Doom has been ported to dozens of different devices before, but none of them have played like this.
Google researchers have generated an AI version of a retro first-person shooter classic using only a neural network, based on captured gameplay video clips.
It's a harrowing yet groundbreaking event, chronicled in a paper published this week titled “The Diffusion Model is a Real-Time Game Engine” (thanks VentureBeat ), which documents how a small team at Google was able to “interactively simulate” a version of Doom with only a “slightly better than random chance” that a human could tell the difference.
A human (for now) must first play Doom and create gameplay video clips that are then ingested into the team's “fully neural-powered” game engine, GameNGen — the same principle that allows AI to learn from and generate still images by ingesting large amounts of data from questionable sources online.
GameNGen generates successive frames based on what it learns by “watching” that gameplay, and outputs them at 20fps with “original-like” visual quality, as seen below.
Doom simulated with the GameNGen neural model. Watch on YouTube
“Can a neural model running in real time simulate a complex game with high quality?” the paper asks. “This study shows that the answer is yes. While not an exact simulation, the neural model is capable of performing complex game state updates, including calculating health and ammunition, enemy attacks, object damage, opening and closing doors, and maintaining game state over long trajectories.”
“GameNGen answers one of the key questions on the way to a new paradigm for game engines, where games are generated automatically, similar to how images and videos are generated these days by neural models. Important questions remain, such as how to train these neural game engines, how to effectively create games in the first place, and how to make the most of human input. Still, we're very excited about the potential of this new paradigm.”
Earlier this year, an extensive Eurogamer survey examined how AI is already changing video game development forever, for better or worse, and a report published by Unity in March claimed that over 60% of game developers were already using AI at some stage in the development process.
