BuildBox 4 - AI Game Engine Done Right???

BuildBox is perhaps the single easiest to use 3D game engine available and a pioneer in the no-code movement. This year at GDC there are so many snake-oil wonder engines and tools that take AI and magically make game development 1000x easier... or so they claim. The BuildBox 4 approach though, I actually believe it could work and is perfect for their target audience... non-programmers. Now the only problem is, will BuildBox do something really stupid and shoot themselves in the foot again? Will the technology actually work as advertised? Only time will tell. That said, from the preview, BuildBox 4 looks like one of the first game engines to get AI right.

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[batwimp]

Next there will be an engine or platform that takes 100% commission and the developer just gets "exposure".

[kosmotion]

No matter what their motive is this engine could be a great prototyping tool; “the idea looks good let me do a quick sketch in buildbox” kinda thing

[justanothernobody]

Although AI isn't really quite ready for finished polished assets etc, it still has uses beyond just being good for beginners. This sort of AI assisted workflow would be great for quickly prototyping game ideas and concepts for example.

[viddarkking]

This will be the standard for all big game engines and asset creation tools in a few years.
In Unreal for example say you want to create an enemy and you just type in a box inside a folder:
Use this skeletal meshes and add this health bar with this UI Elements.
And shortly after it would give you the blueprints and you can just add them to the level or do as we saw in the video and mark an area and say: put X enemies here.

[hoodwinkedfool]

Since the start Buildbox has always viewed game making as a get rich scheme so of course they’ve jumped onto the AI bandwagon

[_gamma.]

If this works as advertised… I can see it being awesome for kids

[theyellowdude]

I used to use buildbox when it was free for like a year and i actually enjoyed making games in it but....ofc they had to ruin it and make the worst decisions. But that gave me a chance to get into coding and Godot game development which was worth it!

[mizzysparrots]

I’m looking to get back into buildbox. I used their original software, made a great game all from scratch, and when I went to export it the code crashed and they couldn’t help me fix it. I totally lost interest in game dev because of that. But they have since come out with new programs so I’m hoping it’s easier

[wtflolomg]

I'll pass on BuildBox, but... I do hope this serves as a wake up call for Epic and Unity (and, of course Godot) to incorporate AI in a way that makes sense. Unity's Muse is just dumb... I have chatbots, and they even know UnityEngine for coding - I also have Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI, and can make tileable textures all day long. What I need is a way to accelerate setting up the game's assets, building out levels, something to wire everything together. By the time the big guns figure this out, we'll be at the stage where OpenAI will be showing off how AI can create entire interactive 3D VR environments based on prompts.

[IcySpicy]

The amount of shovelware crap on the app store is going to go up sky high!

[KomodoBitGames]

I’m looking forward to your state of unreal coverage tomorrow

[HE]

I think other game engines are eventually going to integrate a similar A.I. system

[OLucasQueJoga]

as soon as a company do things like this that just thinks they can charge whatever they want it's a deal breaker for me. I studied Unity for years and right when I finally felt I was ready to start my first project they announced that ridiculous new monetization system that even though they rolled it back I will never trust them again, as soon as that happened I started learning Unreal, now let's see if unreal won't do something like this in the future too.

[JermaineMorgan]

Oh boy the market is about to be flooded by a ton of crap made by kids

[charlestietjen]

this makes a lot of sense if it ends up in a ecosystem like Roblox imo. less so in the hands of commercial devs

[lukasgruber]

"something happened": my initial guess: John Riccitiello became CEO. Edit: close call

[xstatique]

I lost faith in their products years ago, and I'm skeptical about whether this upcoming version will actually have real AI or just be another marketing gimmick.

[mmxgn]

The big issue with those "AI prompts" type of approaches I see is that there needs to be some intermediary format so that you can fine tune it. And the problem I have seen in every implementation is that it is a big bother to fine tune things the way you want that it's usually easier to just follow a regular example. If they manage to make the intermediary format easy to understand and modify (e.g. these mindmaps) then that's interesting, otherwise, it's going to be another frustrating ai-based experience.

Frankly, the best no-code approach I have ever seen in any game engine ever was from Klik & Play (and subsequently the Games Factory and Click and Create) in the 90s with their Story board and integrated sprite tool approach. Nothing else I've used has ever come close.

[xanecosmo]

Well, cool concept.
But this tech could use a few more years.

[ECHSBACHS]

curious to see where it goes from here