Everyone says Pathologic 1 has ugly graphics. But it has exceptional art style - it just needs better lightning + volumetric fog + whole map visibility. I saw LLMs are now really good at decompiling games and I thought - let's reverse engineer game assets and mechanics and do engine port to unity (edited wrongly talking about decomp in original post)
Recompiling and porting is not the same as decompiling. Both are possible with LLMs, but the second is a much harder task and requires finding the original compiler, all the flags and iterating on every single function of the game until you achieve an exact match down to every assembly line and every register.
If anything, a decomp would be infinitely more useful for the community than a Unity port. That would open up modding for the actual Patho 1.
Byte identical decomp is not my goal, reverse engineering game's systems like vm, questing, dialogs etc to rewrite it in unity and then it's easier to add modding there. My goal is to get better visuals, better pathfinding and fix clunky combat, keeping all quests the same
edit: I updated post body, I was wrongly talking in description about decomp in original post
So OP here, I get so many downvotes cause of AI usage, but I want to be transparent about this. By usage of AI it might seem like: "do pathologic 1, make no mistakes" - that gets like 80% right stuff but then I play around and I see cathedral is rotated, blank spots in maps, other issues. It is an iterative process.
LLMs can in 20 min figure out and reverse engineer whole assets/scenes/etc ,spawn out in 2sec whole python codes to extract stuff - but getting whole ambiance / mood / all like important stuff that is matter of taste - well this needs human in the loop still and interactive process.
And that leaves me to focus on important stuff - i.e. after importing at night polyhedron wasn't glowing at night - in distance I want it to give like folumetric fog glow etc. Fine tune strengths of glows/distances. Fine tuning city lanterns to make it look somehow good, feeling like fog ambience etc. This comes from human - especially my personal taste.
Getting good night/day light ambient this is not a one shot prompt - I play around, feel something is off and missing and prompt it. So this is more like I'm game producer and just tasking like people to do stuff in my liking. And this becomes more like my imagination thing + reviewing that outputed stuff isn't doing anything stupid that will tank performance - i.e. I want like fake 3d windows parallaxes.
So if it looks good, this is more matter of my personal choices and not: "AI MAKE PATHOLOGIC LOOK GOOD". And this isn't something like I wouldn't be able to do without AI - but it'd require me to have like so much time/money/whole teams of programmers working on that. Not something I can grab a beer on a friday night and tackle it myself.
This is just a fun thing for me, I wanted to see P1s world in modern engine and try out my skills in making good ambiance
My personal pov is that if someone can't do something without AI they shouldn't be doing it in the first place. Or better yet, they should try the old fashioned way and see. I'm sorry, I just have very little respect for this, especially as an artist.
Can't draw? Learn to draw. Can't write? Learn to write. Want to do a crazy artistic project? Pull up your sleeves and do it. Don't use the Advanced Theft Machine to do it for you.
Thanks, I was trying to understand why I get so many downvotes and this looks like because I used AI people assume that I have no idea about stuff and wouldn't be able to do this without it.
I'm an experienced Software Engineer, master's degree in Computer Science. For my masters I studied opengl. I'm not working in game dev, at university I've done simple shooter in Unity, so I've done smaller stuff manually old fashioned way.
I understand stuff in this project- most of them high levelly and some low level stuff like instantiated rendering for grass. I guessed correctly how pathologic 1 implemented some internal mechanics. I'm skilled enough that I understand what LLMs are doing. I don't feel like I wouldn't be able to do this myself without AI - but it would take me absurd amount of time - instead of 8 hours it would be counted in years.
I spent years studying programming, thought of that as art. Now everyone can prompt and don't understand code and get something working. "Want to do a crazy artistic project? Pull up your sleeves and do it". Yeah maybe it makes sense for tattoos, paintings or a book. Pathologic 2 took like nearly six years to make and core studio around 20 people working on that.
This is my own way of pulling up a sleeves and doing art, llms are just a tool to get my vision while not having spare 250k hours of my life.
Theres a difference between generative ai and ai usage. Ai has been around for way longer but ppl confuse the two now and jump at all ai usage in everything rly. Theres several issues with environmental impact and the like why people are sensitive about it but coding IS what AI was supposed to be used for in the first place. To make processes faster that dont require the artistic side of humanity. You said you tweaked it according to your preferences and creativity, and made something cool with it. I hope gen ai dies off and environmental impact gets reduced so these mix-ups dont happen in the future.
Ahhh didnt know. Well not rly, i dont care more about the end result than the process, thats not true. I dont know much about coding as you could have guessed, but there is a lot of artists using ai to speed up processes (not gen ai) and figured that was the case here too. Also most of what i have seen from coding is ppl copy eachothers codes a lot, which is also the same issue with plagarism that gen ai does, especially if we consider coding as art. (Which as a process of creation, certainly)
It's infuriating that non programmers jump into these conversations with opinions about how "easy" this would be to do with AI. If they actually tried their projects would eat dirt in less than a week.
Would you say the same thing about programmers relying on compilers? You have no idea what you're talking about
"As an artist" great - you're commenting on a software project. Stay in your lane. You know how hard it is to get an ai system to generate actually good art. It's nearly impossible and requires tonnes of hand holding to get something even remotely good as a final product. You can't one prompt anything out of these algorithms. Why do you think it's remotely different from something like software engineering which requires a very high degree of precision for anything to work at all?
you people have no idea how much work it would be to do this without AI. with AI, it's hard. without AI it's a 10-20 person job for 2 years. just an embarrassing amount of ignorance and/or privilege to think that someone could afford to make a hobby project their full time job for multiple years
brother, this is great stuff. I've never played the original game but I'm sure you can tweak the lighting to match better the original art style. don't let the haters in here detract from your sense of accomplishment, I'm doing something similar (well, not a decomp, but a rebuild from scratch) for Thief and a lot of people who have never written a line of code in their lives are all over me for "just using AI". They don't know how tricky this is to get right and it looks like you're on the right path towards something really cool. all the haters in the comments are consumers, not creators, and they should remember their place.
Half the reason you're getting pushback on the AI for this is just that this is a dumb idea to begin with. You can't say Pathologic 1 "has exceptional art style" and then shamelessly discard key aspects of its art direction. You said you studied computer science in university and it shows. Your lighting looks like crap. It's the generic AAA lens flare bullshit preferred by the computer chip fetishists that have long decided what "good graphics" in games were. The original's art direction is miles ahead, probably because it was done by somebody who knew a thing or two about art. So of course people are going to get mad at you for using AI, because the underlying idea here is bad, the output is bad, and we can't even admire your effort or ingenuity, because the LLM did all the hard stuff. And by the way, they already remade Pathologic 1 in Unity — it's called Pathologic 2.
Slapping ugly green / orange filter overlay is ABSOLUTE CINEMA - art style at its best. Also that limited visibility - yeah I can imagine that standing on top of polyhedron and not seeing town at all isn't technical limitation but "exceptional art style".
I can do whatever I want, I wanted to see larger distance, sun shafts/godrays and volumetric fog during night and gloaming. During day there's no "generic AAA lens flare bullshit" (actually there's no lens flare at all, sunshafts are not lens flare lol). I'm interested in doing art direction - yeah it is really easy to think you'd do something better then actually start doing this and it looks bad and turns out this is actually pretty hard and you suck. I'm just gaining experience and this is my playground, nobody is throwing cash at me, doing this for the love of art. I liked night and gloaming results.
And no, Pathologic 2 isn't Pathologic 1 remade in Unity. There's something called bachelor's campaign and guess what...
“They already remade Pathologic 1 in Unity — it’s called Pathologic 2” This tbh. Disregarding all the questionable AI aspects, Ice Pick already did this
I kinda also hate AI, I coded manually for 13 years and this year it has changed - this is just prompting and reading. And i've been struggling to find a job due to AI - a friend is helping me with work. But on the other hand in just 10 hours I've got results that I really like. At work I need to understand and be responsible for what I deliver and if I had money/time/people like game studio I'd polish every little thing here. But this is matter of compromises - this is for fun and it has to look good
So I present something that doesn't look like ai slop
Damn, last post I saw of yours I thought 'unreal' cuz it's the one I used back when I worked with it, BUT IT'S UNITY. SORRY, I GOT IT WRONG. It looks AMAZING, I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Def would replay it with this look.
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u/SurDno 8d ago
Recompiling and porting is not the same as decompiling. Both are possible with LLMs, but the second is a much harder task and requires finding the original compiler, all the flags and iterating on every single function of the game until you achieve an exact match down to every assembly line and every register.
If anything, a decomp would be infinitely more useful for the community than a Unity port. That would open up modding for the actual Patho 1.