On 1/13/2021 at 5:46 AM, Ross Scott said:The scope of what I'm looking for is too large for me to be pushing it in any one direction beyond tool development. What you're talking about would be best if I wanted a specific game world converted, not hundreds / thousands. My video is intentionally more broad, to try and ignite interest in this, so that as advancements are made on this front in software, people who saw the video can keep this kind of application in mind in the future and get incentivized to make it happen for games they might be interested and hopefully leading to more worlds being explorable.
Additionally, I wouldn't rely on the transformative work defense for distributing these. While it's possible that could hold up in court, most people wouldn't have the resources to defend against that sort of thing, so it would likely have to be semi-underground.
I think you're underestimating the lengths fans are willing to go to in order to "survey" the game world. I personally would go through some games to get them converted, or at least some levels (I'd love to have Blood Omen 2 converted for example). Additionally, if someone went through, but missed a few nooks and crannies, if the information was public, someone else could fill those in. That was kind of the point of the articles I mentioned, people have spent 10 years recreating middle earth, I think others might be willing to really do the legwork on converting the games if they had the right tools and it was well known what to do.
For something like an enormous driving game, you would need smarter tools so only SOME areas need to be gone through at fine detail, then have an additional AI to look for pattern recognition. If you have a game with a hundred miles of road, the road texture is going to be repeated an immense amount of times, you would need an AI anticipating that. Same goes for other props like trees, houses, powerlines, etc. that are all being re-used. You would need the AI aggressively guessing what is a duplicate of existing assets.
If you're playing a driving game set in Ohio for too long, the AI will eventually start generating heads on spikes lining the road and lava pits cooking the souls of the dammed.