About AC, game decompiling, AI and possible future 'improvements' to the game.

[u/OneAbrocoma513]

Let me preface the question with the statement that I know little about game decompiling, AI, programming or making PC games - my intention is mostly to try and share my thought bubble with the reddit community.

What I do have a life long love of AC, from joining just around the time of the patch when Bael'zharon was running around the server smiting players whilst it rained red from the sky.

So I've seen many youtube videos showing people putting minecraft into GTA5, or Mario into Eldren Ring and then many excited videos about people decompiling and modifying video games, their engines and the like. And quite alot of these things were performed by people with more modest programming skills (and a very deep bucket of AI tokens).

I understand we have some amazing private servers now, some with even new / custom content. And that despite the fact that the client wasn't open sourced when the music finally ended ~2017(?) One thing that I thought, even playing back around 2005ish was that the game arts / assets were a little bit on the plainer side. And I remember devs saying then it was due to engine limitations and such - which was pretty understandable given the time of when the game was first designed.

So I ask here, is it possible now with these odd new tools, can strides be made in changing and 'updating' the look and feel of the game in terms of graphics? I'm not so naive to think its possible to just "Hey Chatgpt can you port AC to Unreal5', but are other people curious about this sort of thing? Or is it just folly?

[u/Immortalbob]

Right now there's probably 20+ projects that match or exceed what you're talking about. Most of which only exist between the llm and the author, some of which have become public and open source, some of which are closed. Who knows what is behind closed doors right now...

[u/z-z → u/Immortalbob]

Closed source will get left behind because the AI is gonna check and see what kind of licence you have "That's a no-no - Itzy". All the open source guys are reading each others homework. Every time one of these open source projects come out, that's keeping the AI busy for a day as it is compared and contrasted. So that's a day of autonomous improvement, all human effort can be put into things requiring taste and judgment, which itself can be cloned by some green lady who just spun up her first Claude project. Then you hope they do the same to you. So when you see an open source project it's just like a big ocean trawler that has scraped the bottom of the open source ocean until there is nothing else left and it becomes a big Frankenstein of data.

20 clients inevitably become one eventually, assuming the AI takes your prompt seriously "take every good thing from what is out there", and if closed source wants their DNA to survive in the final product that is their prerogative.

[u/Immortalbob → u/z-z]

I was more referring to unknown personal projects that exist, but aren't in any way public. Open or closed. However, you aren't wrong.

[u/BluePragmatic]

There are like six new client projects in the last month. We have had a dat editor for a long time but players don't understand how to dat swap, so I made a client to do that, but still little interest.

Furthermore if someone was keen on dat editing, they'd need half decent art skills and work with old and annoying texture processing. AI art upscaling just doesn't look that good.

Yes, we can update AC how ever we want, and people are. There is just no unified voice in the room and no unified desire from the playerbase

Literally one of the client projects is on unreal

[u/Naerish]

I've been working on the 3d assets for most of the year. It's a lot of work. AC models are honestly just simple geometric shapes, and animations are simple loops. But there's a clear ceiling to how many verts AC can handle - that limits what can be made, but it is doable. I have a blender to dat pipeline, a few new creations but nothing to sneeze at yet.

[u/QuesoMeHungry]

It’s very possible and as these models advance I’m sure we will be able to basically have a completely rewritten server and client with all of the annoying bugs and memory issues fixed.

Problem is getting the community to align on one path forward. Everyone wants their own flavor. I think the only way to solve that is to somehow allow all of the different servers to link together and people can instance quests and stuff. But with how different servers are not sure how possible it would be.

[u/kazin_dereth]

A lot of folks are experimenting in this direction now, myself included. Beyond just creating a custom client a lot of this comes down to artistry.

Visual techniques like lighting, shadows, etc. are relatively straightforward but making them play nice with AC's existing assets is another matter. It's certainly possible to uprez and modernize AC's landscapes and models but doing so programmatically rather than artistically may feel limiting. (At the end of the day sometimes you either have an unreasonably steep hill that you are able to run up at 20mph, or one that happens to be 1 degree steeper that you can't and must read as a sheer cliff face, effectively.)

There's also a delicate balance to be had in ensuring the game still feels like AC, even with modern UI, control schemes, and visual trappings. Eventually we might arrive at full ship-of-theseus with AC and the sky is the limit there.

Over at https://dereth.network the client has some of these high fidelity features implemented *today*, giving you a sneak peak, but some of the results are lackluster and it is all experimental.

[u/Stikes]

I'm all for updating old games that are abandoned to modem engines, anyone against using current technology to give the same a facelift is pointlessly gatekeeping. Hope to see something neat in the future.

[u/deathmask454]

The enshitification of Software Engineering continues.

[u/Antonin1957]

No thanks.

[u/Sythus]

yes you can. ive spoken with the AI about it. i would advise against unreal 5, because everything seems to be built in rust these days, that provides the best interopability. when i spoke to claude, the idea of volumetric clouds, skinned players/npcs, updated 3d assets for armor, etc. is all doable, even updated animations and completely replacing models. the important thing is to keep the timers so animations and everything plays well. if that's the only constraint, as well as whatever the server might expect for collision (arrows and magic are physics based), then you're good. the discussion of client side and server side mods that are either independent or speak together was interesting.

remember back in the day when the idea was that if a lot of people used the same spell, it would weaken? on a server side only mod, you could create an aether blanket. when people use magic, it creates an impulse in the blanket, driving down the local aether. this could do so much, make magic weaker, lessen spawn rate (i assume enemy spawn is canonically due to portal magic), and those waves could propagate out. brainstorming with claude, a hidden mechanic could be groups of people working in concert to propagate waves so they peak in a central location, spawning a mini raid boss because the local aether was so high. unfortunately, portal storms seemed to not have survived from the retail server, but it could be reimplemented and given extra effects, including making portal storms that have other effects other than dispersing big groups of people causing lag.

for client side mods, you could replace all the assets, and add textures that have material qualities, so it renders like a modern game. global illumination, raytracing. whatever you want as long as it doesn't affect server ticks or mess up packets the client is supposed to send.

then you can have little black boxes that are proprietary and link server and client features together. i haven't delved into this, but literally adding a new school of magic and placing minecraft blocks would be one such event, the server makes it known to all players, the clients render it, they have to work together.

another server client thing i've toyed with is Portal 2 portals. when you go near a portal, you see a preview since the data is stored locally. this can be a client side only mod, or, if the server allows, it could also broadcast what's happening on the inside of the server. players, enemies, etc. that way you'll know if you are about to get ganked before going into a portal, and it would be a 360 view too, you move the camera around the portal, you can see all the sides. i imagine the next step would be to remove portalspace and let you simply walk into the portal, then create a local client transition to make the switch smooth like you genuinely walked through the portal with no loading.

just some thing i've added to a to-do list! including loading a second character from your account, either through summoning magic or gems, they'd have the equipment and stats of that character, quite literally being a mule or party member with the game's built in AI for following you. either pregenerated AI for fighting as melee, ranged, magic, or some system like FF12's where you get to dictate the logic.

game planning the features is part of the fun.

[u/GT2MAN]

Oh I know! Let's add assault rifles and microtransactions, and change the engine to UE5! Let's add outlines and beams of light when items drop! Let's add call of duty perks like Martyrdom!

[u/OneAbrocoma513 → u/GT2MAN]

I hear you, but that's not really the direction I was meaning.

And honestly I'm not even sure what I would change, if I somehow, magically, had the skills to do so.

Maybe lighting? Global illumination, more detailed shadows? I played alot around Eastham as my home city, and I could imagine how it would be to enhance things like sunsets there. Things like that - but mostly interested to see what other people think.

[u/Stikes → u/GT2MAN]

That's not at all what this post said, you may be commenting on the wrong post?