TTW - West/East Coast Companion Comments/Dialogue Options

[AgentBJ09]

Since TTW is such a popular mod these days, and AI generated voicework is becoming more common, I'm wondering why there isn't a mod to allow companions from the two wastelands to comment on locations or situations from the alternate worldspace.

Like Arcade making a comment about Megaton's living conditions, or the Enclave when they show up, or Sergeant RL-3 remarking about House's Securitrons in The Strip or Freeside, or the Boomers when they ask the Courier to wipe out the ants.

Add to this the mod @raynor009 showed off in his https://www.nma-fallout.com/threads/fallout-new-vegas-ai-powered-dialogue.221801/ thread, and I could see a lot of potential to add something to the F3 companions, shallow as they were, and make the FNV companions even more interesting.

(Maybe someone's working on something like this already, but I've seen no evidence of such, so...)

Boone / When arriving in the DC Wasteland: "You sure it's a good idea for us to be this far away from the Legion?"
Raul / When arriving in Underworld: "I guess it's fitting that Ghouls would make a home inside a museum. Lots of us are fossils in a way."
Cass / When inside DC, or near Springfield or Grayditch: "This place...gives me really bad chills."
etc.

Butch DeLoria / When inside the King's School of Impersonation in Freeside: "Heh. You know, I feel right at home here."
Fawkes / After talking to Marcus near Jacobstown: "Ah. So, I Am Less Of An Anomaly Than I Thought."
Jericho / When inside any of the Vaults: "Geez, people choose to live in these deathtraps? Smells worse than Megaton's summer days in here."
etc.

 

[Risewild]

It doesn't exist for mainly two reasons:

It's a fuckton of work and using real human voices (without their permission) in AI is illegal, especially voice actors since they have the backing of the actors guild or whatever organization that supports VA legally is called.

It's the same as when the FO3 in FO4 project (whatever the name) was told by Bethesda that they couldn't allow the modding team to use the voices from FO3 on their FO4 mod. Because Bethesda does not own the rights of those voices, they only own the rights for the game the voices are used on.

 

[AgentBJ09]

It doesn't exist for mainly two reasons:

It's a fuckton of work and using real human voices (without their permission) in AI is illegal, especially voice actors since they have the backing of the actors guild or whatever organization that supports VA legally is called.

It's the same as when the FO3 in FO4 project (whatever the name) was told by Bethesda that they couldn't allow the modding team to use the voices from FO3 on their FO4 mod. Because Bethesda does not own the rights of those voices, they only own the rights for the game the voices are used on.

You mean the guilds who initially backed the actors saying they don't want AI replications of their figures or voices, and then backstabbed them?



More reason to hate guilds and unions I suppose, but that aside, I've never heard of such a thing being 'illegal'. If you were using someone's voice to do scam calls or other illicit activities, which I have seen examples of, that I would call criminal. (Is the illegality based in a California ruling or something?)

As for F3 in F4, that's the same situation TTW is in near as I can tell. You need two games, one of which has data extracted from it to be used in another, and once that's achieved, the game from which the extraction occurred isn't as needed. F3 in particular doesn't start when I try running it by itself, unlike New Vegas, so TTW is the only way I can play that and the related content.

 

[Risewild]

As for F3 in F4, that's the same situation TTW is in near as I can tell.

The FO3 in FO4 project will have all brand new voices, they decided to do this because they asked Bethesda for permission to use the voice files from FO3 and Bethesda told them they couldn't give permission for it (for the reasons I mentioned in my first post).

They could have gone the way TTW did, using an installer to extract the voices, edit them to be usable in the newer game, "archive" them once again and then place the archive in its proper place, but they didn't want to do that. I guess they want to be able to just distribute the mod ready to download and play, which to be fair the TTW team would love to be able to do that too, but it's illegal and would give just cause for Bethesda to shut us down since we would be distributing FO3 game assets. Since FO3 in FO4 will use new voices, they don't have this problem, since all assets are made from scratch by the modders.

 

[raynor009]

The hardware required to make the AI generate responses fast enough as shown in that video is whats holding this back. I'm not even sure the latest and greatest GPU can help right now. And AI can learn any voice or slightly change existing ones to avoid legal problems thats not an issue. Maybe in 2-3 generations when we get integrated AI accelerators in our CPU's and GPU's we will gradually see this technology start to be implemented in games. It probably won't be in Fallout 5 or TES 6 but the ones after that for sure. Although as AI stands now, being censored and twisted a certain way under questionable ethical reasons would you like to invite that in your games? We are already infested with real world politics enough as it is in games, movies and tv shows.

 

[AgentBJ09]

The hardware required to make the AI generate responses fast enough as shown in that video is whats holding this back. I'm not even sure the latest and greatest GPU can help right now. And AI can learn any voice or slightly change existing ones to avoid legal problems thats not an issue. Maybe in 2-3 generations when we get integrated AI accelerators in our CPU's and GPU's we will gradually see this technology start to be implemented in games. It probably won't be in Fallout 5 or TES 6 but the ones after that for sure. Although as AI stands now, being censored and twisted a certain way under questionable ethical reasons would you like to invite that in your games? We are already infested with real world politics enough as it is in games, movies and tv shows.

Yeah, that's a major problem with the ChatGPT AIs that I don't like. They're heavily censored, and certain keywords will cause them to lock up, that is until someone makes an open source version with those restraints removed. (GAB has a lot of AIs that users can play around with which aren't as censored as ChatGPT AIs. I should go back to those and see if I can get one to act out some New Vegas style dialogue.)

As for system demands, maybe some of the load for the proc-gen can be put on the GPU's hardware instead of the CPU, though that'd require some workarounds for cards that aren't built with certain hardware in mind. CPUs with more threads could offload some of the work to 1 or 2 threads, and most gaming rigs have 6 or more cores on the CPU.

EDIT / Test Results with GAB's Gamer AI:

Me: Then, I want to try something. What can you tell me about the NPC Craig Boone from that game?

GAB's Gamer AI: Craig Boone, now that's a character with quite a backstory! Boone is a former NCR sharpshooter turned caravan guard. He's a bit of a loner, haunted by his past actions during the Bitter Springs Massacre. He's known for his dry wit and his trusty scoped .44 magnum, which he calls 'That Gun'. If you're looking for a good companion, Boone's your man, but be warned, he's not one for second chances. He's a complex character, and his questline is one of the most compelling in the game. He's a fan favorite, and for good reason!

(I corrected the AI on the two mistakes in this response.)

Me: Now, if you were him, how would you respond to this question: "So, what good is the Legion?"

GAB's Gamer AI: If I were Boone, I'd probably give a sarcastic response. Something like, 'Well, besides being a bunch of power-hungry, slave-driving, warmongers, they're great at making sure you never run out of targets to shoot at!' Boone has a personal dislike for the Legion due to their role in the Bitter Springs Massacre, so his responses would be heavily influenced by that. But remember, I'm just a gaming companion, not a real person. Boone's responses are scripted and cannot be changed.

...

Me: If you were Craig Boone again, and the Courier took you with him to the DC Wasteland of Fallout 3, what kind of response would you give when the trip was over, or when you could see the ruined DC metro tunnels?

GAB's GamerAI: If I were Boone and we made the trip to the DC Wasteland, I'd probably say something like, 'Well, this is just peachy. Another irradiated, post-apocalyptic cityscape to wander around in. Just what I always wanted.' Boone has a pretty dry sense of humor, especially when it comes to the bleak reality of the wasteland. But he'd also likely express some curiosity about the new environment, looking for any potential threats or opportunities. He's a survivor, after all.

 

[Risewild]

It's also important to notice that there is a % of gamers who hate AI-generated content and will boycott any game that uses it. That is why games that use AI stuff have to say so on their Steam pages now, and I have seen people go on flame wars on Steam discussion forums for games that use AI-generated images or voices.

AI is not seen well in gaming yet, but I know how it is in the gaming industry. They will find a way of hyping AI games in the future with stuff like "Be part of history for being a gamer that plays the first fully AI-generated game!", "Humans are fallible! Try our awesome game made by AI!" or "Accept our machine overlords! Experience what it is to play a game made by a machine!".

They will hype it so much that people will want to play it anyway.

 

[AgentBJ09]

It's also important to notice that there is a % of gamers who hate AI-generated content and will boycott any game that uses it. That is why games that use AI stuff have to say so on their Steam pages now, and I have seen people go on flame wars on Steam discussion forums for games that use AI-generated images or voices.

AI is not seen well in gaming yet, but I know how it is in the gaming industry. They will find a way of hyping AI games in the future with stuff like "Be part of history for being a gamer that plays the first fully AI-generated game!", "Humans are fallible! Try our awesome game made by AI!" or "Accept our machine overlords! Experience what it is to play a game made by a machine!".

They will hype it so much that people will want to play it anyway.

I've seen the same with AI generated artwork, and it's all sound and fury to be frank. Artists who are good at their job still get business, even though it's possible to get hundreds of images from any number of sites or host machine Stable Diffusion programs of just about anything someone wants.

That aside, if the AAA industry starts hyping AI up before the indie scene gets something solid with it out, then we've got a problem. The AAA space is 99.9% money-men and bean counters, and also people tied at the hip to censorship on the internet and in games.

 

[raynor009]

AI is rejected because its not mature enough to be capable of generating content that is consistent in quality. It repeats itself often, gives wrong answers, takes too long to answer and its demanding hardware wise for anything advanced enough that a single machine can run. I think in 5 to 10 years we will see it be implemented but no sooner. Consumer hardware needs time to scale and even then I think it will be reservd for the top of the line GPU's and CPU's.

And there shouldn't be full reliance on AI. People should still be involved in the creation process of meaningful story or character development as well as world building. It needs to be implemented in such a way where it complements the work done by people not undermine it or overly rely on it.

 

[AgentBJ09]

AI is rejected because its not mature enough to be capable of generating content that is consistent in quality. It repeats itself often, gives wrong answers, takes too long to answer and its demanding hardware wise for anything advanced enough that a single machine can run. I think in 5 to 10 years we will see it be implemented but no sooner. Consumer hardware needs time to scale and even then I think it will be reservd for the top of the line GPU's and CPU's.

And there shouldn't be full reliance on AI. People should still be involved in the creation process of meaningful story or character development as well as world building. It needs to be implemented in such a way where it complements the work done by people not undermine it or overly rely on it.

Those problems you listed off are usually caused by lack of information, which limits reply range, or bad information on the part of the ones who feed the AI such information. Those can be solved by someone equivalent to a loremaster, or someone combing the data to identify and fix bad info.

Otherwise, yes, full reliance on AI is just cheapening out. (We can thank Hollywood, executives within which openly stated years ago they're thinking of using AI to decide on what films to greenlight instead of human input, for that mindset getting into people.) New Vegas though has well-written characters already, hence why that ChatGPT mod, even in beta, was so close to mimicking the NPCs it was used on. That's also why I don't think the AAA scene should get something with AI backing out first. They'd set a very low standard with it, or further justify not using it.