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avaer 6 hours ago [-]
In case it's not obvious, this isn't a model, this is python scripts that call out to models (code not available).
It's mostly "did you know you can attach an LLM to a PCG system?", but there is one idea here you don't see much of: an image model performs the composition (which image models are really good at), and then you extract the objects into 3d via things like SAM3D before placing them in the world, which is pretty interesting.
The rest is standard stuff you'll find in your favorite PCG system/game engine. Still, think most people don't realize how good LLMs are at 3D these days, especially Fable 5 (which this project predates).
pinkmoonx 5 hours ago [-]
That’s exactly how I’ve used tools like Tripo and Meshy.
Use any image generation tool (or any image) and have a multimodal LLM like Gemini extract individual parts of the image “isolate with a transparent background” - then you can use those images for image-to-3d in those tools.
Don’t forget to use low or “smart” poly features otherwise you get too many vertices to the point you can’t performantly raycast etc.
But yeah - it’s there.
avaer 5 hours ago [-]
> Don’t forget to use low or “smart” poly features otherwise you get too many vertices to the point you can’t performantly raycast etc.
I've found it's actually best to do maximal quality generation and decimate/meshopt to desired budget.
If you're raycasting against your raw art you're doing it wrong anyway, none of the big players do this precisely for the reason you mentioned. And beyond physics meshes, if you're doing anything where performance is a problem you probably want multiple LODs so you have to do this work anyway.
These days you can just ask your agent to build you a LOD pipeline and forget about it rather than sacrificing the art; Claude knows Blender.
pinkmoonx 5 hours ago [-]
Never had success decimating in Blender. It’s WAY too many vertices. Unusably huge.
Decimating ends up ruining the look of the model to get it down to a game ready size.
Even a simple house model, or humanoid, using Decimate in Blender there is no way that will be even recognizable.
avaer 5 hours ago [-]
Have you tried meshopt? It depends a lot on the art, view distance, and tuning, but it works well for my use cases.
(I agree with you about Blender though, I always hated Blender's simplify)
nomel 4 hours ago [-]
Have you tried meshlab [1]? I've had pretty fantastic results reducing meshes from millions to some thousands.
Side tangent: Smart Poly is often a paid feature, but you used to be able to steal it for free. Because in order to preview it, you download the GLB in the Network tab.
Some 3D AI providers still leak like that, but Meshy came up with their own binary format that splits the stream up into separate files that are assembled with a response it only gets if you have Premium.
Thought it was cool technology - and wonder if browser games in general are doing stuff like that to protect 3D assets from being easily ripped from the Network tab.
doctoboggan 3 hours ago [-]
> Still, think most people don't realize how good LLMs are at 3D these days, especially Fable 5
Can you explain more? Can I use Fable 5 to generate a 3d model from a couple of photographs?
cautiouscat 6 hours ago [-]
It looks impressive. However open worlds are at their best with hand placed details and environmental storytelling. Look at Skyrim/Cyberpunk vs. Starfield where most of the world is proc gen’d.
I get that you run this, and then edit it. But the generated villages just aren’t interesting in my opinion. It’s probably great for tencent’s market where you’re mass producing gacha style games, but I don’t think worlds made in this fashion will scratch the open world itch like the best open world games out there.
avaer 6 hours ago [-]
You know what's also good at storytelling? AI. Or else we wouldn't have writing awards being revoked when it comes out it was written by AI.
I wouldn't say we don't need artists or writers, but I think most people will be surprised how quickly fully AI driven pipelines will advance here.
binary0010 6 hours ago [-]
I'd actually be curious to read an award winning ai book, all the ai books/interactive story generators I've tried have been... Ok at best... Do you know what novels have been written by ai and award winning?
avaer 6 hours ago [-]
Japanese isekai might not be your cup of tea, but one example is [1] which was way back in Jan, and models have improved a lot since then.
My sneaking suspicion is that there are a lot more cases than get reported, because authors are disincentivized to disclose AI usage, and readers by and large feel icky about reading AI work for reasons unrelated to quality.
I can totally see a weird future where a lot of what people like is AI generated, and everyone lies to each other about it. So it's hard to do research on this phenomenon.
Not completely surprising that AI could do well generating manga. It's very formulaic in general and by nature devoid of a lot of the relatable character development from most other writing. I have no problem reading an AI story if it's done well, but it typically just isn't. What I find annoying though is AI generated content that is only interesting if it's actually real. Like a historic photo or a video of some shocking event.
ido 17 minutes ago [-]
I’d be ok reading AI-written stories if it’s only “AI assisted” (I.e. there’s a skilled human driving it). If it’s just a prompt and then the AI does all the writing, I know there’s just no intention behind it as LLMs don’t actually “think”- they just (in a very sophisticated way) pattern-match against an existing corpus.
I’ve experimented using AI to prototype game ideas and inevitably once I succumb to the temptation of handing the AI the game design reigns it starts devolving to meaningless slop with a silhouette of a meaningful design. The only way to get something meaningful (that ive found) is for the human to stay in the driver’s seat.
altmanaltman 2 hours ago [-]
Its a bit like saying AI is good at math when its being used by Terrance Tao. Like okay if its so good at storytelling, use it to generate a good one and share it under this comment for feedback and we can check out how good and original it is.
cautiouscat 5 hours ago [-]
What award/book was this?
FeteCommuniste 5 hours ago [-]
The winner of a short-story prize from Granta (well known literary fiction publisher) is believed to be AI-written:
So the author didn’t claim it was? It’s just assumed?
Forgeties79 4 hours ago [-]
1 unverified example with quite the unique, if true, circumstances against the undoubtedly countless dismissed attempts (not to mention those never submitted because they’re trash) hardly meets the bar being established here.
letmevoteplease 3 hours ago [-]
Even if 99% of generations are trash, why does that matter? Just throw out the failures and keep the good ones, like any writer.
Here is the text of the winning story: https://granta.com/the-serpent-in-the-grove/ If you've ever used ChatGPT to generate stories, you will find the style unmistakable. It's cloying to me, but it did manage to fool some stuffy literary judges.
altmanaltman 2 hours ago [-]
If 99% generations are trash then it means it sucks at storytelling and is not good at it contary to what was claimed in the comment.
Forgeties79 4 hours ago [-]
> You know what's also good at storytelling? AI
Writing a coherent story =/= good at storytelling
dd8601fn 8 minutes ago [-]
It’s better than most video games. Including some of the best selling.
6 hours ago [-]
dyauspitr 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, all that hand place details and humans do it better crap only last for like three months based on the recent past.
cobertos 6 hours ago [-]
In both the Autumn and Winter examples in the hero images, the algo seemed to have placed buildings on the water in the foreground
In the summer example in the hero images, the building placement + small pockets of water on the left looks odd and low attention to detail. A similar poor quality result as if an uncaring human used a scatter brush...
Curious if the examples are cherry-picked and by how much, or if this is one-shoted
dozerly 6 hours ago [-]
I am sure they are cherry picked. No one would spend time trying to publish results like this without picking the best results they possibly could to showcase.
andai 5 hours ago [-]
In this competitive world, you need to integrate the cold plunge deeply with your lifestyle to stay ahead.
2001zhaozhao 5 hours ago [-]
This kind of content generation can be quite cool to enable new game ideas for indie developers that were only possible with AAA before. But it also makes it hard to gauge the amount of human work that went into the game. When you see an elegantly designed building, environment or easter egg in the game, was that really made by a human (or even prompted by a human), or did the AI generate it autonomously as part of a much larger generation step?
smlacy 5 hours ago [-]
> When you see an elegantly designed building ...was that really made by a human or did the AI generate it as part of a much larger generation step?
Does it matter? Why?
2001zhaozhao 2 hours ago [-]
To me what matters is being able to verify human authorship at a glance. It used to be that when you saw a work of visual art you were automatically 100% sure that someone had to have spent a great deal of effort producing that, but image models took it away. This is the same situation but with game environments.
Forgeties79 4 hours ago [-]
A good painting is never “just a good painting.” The context, the artist, etc. are part of the art. To remove that is to make it no longer art because it’s no longer an actual expression of anything personal. Pretty words with no intent behind them don’t mean anything.
Plenty of Holiday Inn’s have lovely painted landscapes on the walls. People aren’t paying for them to be in their homes.
mparramon 2 hours ago [-]
With tools like this, the artist is not removed from the art. He just has more leverage.
I would argue the opposite even: this is more personal, as a singular artist can now do more by himself, without relying on others to do the parts that he couldn't do before.
AuthAuth 1 hours ago [-]
AI strips a lot of the intention from the work. The artist might want a wooden house with a straw roof and while they design the house they might add framing and other small touches to the house and to the viewer the small decisions could be as important as the choice for a straw roof.
When the artist AI generates it they get a house with wooden house with a straw roof and nothing else has any thought or intention. Its less personal, the viewer previously did not have to question what the artists intention was now they do because its likely the artist had no intention or thought towards a particular part of the art.
mparramon 1 hours ago [-]
So the artist simply accepts the AI generated wooden house. Might it be possible that he does not?
Furthermore, before AI, artists also used assets that came from other creators, accepting them wholesale. No intention, then?
The issue I see here is that we're judging the tool, not the artist.
It reminds me so much of the digital photography backlash. But here we are.
BizarroLand 5 hours ago [-]
Some people still care about it, or want a possibly shared experience over one that can only be experienced once by one person
5 hours ago [-]
thymine_dimer 3 hours ago [-]
The water levels don't change seasonally..So I'm guessing it's a very high rainfall area? In which case erosion and nutrient leaching are bound to be issues for the agentic farmers. I wonder if they've thought to build soil with perennial ground cover species..
But as I say this, I realise the tree species seem to change very dynamically from season to season. So I'll have to assume either the temporal rate of change is actually a lot slower than one would expect in a model like this (allowing large tree species to regenerate annually), or there are new coniferous flowering tree varieties in this universe.
gosolozero 6 hours ago [-]
Interesting prompt to world pipeline. I wonder if there can be more style applied than just the "MMO cartoony" style? Like medieval Witcher or realistic Cyberpunk buildings?
avaer 6 hours ago [-]
I'm sure the answer is yes, even now there are pretty good model generators out there that can do realistic models. Experimental things like this just tend to go with cartoony styles since mistakes and lower quality (read: faster generation) can be chalked up to "lol", whereas realistic styles tend not to be forgiving with art mismatches and shading mistakes.
In modern polished games, the art team spends a lot of time tweaking things to make sure it looks great and coherent. Most people are not willing to have their agent run for a month to do this work. I don't know if it's been tried yet but I would be really interested to see the result.
pinkmoonx 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah any game ready asset has to be low poly. Even if it has 4k textures the polygon (vertex) count must be low to do anything meaningful (raycast, load many models).
Usually a combination of distance and frustum culling (breaking the model down into several that only load when you need to see it) with 4k or 8k textures can make a low poly game ready asset look very high quality
Reubend 6 hours ago [-]
The assets look good, but for some reason the terrain looks too cartoonish to me.
m00dy 4 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, code is not available.
ElCapitanMarkla 6 hours ago [-]
This looks so cool. Nice work :D
sergiotapia 2 hours ago [-]
I kind of feel like this is how Crimson Desert was made.
It's enormous, but utterly devoid of any soul. Like eating a $3000 subway sandwich.
ex-aws-dude 6 hours ago [-]
I hate to be an HN bikeshedder but why is everything "Claw" recently?
bonoboTP 4 hours ago [-]
Because it's a buzzword. It causes buzz. Putting it together with "world" makes it buzz even more because people want to talk about world models all the time (it doesn't matter what the actual input and output is, just that it's a world model, not some meagerly language model, it models all the world, much better than modeling just boring old language), as well as about claws. So that's why.
consumer451 5 hours ago [-]
Branding is amazing. In this case with a normal word, it's a sort of network effect?
Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, just spoke at YC Startup School. The entire thing is worth a view.
It's mostly "did you know you can attach an LLM to a PCG system?", but there is one idea here you don't see much of: an image model performs the composition (which image models are really good at), and then you extract the objects into 3d via things like SAM3D before placing them in the world, which is pretty interesting.
The rest is standard stuff you'll find in your favorite PCG system/game engine. Still, think most people don't realize how good LLMs are at 3D these days, especially Fable 5 (which this project predates).
Use any image generation tool (or any image) and have a multimodal LLM like Gemini extract individual parts of the image “isolate with a transparent background” - then you can use those images for image-to-3d in those tools.
Don’t forget to use low or “smart” poly features otherwise you get too many vertices to the point you can’t performantly raycast etc.
But yeah - it’s there.
I've found it's actually best to do maximal quality generation and decimate/meshopt to desired budget.
If you're raycasting against your raw art you're doing it wrong anyway, none of the big players do this precisely for the reason you mentioned. And beyond physics meshes, if you're doing anything where performance is a problem you probably want multiple LODs so you have to do this work anyway.
These days you can just ask your agent to build you a LOD pipeline and forget about it rather than sacrificing the art; Claude knows Blender.
Decimating ends up ruining the look of the model to get it down to a game ready size.
Even a simple house model, or humanoid, using Decimate in Blender there is no way that will be even recognizable.
(I agree with you about Blender though, I always hated Blender's simplify)
[1] https://www.meshlab.net
Some 3D AI providers still leak like that, but Meshy came up with their own binary format that splits the stream up into separate files that are assembled with a response it only gets if you have Premium.
Thought it was cool technology - and wonder if browser games in general are doing stuff like that to protect 3D assets from being easily ripped from the Network tab.
Can you explain more? Can I use Fable 5 to generate a 3d model from a couple of photographs?
I get that you run this, and then edit it. But the generated villages just aren’t interesting in my opinion. It’s probably great for tencent’s market where you’re mass producing gacha style games, but I don’t think worlds made in this fashion will scratch the open world itch like the best open world games out there.
I wouldn't say we don't need artists or writers, but I think most people will be surprised how quickly fully AI driven pipelines will advance here.
My sneaking suspicion is that there are a lot more cases than get reported, because authors are disincentivized to disclose AI usage, and readers by and large feel icky about reading AI work for reasons unrelated to quality.
I can totally see a weird future where a lot of what people like is AI generated, and everyone lies to each other about it. So it's hard to do research on this phenomenon.
[1] https://0115765.com/archives/165655
I’ve experimented using AI to prototype game ideas and inevitably once I succumb to the temptation of handing the AI the game design reigns it starts devolving to meaningless slop with a silhouette of a meaningful design. The only way to get something meaningful (that ive found) is for the human to stay in the driver’s seat.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/20/granta-magazin...
Writing a coherent story =/= good at storytelling
In the summer example in the hero images, the building placement + small pockets of water on the left looks odd and low attention to detail. A similar poor quality result as if an uncaring human used a scatter brush...
Curious if the examples are cherry-picked and by how much, or if this is one-shoted
Does it matter? Why?
Plenty of Holiday Inn’s have lovely painted landscapes on the walls. People aren’t paying for them to be in their homes.
I would argue the opposite even: this is more personal, as a singular artist can now do more by himself, without relying on others to do the parts that he couldn't do before.
When the artist AI generates it they get a house with wooden house with a straw roof and nothing else has any thought or intention. Its less personal, the viewer previously did not have to question what the artists intention was now they do because its likely the artist had no intention or thought towards a particular part of the art.
Furthermore, before AI, artists also used assets that came from other creators, accepting them wholesale. No intention, then?
The issue I see here is that we're judging the tool, not the artist.
It reminds me so much of the digital photography backlash. But here we are.
But as I say this, I realise the tree species seem to change very dynamically from season to season. So I'll have to assume either the temporal rate of change is actually a lot slower than one would expect in a model like this (allowing large tree species to regenerate annually), or there are new coniferous flowering tree varieties in this universe.
In modern polished games, the art team spends a lot of time tweaking things to make sure it looks great and coherent. Most people are not willing to have their agent run for a month to do this work. I don't know if it's been tried yet but I would be really interested to see the result.
Usually a combination of distance and frustum culling (breaking the model down into several that only load when you need to see it) with 4k or 8k textures can make a low poly game ready asset look very high quality
It's enormous, but utterly devoid of any soul. Like eating a $3000 subway sandwich.
Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, just spoke at YC Startup School. The entire thing is worth a view.
> There are 33,000 "claw" named repositories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whcfSGN6CAU&t=1450s