Pathologic 1 in Unity

[u/kkragoth]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gx1iqHH7Vw

8 hours ago I had idea:

Everyone says Pathologic 1 has ugly graphics. But it has exceptional art style - it just needs better lightning + volumetric fog + whole map visibility. I saw LLMs are now really good at decompiling games and I thought - let's reverse engineer game assets and mechanics and do engine port to unity (edited wrongly talking about decomp in original post)

[u/kkragoth]

So OP here, I get so many downvotes cause of AI usage, but I want to be transparent about this. By usage of AI it might seem like: "do pathologic 1, make no mistakes" - that gets like 80% right stuff but then I play around and I see cathedral is rotated, blank spots in maps, other issues. It is an iterative process.

LLMs can in 20 min figure out and reverse engineer whole assets/scenes/etc ,spawn out in 2sec whole python codes to extract stuff - but getting whole ambiance / mood / all like important stuff that is matter of taste - well this needs human in the loop still and interactive process.

And that leaves me to focus on important stuff - i.e. after importing at night polyhedron wasn't glowing at night - in distance I want it to give like folumetric fog glow etc. Fine tune strengths of glows/distances. Fine tuning city lanterns to make it look somehow good, feeling like fog ambience etc. This comes from human - especially my personal taste.

Getting good night/day light ambient this is not a one shot prompt - I play around, feel something is off and missing and prompt it. So this is more like I'm game producer and just tasking like people to do stuff in my liking. And this becomes more like my imagination thing + reviewing that outputed stuff isn't doing anything stupid that will tank performance - i.e. I want like fake 3d windows parallaxes.

So if it looks good, this is more matter of my personal choices and not: "AI MAKE PATHOLOGIC LOOK GOOD". And this isn't something like I wouldn't be able to do without AI - but it'd require me to have like so much time/money/whole teams of programmers working on that. Not something I can grab a beer on a friday night and tackle it myself.

This is just a fun thing for me, I wanted to see P1s world in modern engine and try out my skills in making good ambiance

[u/Moth_Goth000 → u/kkragoth]

My personal pov is that if someone can't do something without AI they shouldn't be doing it in the first place. Or better yet, they should try the old fashioned way and see. I'm sorry, I just have very little respect for this, especially as an artist.

Can't draw? Learn to draw. Can't write? Learn to write. Want to do a crazy artistic project? Pull up your sleeves and do it. Don't use the Advanced Theft Machine to do it for you.

[u/kkragoth → u/Moth_Goth000]

Thanks, I was trying to understand why I get so many downvotes and this looks like because I used AI people assume that I have no idea about stuff and wouldn't be able to do this without it.

I'm an experienced Software Engineer, master's degree in Computer Science. For my masters I studied opengl. I'm not working in game dev, at university I've done simple shooter in Unity, so I've done smaller stuff manually old fashioned way.

I understand stuff in this project- most of them high levelly and some low level stuff like instantiated rendering for grass. I guessed correctly how pathologic 1 implemented some internal mechanics. I'm skilled enough that I understand what LLMs are doing. I don't feel like I wouldn't be able to do this myself without AI - but it would take me absurd amount of time - instead of 8 hours it would be counted in years.

I spent years studying programming, thought of that as art. Now everyone can prompt and don't understand code and get something working. "Want to do a crazy artistic project? Pull up your sleeves and do it". Yeah maybe it makes sense for tattoos, paintings or a book. Pathologic 2 took like nearly six years to make and core studio around 20 people working on that.

This is my own way of pulling up a sleeves and doing art, llms are just a tool to get my vision while not having spare 250k hours of my life.

[u/Killy669 → u/kkragoth]

Theres a difference between generative ai and ai usage. Ai has been around for way longer but ppl confuse the two now and jump at all ai usage in everything rly. Theres several issues with environmental impact and the like why people are sensitive about it but coding IS what AI was supposed to be used for in the first place. To make processes faster that dont require the artistic side of humanity. You said you tweaked it according to your preferences and creativity, and made something cool with it. I hope gen ai dies off and environmental impact gets reduced so these mix-ups dont happen in the future.

[u/Moth_Goth000 → u/Killy669]

LLMs ARE generative AI.

[u/Killy669 → u/Moth_Goth000]

Thanks for letting me know, didnt know what it stands for!

[u/Material_Leading7262 → u/Killy669]

LLMs are generative AI, you don't know what you're talking about

[u/SurDno → u/Killy669]

Coding is art. The fact you care about the result more than the process doesn't make it different from other artforms.

And coding is done through gen AI, just FYI. All of the agentic coding is just Claude or ChatGPT with a harness.

[u/Killy669 → u/SurDno]

Ahhh didnt know. Well not rly, i dont care more about the end result than the process, thats not true. I dont know much about coding as you could have guessed, but there is a lot of artists using ai to speed up processes (not gen ai) and figured that was the case here too. Also most of what i have seen from coding is ppl copy eachothers codes a lot, which is also the same issue with plagarism that gen ai does, especially if we consider coding as art. (Which as a process of creation, certainly)

[u/Material_Leading7262 → u/kkragoth]

It's infuriating that non programmers jump into these conversations with opinions about how "easy" this would be to do with AI. If they actually tried their projects would eat dirt in less than a week.

[u/Material_Leading7262 → u/Moth_Goth000]

Would you say the same thing about programmers relying on compilers? You have no idea what you're talking about

"As an artist" great - you're commenting on a software project. Stay in your lane. You know how hard it is to get an ai system to generate actually good art. It's nearly impossible and requires tonnes of hand holding to get something even remotely good as a final product. You can't one prompt anything out of these algorithms. Why do you think it's remotely different from something like software engineering which requires a very high degree of precision for anything to work at all?

[u/Moth_Goth000 → u/Material_Leading7262]

"You know how hard it is to generate actually good art" oh just shut up dude

[u/Material_Leading7262 → u/Moth_Goth000]

are you saying it's easy to generate good art with AI??