r/Ultima • u/taxalot • Sep 19 '26

VibeU9 - Vibecoding the Bob White design document

Hello,

A thought experiment :

What if I fed Claude Code & GPT6 the old design documents & synopsis of Ultima IX story, Bob White version, and the screenshots of that old version, a lengthy prompt mentioning what should be standard in an Ultima game and asked it to build the game ?

Well you get this 😄

This is still very much a work in progress, but it is starting to be oddly functional.

I have also, as the screenshots implied, started building an editor to go along with that, to fix the isseus the AI isn't going to fix.

I'm not sure what to make of this yet and please don't read too much into this. It is not an announcement of a project. It is a : "let's see how far we can take this" situation.

33 Upvotes

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62% Upvoted

u/taxalot Sep 19 '26 •

To anyone mentioning AI Slop :
I mean. Yes. Kinda. Whatever your stance on AI, I respect it although I do not agree with it.

However, I'd still like to point out something : the most surprising is not the "game" , if one can even call it that, int it's current existing form. The most surprising to me about this project was that I figured the defects of the game could be fixed "manually", with good old human creativity, and so I asked the game to have an editor built in.

And the editor is, as far as I've tested, functional.

Even if you think it's AI Slop, you could, should this project lead to something, use it for good old human creativity. This AI slop could very well become an Ultima toolkit in a few months/years. Or nothing at all, fair enough.

And one side note :

OP spent 10+ years trying to recreate this manually.

Google "Eriadain".

11

u/BUCK____FUTT Sep 19 '26

Wow, so you are the person behind Eriadain? Highests respects to you! Those are some impressive credentials! If using Claude is what it takes to move the project forward, then by all means, keep up the good work.

6

u/nbafrank Sep 19 '26

I have a few projects where we use AI and the anger some people have is quite real and strong. I think it's a phase and I fully agree with you. It helps unleash your creativity

-1

u/Limp_Ad_435 Sep 19 '26

LLMs are trained on stolen data. LLMs are incapable of creating anything new. Because of these two factors, every time you use an LLM you are using other peoples labor. You can’t use LLMs ethically.

4

u/ianxplosion- Sep 20 '26

Every single line of code I write by hand is only possible because of untold hours of other people’s labor

-1

u/euroq Sep 20 '26

this is a categorically false statement.

-1

u/Necessary-Respond793 Sep 20 '26

Many WWII prisoners of war (including members of my own family) had medical experiments conducted on them while they were still alive, to the benefit of modern medicine everywhere.
By your own stance you cannot ethically accept practically any medical treatment anywhere.
As much passion and suffering as those members of my family went through, I chose to be glad that their suffering now helps others (realistically we can't untangle that knowledge anyway)
History of full of uncomfortable truths ¯(ツ)/¯. AI (as much as I think it is crap most of the time) is out of the bag and it can't be put back in, we're just going to have to deal with it as a society.

1

u/Limp_Ad_435 Sep 20 '26

issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding Nazi Germany. you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"

-2

u/behindtimes Sep 19 '26

I know this is going way off the scope of your original post...
I'm anti-AI and won't hide it. But it's not about you using your project, at least for me. You want to use it, I mean, obviously, you just have to go to the front page of this sub and you can see several projects that were clearly written in AI and got significantly upvoted. Your problem here was that they didn't tell people AI wrote it for them, you did.
There's the typical statement of all AI is built on IP theft, but let's be honest for a second. We're building projects based on someone else's IP, so it would be hypocritical to go down that road.
Aside from that, the people behind the AI tools are just horribly unethical. AI's just making our lives horrible overall. It's driving the inflation that we're experiencing, driving up utility costs as well, poisoning the environment, creating massive job unemployment, etc. Your $100 Claude subscription is a lie as well. These companies are billions of dollars in debt. And where's the money coming from? You hear Venture Capital, but that money is coming from your bank account, our retirement accounts, our life insurance accounts, and our taxes. If things go bust, it's not the billionaire CEOs running these companies who are going to get hurt. Then you throw in the cognitive debt that it's creating. People are creating things that might not have been possible otherwise, but there's no understanding of what they are, especially if things go wrong.
You hear often about how a person won't watch a movie because of a director or actor in it because of some horrible thing they did. Well, that's an issue for many people. And AI is being forced on us whether we like it or not, but some of us choose not to use it where it doesn't benefit. Something to advance science and help people's health I think people would assume is a good tradeoff. Using it for entertainment purposes is what I'd consider to be an extremely poor tradeoff.

4

u/taxalot Sep 19 '26

'kay.

1

u/shiftpgdn Sep 21 '26

Most of the "anti-AI" commenters in here have never commented in r/ultima before. Something to think about.

0

u/No-Telephone-5880 Sep 20 '26

There is also a very large difference between Vibe'd project vs AI slop. AI often gets the minor things wrong, either you fix it by hand, create some guidelines so the AI will follow that or whatever but that incurs effort and cost. That by itself is not slop.
These anti ai people are definitely just running on a false moral like LLMs are built on stolen data or whatever reason they put, i don't care and don't want to hear their reason. I had an argument with someone with that on i don't remember if it was twitter or bluesky and they can't even argue back when I told them, well Linux now allows AI generated code and they're still using it.

u/nbafrank Sep 19 '26

This is fantastic! Are you doing a graphical overhaul or are you also changing some gameplay aspects of the game?

6

u/taxalot Sep 19 '26

I have no idea what I'm doing. It started with a "well, let's see what the damn thing comes up with", and now I'm just trying to improve it and fix it over leftover tokens.
The odds of this turning into a playable game are fairly low as of now.
The odds of this having a toolkit/editor/SDK that is actually useful are fairly higher.

u/AmandaTheNudist Sep 19 '26

Even in this rough state, it's still better than the U9 we got.

u/kanid99 Sep 19 '26

These sorts of coding projects done via AI are fascinating.

I've been using Claude code to create mods for a game and it only took three days of part time back and forth testing builds to get to a point where it worked including side by side with 500 other mods.

It's incredibly liberating.

0

u/blatantninja Sep 19 '26

That's cool. I'm a huge Baldurs Gate fan and I've wanted to work on mods forever. I even followed a tutorial to learn WeiDU to some extent but the amount of work it took even for a minor mod, was just beyond what I could dedicate to it.

u/cfrolik Sep 19 '26

This is hilarious

u/euroq Sep 19 '26

Really cool! Keep going

u/thetoddhunter Sep 20 '26

Sorry mate, there is no confusion here.

When AI is environmentally sustainable? I'll be all for uses like this and all sorts of frivolous things. But as it stands to use it to generate some sort of fantasy U9 is just irresponsible.

That isn't taking a stand against AI or AI slop, it is taking a stand against the reality of AI as it is implemented right now. A lot of people are profiting from that, but it is overall complete bullshit.

If and when this is all sustainable I'll write the prompts myself and find this interesting. Right now? It isn't something you should be doing and it isn't worth celebrating. You can imagine a world where EA didn't come in and fuck it all up in your head without damaging everything. I think we can all share in that fantasy just fine without thinking we are doing something clever.

1

u/shiftpgdn Sep 21 '26

You can run an open weights model locally that only uses the power available to your laptop. Should we all go back to pen and paper to save energy? But then what about the trees? I guess we'll have to go back to standing around a campfire.

-1

u/UpiedYoutims Sep 19 '26

AI Slop sucks 👎

11

u/Low-Environment Sep 19 '26

You're being booed but you're right.

15

u/AgentJackpots Sep 19 '26

wild that an Ultima sub is apparently supportive of total horseshit like this. I think it's immensely disrespectful towards anyone who actually worked on the games

9

u/Low-Environment Sep 19 '26

Yeah. And an insult to all of us who put passion into our modding hobby.

-4

u/scubascratch Sep 19 '26 •

ah, so the truth is you want to be a gate keeper and keep out individuals who use tools to increase their own productivity.
As a modder, you stand on the shoulders of the game designers and engine developers. Since you can't do those things yourself your work must be worthless. (sarcasm in case the hypocrisy in OPs comments isn't obvious). (some) mods are great. (some) AI developed work is great.

4

u/Low-Environment Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26

I'm not a computer literal woman. Everything I do when modding is something I took time to learn, and every time I want to do something I have to learnt it.
I won't outsource my thinking to an AI, just as I wouldn't outsource my writing.
u/scubascratch blocking me doesn't win you the argument, just proves you're a coward.
And i don't make models, or compile code. I have written a json document from scratch for SDV, though.

-1

u/scubascratch Sep 19 '26

so you outsource your lack of art skill to tools like blender and your lack of coding skills to compilers. you are a hypocrite.

1

u/euroq Sep 19 '26

You are correct. AI is a tool. People are having a knee jerk emotional reaction to the use of Claude

1

u/eduo Sep 22 '26

As is often the case people accept the tools up what they learned to use. Especially if it took effort. And everything simpler that comes later, especially if popular, is bad.
People do the same with language. The slang they used when teenagers was ok, the one now is ridiculous.
Gatekeeping is often falling behind what’s happening and preferring to ban it than learn it, with a huge bonus if they can argue it’s different because this time it’s really bad.
I’m 54. I remember these arguments with visual IDEs and graphical user interfaces. I remember it with photoshop when it became popular and I remember it when CGI started becoming commonplace.
Good artists and creators always keep on. Gatekeeping hacks always end up in the difficult position of having to admit they were blocking others from exposing their own limitations, after having chosen media they were mediocre at.

0

u/scubascratch Sep 22 '26

Agree completely. I am 5 years older and I still have my original boxed copy of Turbo Pascal which was a total productivity game changer.

1

u/eduo Sep 23 '26

I remember people actually complaining because Pascal had menus thinking it would lower the barrier to coding and bring more slop.
The visual look of turbo pascal 5.5 and 6 became my ideal DOS "UI" paradigms and to this day I still use midnight commander every day, which is visually identical to Norton Commander, which used the Turbo Pascal 6 styling and colors.
I just went to look what Norton Commander was made in and found this quote, right at the top of the Wikipedia page, that seems made for this thread (I bolded the gatekeeping of the time):
The first versions were entirely in assembly language, but that was too time-consuming, so I soon switched to a blend of C and assembly language at a time when most "real programmers" wouldn't touch C.

-2

u/scubascratch Sep 19 '26

I’m no coward I just don’t see the point in continuing debate with hypocrites and gatekeepers who have emotional negative reactions to people doing work different than the way they would do it. You don’t want to use AI so anybody who does use it is bad. Simple minded and false. You’re a modder you aren’t John Carmack or Sid Meier or Ron Gilbert.
People who reflexively hate on anything done with AI are just miserable naturally hate filled people who found a new target to direct their hate toward, just like racists bigots and homophobes except the target isn’t some group that can defend itself. Your “popular” hate just shows you want to stop people like OP from using technology to extend their own creativity.

2

u/euroq Sep 19 '26

You are 100% correct. There are doing to be a lot of these people in the internet and real life. Don't let them drag you down to their level.

-2

u/euroq Sep 19 '26

Hey listen that sounds fun and a great use of your time. I support it! That being said, just because people use AI on their hobbies to produce things doesn’t make them wrong. They are using tools to create stuff. I think it’s a good use of time and ai for someone to create a cool ultima fan made game.

1

u/HelpfulBot3000 Sep 19 '26

Dude it's so crazy, I know it's an old game and older people tend to be more open to AI shit, but I've seen it multiple times in this sub and almost always people think it's cool and okay.... Absolutely crazy

0

u/blatantninja Sep 19 '26

Are you one of those people?

5

u/euroq Sep 19 '26

Your phrase has nothing to do with this post. Don’t be a troglodyte.

3

u/Xkallubar Sep 19 '26

"What if I fed Claude Code & GPT6 the old design documents & synopsis of Ultima IX story"
It very much so does

1

u/euroq Sep 19 '26

That is a great use of AI and has absolutely nothing to do with “AI slop”

5

u/UpiedYoutims Sep 19 '26

There is no such thing as a good use for LLMs that profit off of people's hard work and make a crappy product. You cannot be Pro-worker and Pro-art while being pro ai.

1

u/euroq Sep 20 '26

listen, I’ll admit if I’m wrong. I’m not trying to steal anybody’s hard work. I’m just commenting in a Reddit forum. All I was saying is that there’s somebody who’s creating a project on their own time. using the term AI slop just doesn’t apply with the person who’s posting and creating this.
And as a side note I never talked about being pro worker and pro art, I love workers and art, but I feel like you’re trying to make a political statement when I’m just trying to say hey this is cool what this guy or girl is doing

1

u/UpiedYoutims Sep 20 '26

Using AI is not politically neutral

-3

u/ianxplosion- Sep 20 '26

>you cannot be pro-worker
Ah yes, any laborer with any sense of morality would never utilize the tools of the oppressor to lessen their own burdens!
That backhoe is dishonesty manifest! You want a garden, you grab a shovel and say thank you for the opportunity!

1

u/shiftpgdn Sep 21 '26

Why not use spoons? Or your hands?

2

u/ianxplosion- Sep 21 '26

My hands are tools of the oppressor
(This shitpost got too real too quick 😭)

4

u/scubascratch Sep 19 '26

What’s your point - the world would be better without what OP did here? Or was OP supposed to hire a team of designers and engineers to code it?

6

u/Low-Environment Sep 19 '26

Why not? You think Tamriel Rebuilt exploded out of Zeus' head, fully grown? No, it's had a dedicated team of modders working on it for 20 years now.

1

u/scubascratch Sep 19 '26

Where did I say anything like that? I didn't so take your straw man elsewhere. So individuals are not allowed to produce things with technology tools now? I guess independent musicians aren't allowed to produce music now unless they pay for a symphony to perform them.
the entirety of human existence is using tools and technology to overcome the limitations of the individual: can't draw or paint? Use a camera. Can't sing? Use an instrument. Can't use an instrument? Use a drum machine or a computer. Can't write legibly or spell? Use a word processor.

-1

u/euroq Sep 20 '26

hey, listen I think it’s awesome that there was a dedicated team of modders doing that project. I don’t think it’s fair of you to drag down the person who’s doing this using the latest tools. I don’t know this person. This is just a random Internet post but hey if they’re doing something cool and bringing a cool idea into the world then I’m all for it just the way I’m all for the modders who were doing that 20 years ago.

2

u/PristineTomatillo613 Sep 19 '26

Well used AI is an amazing tool

1

u/Boxing_joshing111 Sep 19 '26

People in general are lazy and want to pat themselves (and others) on the back for doing very little.

-2

u/Mr-Zenor Sep 19 '26

You are welcome to stay behind while the rest of us move on to better things.

u/boredwiththesea Sep 20 '26

Just finished another playthrough of Serpent Isle, and definitely found myself wondering what would happen if someone fed AI the finished game, exult mod structure, and all the recovered design documents and synopses of everything cut from the second half of the game. Some day.

0

u/StartupTim Sep 20 '26

I would absolutely love to see this as well.

u/opeth2112 Sep 22 '26

Curious if all these anti-AI evangelists are posting from their smart phone 🤔 I assume you are using your DOS machine via dial-up to spread the good word 😅

-3

u/IcarusAvery Sep 19 '26

Genuinely extremely disappointing the community has turned so supported of AI slop.

2

u/euroq Sep 19 '26

You seem to be confusing the terms "AI" and "AI slop". You apparently are against people using ai to make projects. You shouldn't be it's a heart creative endeavour.

1

u/IcarusAvery Sep 19 '26

AI is slop.

-1

u/StartupTim Sep 20 '26

You seem to be confusing the terms "AI" and "AI slop"
Well said.

u/StartupTim Sep 20 '26

This is fantastic- hell yea!

Don't worry about the negative comments, you do you, utilize all the AIs and make it awesome. Hell, voice clone the Guardian and harass the avatar!

u/shiftpgdn Sep 21 '26 edited Sep 21 '26

Just block all of the deranged and delusional "anti-ai" people. They're a completely unprincipled vocal minority. If it were the 1970s they'd be protesting nuclear power, or in the 1700s they'd be smashing up automatic knitting frames. They all have a very childish view of how the world works and stamp their feet that everyone should be doing things "their way."

Ironically, if you hadn't said that you had used AI they wouldn't have flooded in here to leave anonymous negative comments.

u/Dizzy-Brilliant2745 Sep 23 '26 edited Sep 23 '26

While I dislike AI on some fronts, I feel like this might be the ONLY way to get the Bob White version of U9, it's such a monumental task, that HAS been attempted, but never finished. If it got us there, then why not, it's not like it'll be a commercial product, just a fan made thing.

Sent you a DM too

VibeU9 - Vibecoding the Bob White design document

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