[HN Gopher] Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator
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Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator
Author : psawaya
Score : 100 points
Date : 2026-01-08 19:55 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (elbowgreasegames.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (elbowgreasegames.substack.com)
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| I'm imagining a version of this where you have to use various
| prompt- or data-centric attacks to navigate scenarios
| tom_0 wrote:
| We want to gamify prompt hacking and give people an UI to
| add/remove chunks of the system prompt. It'll be unlocked by
| collecting widgets around the place.
| fosterfriends wrote:
| I'm so excited to see LLMs used more creatively in video games.
| So many new mechanics can be unlocked with LLMs as judges
| psawaya wrote:
| Agreed!
|
| Some other cool ones I've seen:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/2542850/1001_Nights/
| https://www.playsuckup.com/
| shminkle wrote:
| Robotopia was very inspired by suck up. First LLM game that
| kinda cracked the 3d world
| wavemode wrote:
| I like the concept. Though, they couldn't have found better text-
| to-speech voices? Or is it meant to be humorous how bad they are.
| tom_0 wrote:
| It's a stylistic choice for sure. A little better than that is
| straight in uncanny valley, and human-level is too high latency
| and too expensive for us. We found that this level of crappy
| works great, in practice, plus it runs on-device! We use
| Rhasspy Piper to generate them.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| I would personally avoid voices that skew too close to common
| tiktok TTS ai. Currently the heavy robots with the lower
| bassier voices sell that clunky robot voice vibe much better,
| but some of the more generic voices immediately take me out.
| tom_0 wrote:
| Unfortunately, they are close because some of them ARE
| tiktok AI voices you heard! I'm working on hiring VAs to
| make custom datasets, though. We'll have our own unique
| voices by 1.0 for sure.
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| Another game that has LLM powered NPCs is the f2p action game
| from China called "Where Winds Meet" and players came up with all
| sorts of hilarious ways to cheat quests and other fun stuff via
| prompt injections.
|
| https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/where-winds-meet-players-are-...
|
| https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/where-winds-meet-player-con...
| shminkle wrote:
| I had no idea this game had LLM NPCs. Interesting
| tom_0 wrote:
| Hey, Tommaso here, I'm one of the founders of the Robotopia
| studio. I didn't expect to see this here! Ask me anything :)
| Scaevolus wrote:
| Are the LLMs run on-device, or does this use cloud compute?
|
| (Off-topic AMA question: Did you see my voxel grid visibility
| post?)
| tom_0 wrote:
| The "big" one is Llama3.3-70b on the cloud, right now. On
| GroqCloud in fact, but we have a cloud router that gives us
| several backups if Groq abandoned us.
|
| We use a ton of smaller models (embeddings, vibe checks, TTS,
| ASR, etc) and if we had enough scale we'll try to run those
| locally for users that have big enough GPUs.
|
| (You mean the voxel grid visibility from 2014?! I'm sure I
| did at the time... but I left MC in 2020 so don't even
| remember my own algorithm right now)
| Scaevolus wrote:
| Shipping GPU-accelerated ML models in games looks
| difficult, are there any major examples other than vendor-
| locked upscaling like DLSS or FSR?
|
| (Yep! https://cod.ifies.com/voxel-visibility/ )
| tom_0 wrote:
| Yeah it's extremely difficult right now, especially for a
| Windows game that can't have players install Pytorch and
| the Cuda Toolkit!
|
| ONNX and DirectML seem sort of promising right now, but
| it's all super raw. Even if that worked, local models are
| bottlenecked by VRAM and that's never been more
| expensive. And we need to fit 6gb of game in there as
| well. Even if _that_ worked, we'd need to timeslice the
| compute inside the frame so that the game doesn't hang
| for 1 second. And then we'd get to fight every driver in
| existence :) Basically it's just not possible unless you
| have a full-time expert dedicated to this IMO. Maybe
| it'll change!
|
| About the voxel visibility: yeah that was awesome, I
| remember :) Long story short MC is CPU-bound and the
| frustum clippings' CPU cost didn't get paid off by the
| reduced overdraw, so it wasn't worth it. Then a guy
| called Jonathan Hoof rewrote the entire thing to be
| separated in a 360deg scan done on another thread when
| you changed chunk + a in-frustum walk that worked
| completely differently, and I don't remember the details
| but it did fix the ravine issue entirely!
| Scaevolus wrote:
| GGML is another neat ML abstraction layer, but I don't
| think much work has been dedicated to the Windows port.
| tom_0 wrote:
| GGML still runs on llama.cpp, and that still requires
| CUDA to be installed, unfortunately. I saw a PR for
| DirectML, but I'm not really holding my breath.
| lostmsu wrote:
| You don't have to install the whole CUDA. They have a
| redistributable.
| tom_0 wrote:
| Oh, I can't believe I missed that! That makes whisper.cpp
| and llama.cpp valid options if the user has Nvidia,
| thanks.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Whisper.cpp and llama.cpp also work with Vulkan.
| tom_0 wrote:
| Yeah, I researched this and I absolutely missed this
| whole part. To my defense I looked into this in 2023
| which is ages ago :) Looks like local models are getting
| much more mature.
| Charmunk wrote:
| Hey! Robotopia looks awesome, I'm excited to try it out when it
| launches. How do you convert the LLM output to actions? Is
| there more broad actions available (ie like creating any
| object, moving anything anywhere) exposed to the LLM or is it
| more specific tools it can call?
| tom_0 wrote:
| Thanks :) It may sound insane but we convert actions to
| Python functions then ask the LLM to write a python script
| that actually runs in IronPython inside the game. Then we
| have a visual Behavior Tree system to let our designer define
| the actions. So yeah, they got a bunch of general actions
| like walk, talk, follow, interact etc.
|
| PS: I think MCP/Tool Calls are a boondoggle and LLMs yearn to
| just run code. It's crazy how much better this works than
| JSON schema etc.
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| uhhh... you're running generated code on your customers'
| PCs? what kind of sandboxing do you have?
| tom_0 wrote:
| Fair reaction tbh. Right now there's a time watchdog +
| I'm entirely disabling all I/O and import, But going
| forward I want to replace it with a proper sandboxing
| tech... things I looked into are V8 isolates, compilation
| to WASM, implementing our own gutted python interpreter,
| spinning up a locked down process, and others. I'm
| definitely aware of the risk here. The good news is that
| unless we get pwned, LLMs are very unlikely to write
| malicious code for the user.
| dandelionv1bes wrote:
| This is fantastic. I think it's nailed in the substack what was
| missing from a lot of these LLM driven NPCs that did not feel
| authentic. I have a couple of follow-up questions on specifics
| relating to analysis of behaviour with LLMs (in game-dev
| myself). Would it be possible to speak to you directly on them?
| tom_0 wrote:
| Thanks :) If you want I'm on the discord linked on our
| landing page, it's fun stuff to talk about!
| dandelionv1bes wrote:
| Amazing! Thanks will join.
| Tossrock wrote:
| Do you have a budget per-player of cloud usage? What happens if
| people really like the game and play it so much it starts
| getting expensive to keep running? I guess at $0.79 / Mtok
| llama70B is pretty affordable, but a per-player opex seems hard
| to handle without a subscription model.
| tom_0 wrote:
| Our initial plan was to simply ask enough for the game that
| the price would cover the costs on average... but that means
| that we're basically encouraged to have people play the game
| as little as possible? We're looking into some kind of
| subscription now, it sounds weird but I do think it's a
| better incentive in this case. Plus we can actually ask for
| less upfront.
| d3rockk wrote:
| This has insanely incredible potential for language learning.
| Do you plan to implement support for additional languages?
| tom_0 wrote:
| Yes, but every language is going to be a "port", not
| something contracted out like traditional localization. I
| haven't decided how exactly but language conversion will land
| somewhere between these two extremes: 1. (expensive) pick a
| suite of "native" models (eg. models from China), TTS, ASR.
| Rewrite all the prompts in the target language. Revalidate
| all characters by hand 2. (cheap) slap a translation model
| around input and output and let the game run in English
| internally. My gut feeling is that this could have very poor
| results though and increase latency.
|
| It's definitely a research project, this has never been done
| before.
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| Do you think there's a path where you can pregenerate popular
| paths of dialogue to avoid LLM inference costs for every
| player? And possibly pair it with a lightweight local LLM to
| slightly adapt the responses? While still shelling out to a
| larger model when users go "off the rails"?
| themanmaran wrote:
| Not the founder, but having run conversational agents at
| decent scale, I don't think the cost actually matters much
| early on.
|
| It's almost always better to pay more for the smarter model,
| than to potentially give a worse player experience.
|
| If they had 1M+ players there would certainly be room to
| optimize, but starting out you'd certainly spend more trying
| engineer the model switcher than you would save in token
| costs.
| tom_0 wrote:
| I agree, trying to save on costs early on is basically
| betting against things getting better. Not only that but in
| almost every case people prefer the best model they can
| get!
|
| Not only that but I think our selling point is rewarding
| creativity with emergent behavior. I think baked dialogue
| would turn into traditional game with worse writing pretty
| quick and then you got a problem. For example, this AI game
| here does multiple choices with a local model and people
| seem a bit mild about it.
|
| We could use it to cache popular QA, but in my experience
| humans are insane and nobody ever says even remotely
| similar things to robots :)
|
| [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2828650/The_Oversigh
| t_Bur...
| johnea wrote:
| Max Headroom?
| malchow wrote:
| This is an incredible foretaste of what AI can enable in gaming.
| Not replacing humans (the creators here are former leaders from
| Minecraft), but rather simply unlocking more fun gameplay by
| offering creativity, humor, and branched storytelling customized
| to the player.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I strongly suspect that the advent of LLMs stalled the new
| elder scrolls game another 5-6 years.
| malchow wrote:
| What's interesting is you might not want to see de novo AI-
| generated storytelling (slop factor), but you might really
| like the way AI can make a story crafted by humans more
| interactive.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| It's going to be a balance act. There's going to be plenty
| of companies that are just going to be greedy and will
| generate AI slop without checking, which will undoubtedly
| tank the quality of many games in the near future.
|
| When applied smartly and with human supervision, I think
| that AI could easily help humans build game worlds and
| stories that were previously impossible to achieve.
| tom_0 wrote:
| Hah from my knowledge of traditional AAA, there is 0 chance
| any AAA in development right now uses LLMs. A lot of them
| don't even use it for coding and gamedevs' mood about AI is
| abysmal.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Let me just remind you that Microsoft owns the elder
| scrolls franchise now, for better or worse.
| tom_0 wrote:
| I know, but it's a bit of an unstoppable force vs
| immovable object situation unless something changed. If
| they do it, I hope it'll be better than Copilot
| integrations :)
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Why? Because they feel like it needs to be a part of the
| game?
| gimun wrote:
| Nice concept and good try!
| tom_0 wrote:
| Thanks :)
| Rooster61 wrote:
| This looks like a lot of fun. Is there a way to use text rather
| than speech for input? I'm not particularly fond of my voice
| getting sent to an LLM.
| tom_0 wrote:
| Yeah, there's a toggle to type you can switch at any time, it
| actually lowers latency.
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