GoKawiilImagine you're playing a racing game and you're AI-generating the car you'll use. Or a sandbox battle where you're making all your machines and weapons on the fly. Centipede tank with four turrets? Flying bat drone? Roblox is folding its new CubePart AI model into its platform and game developer tools, and it's going to mean kids and other players generating things in games that actually do stuff with moving parts.
CubePart AI, an open-source AI model Roblox has just published research on and will be introducing its platform, is an extension of 3D AI-generated objects that Roblox introduced last year. This time, though, objects can have actual working parts that fit the physics of the game they're in.
AI models for creating multipart objects already exist, but Roblox argues, in a new research paper, that its model is better, promising training on more objects than other models (2 million parts, and a half million overall assets) and being able to label parts of objects using AI faster. The result could be actual functioning things that can work in games using existing game engines.
Roblox
AI-generated moving tanks, robots or surveillance skulls?
The model-creating AI will work in Roblox Studio for developers, but also be accessible for players in games that support it starting today.
"Our dream is that any two-person studio is able to create a massive complex game, but if you take it further and further, then why not have more and more of our players become creators, even without having to open a full-scale studio product?" Anupam Singh, Roblox' senior vice president of engineering, tells me on a chat over Zoom.
Weird examples in Roblox's research paper of what could be made show exactly how strange it could get: a "floating surveillance unit housed inside a human skull," with cameras, moving vertebrae and a "sensor halo." Or "a long-range weapon carved from a living elder tree," with enchanted berry ammo and a vine sight.
This won't be isolated to some sandbox that's off to the side somewhere -- it's something you'll be able to bring directly into your in-game activity. "The trick that we have found is, unless you integrate it into very interesting gameplay, after a while it becomes a little bit boring," Singh says. "You're generating an object, but then you need all this other gameplay stuff around it."
The moving creations can't be endless -- Singh says that natural fail points will dictate limits to keep things from getting too big -- and they can't distort and move quite like living creatures yet, so it's intended more for machines and suits and vehicles than aliens and companions, although golem-like robots are possible.
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