Scientists make Doom playable inside AI engine

A team of Google researchers has created an AI-based game engine that can generate a real-time playable version of Doom.

Every day, modders and clever engineers alike find new ways to play Doom or anything but the original hardware. Even gut bacteria and some of the more questionable electronic gadgets can run the legendary shooter.

So an AI-driven game engine seems like the natural next step. The engine, known as GameNGen, was developed by scientists using a “diffusion model”, somewhat similar to Stable Diffusion.

Scientists Dani Valevski, Yaniv Leviathan, Moab Arar, and Shlomi Fruchter were able to use their AI-driven engine to simulate Doom in real-time without relying on manually written game software.

Typically, game engines, like id Tech 1 used in the original creation of Doom (also known as the Doom engine) depend on a wealth of code to run.

GenNGen, however, is powered entirely by “a neural model that enables real-time interaction with a complex environment over long trajectories at high quality.”

This model works by generating new frames in the simulated environment, based on the input of the player and previous processed frames.

To gather the data needed for GameNGen to accurately run its own version of Doom, the scientists used an AI agent to play classic Doom at every difficulty.

This meant GameNGen could simulate a range of different player skill levels.

When playing Doom, actions like finishing levels were rewarded. Meanwhile, receiving damage and dying were punished.

This resulted in AI agents that could play the game and provide a wealth of training data for GameNGen.

GameNGen

According to the team’s published paper, the scientists were able to run Doom at an impressive 20 FPS and produce a visual quality “comparable to that of the original game.”

The GameNGen version of Doom was even able to keep track of the remaining health and ammo, as well as keep a tally of game state updates like attacked enemies and damaged objects.

But, don’t expect an AI to generate and play any modern titles any time soon: Getting Doom up and running was hard enough, so it’s difficult to think how AI could “generate” experiences like Baldur’s Gate 3, or Elden Ring.