Week 16 progress update

This week I investigated using AI for asset generation. After watching a video about ControlNet, I think this one, I decided to give it a try. Rationale: I currently have a bunch of assets which have a decent normal map, but I have pretty bland diffuse maps. ControlNet seems to be able to generate pictures from normal maps, so I thought it could help me. I downloaded a few 5 GB files and tried to run Stable Diffusion 2 and ControlNet on my machine. It was an interesting experiment (see attached pics.)

A quick summary of my experience. (1) AIs seem to be great at producing whatever they like to produce. This is ideal if what you are doing is creating the next “This is gonna change everything” YouTube video to showcase how good these things are at producing art. The situation is quite different if you want to use AI to generate a specific asset. (2) The results you get are quite random. I ended up changing the input text and the seed again and again to get quite different pictures. (3) the resulting images tend to have artefacts, especially when the AI isn’t understanding very well the normal map or what you want to produce. (4) The pics I obtained do not match very closely with the normal map I gave. It is difficult to control what the AI does. (5) Overall these tools are not yet very useful to create real game artwork. This may change in the future, we’ll see.

I integrated the audio tracks I recorded last week into the demo and adjusted the animations a bit.

Another random experiment: I tried git lfs (Large File Storage) for my repository. I am pretty disappointed about how much it ends up breaking. It is now much more difficult to push the repository to a different machine in my house or even do a local clone. I am considering just getting rid of it and committing the assets normally.

At the end of the week I started working on improving the graphics of my game. I worked on the background image (the starred sky) and added a full moon to the sky. I am going to spend the next couple of weeks trying to improve the graphics to make the demo more publishable.