It's mostly "did you know you can attach an LLM to a PCG system?", but there is one idea here you don't see much of: an image model performs the composition (which image models are really good at), and then you extract the objects into 3d via things like SAM3D before placing them in the world, which is pretty interesting.
The rest is standard stuff you'll find in your favorite PCG system/game engine. Still, think most people don't realize how good LLMs are at 3D these days, especially Fable 5 (which this project predates).
Things like the red key must be reachable before the red door, and there should be no path that bypasses the red door, etc. written as a set of constraints.
I was working on is because I realized, constraints tend to be similar in nature (graph cut, minimum/maximum shortest path etc.) algorithmically, but its usually quite hard to control designer intent.
The reason I shelved the project, was I asked an LLM a couple years ago, to generate a dungeon room graph, following a similar set of constraints, but stated in plain English, and it did a perfect job.
Which brings me to my final point. LLMs are amazing and flexible constraint solvers, and are woefully underutilized in scenarios like this.
With a hand authored constraint system if the red key is in the wrong place you have a bug in the constraint system that can be deterministically fixed, with a LLM you have to roll the dice on prompting again and go through expensive verification.
Use any image generation tool (or any image) and have a multimodal LLM like Gemini extract individual parts of the image “isolate with a transparent background” - then you can use those images for image-to-3d in those tools.
Don’t forget to use low or “smart” poly features otherwise you get too many vertices to the point you can’t performantly raycast etc.
But yeah - it’s there.
I've found it's actually best to do maximal quality generation and decimate/meshopt to desired budget.
If you're raycasting against your raw art you're doing it wrong anyway, none of the big players do this precisely for the reason you mentioned. And beyond physics meshes, if you're doing anything where performance is a problem you probably want multiple LODs so you have to do this work anyway.
These days you can just ask your agent to build you a LOD pipeline and forget about it rather than sacrificing the art; Claude knows Blender.
Decimating ends up ruining the look of the model to get it down to a game ready size.
Even a simple house model, or humanoid, using Decimate in Blender there is no way that will be even recognizable.
(I agree with you about Blender though, I always hated Blender's simplify)
Some 3D AI providers still leak like that, but Meshy came up with their own binary format that splits the stream up into separate files that are assembled with a response it only gets if you have Premium.
Thought it was cool technology - and wonder if browser games in general are doing stuff like that to protect 3D assets from being easily ripped from the Network tab.
Can you explain more? Can I use Fable 5 to generate a 3d model from a couple of photographs?
I get that you run this, and then edit it. But the generated villages just aren’t interesting in my opinion. It’s probably great for tencent’s market where you’re mass producing gacha style games, but I don’t think worlds made in this fashion will scratch the open world itch like the best open world games out there.
I wouldn't say we don't need artists or writers, but I think most people will be surprised how quickly fully AI driven pipelines will advance here.
My sneaking suspicion is that there are a lot more cases than get reported, because authors are disincentivized to disclose AI usage, and readers by and large feel icky about reading AI work for reasons unrelated to quality.
I can totally see a weird future where a lot of what people like is AI generated, and everyone lies to each other about it. So it's hard to do research on this phenomenon.
I’ve experimented using AI to prototype game ideas and inevitably once I succumb to the temptation of handing the AI the game design reigns it starts devolving to meaningless slop with a silhouette of a meaningful design. The only way to get something meaningful (that ive found) is for the human to stay in the driver’s seat.
Writing a coherent story =/= good at storytelling
Just look what happened when a studio tries to do a bold move and have a sequel where the protagonist of the first game gets tortured and killed out of revenge, by the daughter of one of the many characters he killed in the first part. This is a direct metaphor involving the player, about grief, revenge, and loss.
They were absolutely shredded by the fans over doing this to their favourite serial killer.
Gamers by and large don’t want a good story.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/20/granta-magazin...
I have never done any story generation and after reading the first couple of paragraphs, I could not tell whether this was AI-generated or not.
In the summer example in the hero images, the building placement + small pockets of water on the left looks odd and low attention to detail. A similar poor quality result as if an uncaring human used a scatter brush...
Curious if the examples are cherry-picked and by how much, or if this is one-shoted
Does it matter? Why?
Plenty of Holiday Inn’s have lovely painted landscapes on the walls. People aren’t paying for them to be in their homes.
I would argue the opposite even: this is more personal, as a singular artist can now do more by himself, without relying on others to do the parts that he couldn't do before.
When the artist AI generates it they get a house with wooden house with a straw roof and nothing else has any thought or intention. Its less personal, the viewer previously did not have to question what the artists intention was now they do because its likely the artist had no intention or thought towards a particular part of the art.
Furthermore, before AI, artists also used assets that came from other creators, accepting them wholesale. No intention, then?
The issue I see here is that we're judging the tool, not the artist.
It reminds me so much of the digital photography backlash. But here we are.
In modern polished games, the art team spends a lot of time tweaking things to make sure it looks great and coherent. Most people are not willing to have their agent run for a month to do this work. I don't know if it's been tried yet but I would be really interested to see the result.
Usually a combination of distance and frustum culling (breaking the model down into several that only load when you need to see it) with 4k or 8k textures can make a low poly game ready asset look very high quality
But as I say this, I realise the tree species seem to change very dynamically from season to season. So I'll have to assume either the temporal rate of change is actually a lot slower than one would expect in a model like this (allowing large tree species to regenerate annually), or there are new coniferous flowering tree varieties in this universe.
But Claude can do this with little prompting.
[edit] Not sure why the downvote, but Claude Design can do this, its just a matter of knowing the exact prompt.
This was created with just the prompt on from their front page and nothing else.
That's literally a cut+paste. If I had spent time on it, you can get it close to what's shown.
Claude also created that as a Blender file with assets for each of the generated items.
Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, just spoke at YC Startup School. The entire thing is worth a view.
> There are 33,000 "claw" named repositories.
It's enormous, but utterly devoid of any soul. Like eating a $3000 subway sandwich.