DOOM, the 1993 first-person shooter that can run on pretty much anything from a lawnmower to a Windows terminal, has reached the logical next step in its evolution — generated by AI. Thanks to Google’s AI GameNGen, it is now possible to play the game in real-time as it’s being generated by AI. What a time to be alive.
And you thought AI was DOOMed?
GameNGen is the first video game engine “powered entirely by a neural model that enables real-time interaction with a complex environment over long trajectories at high quality,” according to the abstract on its GitHub page.
While the engine can simulate an interactive version of the game, an impressive feat to be fair, playing said simulation is limited to between 20-30 frames per second running on one of Google’s Tensor processing units (TPU).
The process happens in two phases. First, something called a Reinforcement learning (RL) agent takes a crack at playing the game, learning how to dodge projectiles, slay demons, and interact with the environment. Those sessions are used to train a diffusion model which can generate frames based on past frames and actions.
The resulting generated game obviously can’t hold a candle to the impressive visuals of the last couple DOOM games, not to mention the ray-traced version of the original. But considering a model is generating what you see and it’s functionally playable is still impressive in our books.