Art Assets & AI

[1337Dude]

Unless I'm mistaken, we've reached the point where anyone with access to certain A.I. programs can generate high quality art in minutes. Obviously this would be extremely advantageous for a game like Dominions 6. What was previously thought to be too much work should now be realistically feasible. Have the developers of Dominions considered utilizing A.I. in the creation of art assets? Obviously it would have to be generated by someone who has the correct artistic intentions & vision for how things should look. Even if someone felt uncomfortable using A.I. to generate "original" art - it could be used to quickly generate higher quality assets of what was already previously created by the artists. Dominions could become significantly better looking with significantly less work than before. Just curious if Dominions will have a brighter future due to this tech.

[Mormacil]

Given their hesitance to even employ traditional assets by other creators I don't see them turning to AI in the slightest. If they find using the assets created by another human being as to much why would they want to use something that uses millions of assets created by others?

I'd also find the claim high quality in combination with AI art quite amusing. I've seen some pieces where a human artists spends many hours improving an AI base into something good but I never seen an AI only image look high quality.

[1337Dude]

Originally posted by Mormacil:

I'd also find the claim high quality in combination with AI art quite amusing. I've seen some pieces where a human artists spends many hours improving an AI base into something good but I never seen an AI only image look high quality.

I guess you haven't looked very hard. A lot of album art for music for example is being A.I. generated now and it's more or less indistinguishable from actual art. Of course, the sprites being used in a game like Dominions wouldn't need to be high quality anyways (this is pixel art we're talking about here).

If the models for the A.I. art were trained on, for example, already-existing Dominions art - it's more or less still original and being created within artistic tone and vision of the artistic creator. If the developers don't want to use it, that's absolutely fine. But they could, for example, give modders the capability to implement things such as extra frames or higher resolution sprites, so that the community could do such a thing. This is assuming that there's anyone who actually values being competitive in respect to massive advancement in modern technology. I know Dominions is an old game but I'm not entirely convinced it's a community of luddites.

[Mountain Months]

Unfortunately Valve has chosen the regressive point of view and are rejecting anything with AI-generated assets. AI is the future whether anyone likes it or not.

[1337Dude]

Originally posted by Mountain Months:

Unfortunately Valve has chosen the regressive point of view and are rejecting anything with AI-generated assets. AI is the future whether anyone likes it or not.

I wasn't aware. Well that definitely answers a lot of questions. Having said that, there's always room for allowing the community to take things into their own hands. I'm not an artist, but I am a programmer, and it's impossible to deny the value of A.I. for AI-generated assets.

Frankly, this seems like a way for the industry to shield itself from normal people creating games with the appearance of a higher budget. Seems like gate-keeping to me. I do believe there should be certain intellectual property and artist protections, but completely banning A.I. is ludicrous. Besides, how is Valve going to know if some artist turned in A.I. generated art? Sounds like something that's more of a good-faith policy where people who disagree with said policy could easily circumvent it (not advising anyone to do this).

[Teralitha]

Its okay, the hand drawn low res pixel art is endearing and nostalgic, they should never chang it.

[Mormacil]

Originally posted by Mountain Months:

Unfortunately Valve has chosen the regressive point of view and are rejecting anything with AI-generated assets. AI is the future whether anyone likes it or not.

They haven't, they blocked assets that can't proof their AI is ethnically trained. Using Adobe's AI e.g. is entirely fine.

[Maerlande]

Originally posted by 1337Dude:

Unless I'm mistaken, we've reached the point where anyone with access to certain A.I. programs can generate high quality art in minutes. Obviously this would be extremely advantageous for a game like Dominions 6. What was previously thought to be too much work should now be realistically feasible. Have the developers of Dominions considered utilizing A.I. in the creation of art assets? Obviously it would have to be generated by someone who has the correct artistic intentions & vision for how things should look. Even if someone felt uncomfortable using A.I. to generate "original" art - it could be used to quickly generate higher quality assets of what was already previously created by the artists. Dominions could become significantly better looking with significantly less work than before. Just curious if Dominions will have a brighter future due to this tech.

Kristoffer has made it very clear he greatly enjoys making the art for the game and Illwinter has made it clear they do not like to use assets by others than themselves (all two of them). So, have they considered using it? I don't know but I predict they would never use AI for art based on the two observations I made.

If you replace Kristoffer with an AI, what exactly does his role become? Just writer? It's quite different than replacing an employee.

[Turin Turambar]

The most obvious thing it could be used is to generate animation for the units, using the existing sprites as a base. Otherwise it's too expensive to do, imagine generating walking and attacking animation for the thousands of different units the game has.
And... that's the issue, AI actually still not good enough to do that, to maintain a consistent style from frame to frame, and be logical about what parts change from one frame to the next. It's only good to generate a single art piece that exist not within a contest.

[Selgeron]

It's actually really hard to get an AI to produce decent pixel art, and anything else would look really 'off' in this game.

If they really wanted to do a change in art, then they could hire a spriter or two to do it, adding a 2 frame 'walk' cycle or bumping the resolution up wouldn't be a HUGE investment. But I question whether or not doing something like that would really 'add' to the game- I barely look at the units anymore when I am watching a fight.

[Mormacil]

Originally posted by Selgeron:

It's actually really hard to get an AI to produce decent pixel art, and anything else would look really 'off' in this game.

If they really wanted to do a change in art, then they could hire a spriter or two to do it, adding a 2 frame 'walk' cycle or bumping the resolution up wouldn't be a HUGE investment. But I question whether or not doing something like that would really 'add' to the game- I barely look at the units anymore when I am watching a fight.

It would be a huge undertaking actually. If we assume two sprite artists take 30 minutes to make a sprite per person with the 9000 sprites in the game that's more sprites than they could do together if they worked every week with no time off besides the weekends. No holidays, no vacations, just full time employment for 52 weeks a year.

And with pixel art resolution matters a lot, drawing those giant sprites at 256p is a big undertaking. And that's ignoring drawing additional poses, just the two pose system of right now. Don't get me wrong, I'd love the ability to add more poses to units. Perhaps a ranged and a melee attack pose, maybe a strategic map pose separate from the battlefield, a casting pose? etc. But putting that on existing content will be a huge undertaking.

Do not underestimate the cost in time and money it would take to overhaul the entire set of sprites the game accrued over the years.

[Sombre]

I quite like that dominions only has 2 sprites per thing. With dom6 having 6 per mounted thing I now have first hand experience with the huge amount of work that generates for me for the warhammer mod. So having even more is not something I'd like.

[Ulfberht]

Don't know where you got these numbers from. If we're talking about unit sprites there are less than 3600. Probably less than 3000. If you double this for the attack animation you get around 6000. But even with this number there is a vast amount of reuse of art parts. A great example is to look at EA Xibalba. Two different types of Xibalban Warrior, the only difference is one has a club, one has a spear, all of the other sprite is reused, even identical pose(except in the attack animation.) Stepping up to the Xibalban Dart Thrower most of the sprite is reused but they've changed the position of one of his arms. Xibalban Guard then is a recolor of this. Sun Guide is a recolor of that. Xibalban Scout reuses the Xibalban Warrior sprite.

[Sombre]

Originally posted by saint.milos.obilic:

Don't know where you got these numbers from. If we're talking about unit sprites there are less than 3600. Probably less than 3000. If you double this for the attack animation you get around 6000.

There are indeed somewhere around 9000 sprites in dominions 6. I don't know the exact number though. Remember any mounted thing now has a dismounted sprite as well as a mount sprite and those both have attack sprites also.

As to how different the sprites are from any other sprite, it definitely changes how much work is involved in making new sprites, but you do still need to make them.

[Ulfberht]

Oh, good point. I forgot we were talking about Dom 6. I only know where to find numbers about the number of sprites in Dom 5. But if we're factoring in mounted units as having 4 sprites per unit due to the mount having individual sprites as well I'd just have to say that's a strange way to do the counting. I assume that like the weapon art used on units they're going to reuse mount art across unit sprites. I think the art in the dominions series is one of the coolest parts of the game as is. I would hate to have it replaced with some horrifically bland, generic, stuff.

[Mormacil]

Originally posted by saint.milos.obilic:

Don't know where you got these numbers from. If we're talking about unit sprites there are less than 3600. Probably less than 3000. If you double this for the attack animation you get around 6000. But even with this number there is a vast amount of reuse of art parts. A great example is to look at EA Xibalba. Two different types of Xibalban Warrior, the only difference is one has a club, one has a spear, all of the other sprite is reused, even identical pose(except in the attack animation.) Stepping up to the Xibalban Dart Thrower most of the sprite is reused but they've changed the position of one of his arms. Xibalban Guard then is a recolor of this. Sun Guide is a recolor of that. Xibalban Scout reuses the Xibalban Warrior sprite.

Sprite dump of the units only has 8910 sprites in it. Given we also have an additional 2000 other sprites in the game and hundreds of new dismounted sprites I think 9000 was a low but fair estimate.

And yes some sprites can take you less than 30 minutes, others will take you significantly more. Pretender sprites take a lot of time to make, I know I've done a bunch. The 30 minutes is a realistic average based on my own data. Being curious I actually tallied the hours it took to make all the newer sprites for AetherNomad's Nok. Only 30 minutes on average is a solid estimate for an average sprite artist.