AI-powered Minecraft runs without a game engine — game rendered in real-time at a continuous 20 FPS

DecartAI's Oasis AI world model can run a rough approximation of Minecraft with "no game engine, no logic, no code" at 20 FPS and 360p.
DecartAI's Oasis AI world model can run a rough approximation of Minecraft with "no game engine, no logic, no code" at 20 FPS and 360p. (Image credit: DecartAI)

In the "apparently" post-copyright age of AI PCs, yet another AI company has introduced a shameless playable ripoff of an actual, copyrighted video game— now it's DecartAI's Oasis world model and Minecraft, with resolution and framerate more characteristic of Nintendo 64 games like Ocarina of Time (20 FPS, 360p) than any modern port of Minecraft.

Even fan ports to platforms like the GameCube and Dreamcast run better than this! Add numerous AI hallucinations that render truly complex gameplay unfeasible, including a complete lack of object permanence to the point that even digging a hole drops you back above ground, and NO environmental fixtures are permanent, and one wonders why anyone would want to play a survival-building RPG in these conditions.

Oasis, developed in collaboration with Etched, isn't necessarily commercial. In fact, according to comments on Etched Twitter, it's apparently due to be open-sourced. How exactly they're being allowed to open source and distribute code so blatantly ripping off (and training with) an existing video game is anybody's guess.

This project is also based on the open-source Minecraft training dataset from OpenAI, Minecraft Video PreTraining (VPT). VPT was trained on 70 thousand hours of IDM-labeled online video.

While AI zealots cheer advancements like AI Counter-Strike: GO and Doom as advancements for the gaming space, it seems clear to anybody paying attention that the most affordable, performant, and sensible option for years, if not decades, to come will be actual game engines running on actual hardware.

Proudly touting a "game" without a game engine, game logic, or code is perhaps missing the point of what makes games fun—or even coherent, particularly considering the fact that these projects simply don't exist without real video games to rip off.

In other words, no— with how this technology works fundamentally, requiring training off existing content, you aren't able to simply AI prompt the creation of a truly complex, original game. The closest thing to that is a shameless ripoff of Angry Birds assembled from AI-generated assets. That is still just Angry Birds, though it is a remarkably more coherent experience than these real-time 3D AI world models, which are so prone to disorienting hallucination as to make them feel like hallucinations to play.

Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

  • usertests
    I saw AI generation of game world scenery (3D environment) from text prompts recently. I think that was the more useful demo.

    It might have been this one but I'm not sure:
    https://venturebeat.com/games/exists-launches-genai-platform-to-create-3d-games-from-text-prompts/
    Reply
  • JTWrenn
    Great so you made a super duper energy inefficient game. I really worry how much AI is pushing to power generation and computer hardware from humans and just how inefficient it is. We need to figure out that power and greenhouse issue first...otherwise I feel like we will all use excel via a super computer instead of just typing. It's just getting so out of whack.
    Reply
  • subspruce
    JTWrenn said:
    Great so you made a super duper energy inefficient game. I really worry how much AI is pushing to power generation and computer hardware from humans and just how inefficient it is. We need to figure out that power and greenhouse issue first...otherwise I feel like we will all use excel via a super computer instead of just typing. It's just getting so out of whack.
    it's like using Electron for a note-taking app - stupid
    Reply
  • manucanu
    Give some sugar to the article writer and his sheep so they can balance it with the sourness.

    While the ai generated games look horrible, similarly to first image generators, it will definitely improve and will cause chaos (copyright being the kickstart complaint), in this case game developers and hardware benchmarking. It will twist those industries just as it is doing with others, so I do understand the sour side of things.

    However ranting at it does nothing but to improve ignorance, and when things get advanced enough yall will find yourselves with the pants down.
    Reply
  • WigglyRebel
    manucanu said:
    Give some sugar to the article writer and his sheep so they can balance it with the sourness.

    While the ai generated games look horrible, similarly to first image generators, it will definitely improve and will cause chaos (copyright being the kickstart complaint), in this case game developers and hardware benchmarking. It will twist those industries just as it is doing with others, so I do understand the sour side of things.

    However ranting at it does nothing but to improve ignorance, and when things get advanced enough yall will find yourselves with the pants down.

    These AI can predict and generate frames.

    That's basically all it boils down to, so in order to remember what has happened they have to reference the frame(s) it happened on... Which means you need to store those frames. But you also need to store them in such a way that the correct frame(s) are referenced whenever the player decides to turn around after 10 minutes of looking in one direction or uses an action to teleport to somewhere they've been.

    Or to put it another way: What is the solution to the AI memory problem other than everyone having to have petabytes of memory?

    That's just one of the several issues that the technology doesn't exist to solve right now. I'm not concerned about AI games amounting to much any time soon.
    Reply