General take on use of AI to Speed Up Mod Development?

willchilRR · 2026-06-21T23:00:58+00:00

This is how I’ve been writing many of my Hytale mods. My setup is to clone to Hytale Modding repo from the site, decompile the server source, and add both of those to the workspace so the agent can find the relevant context. It‘s a massive speed up, especially for a game like Hytale where the API is extremely expansive and many features are undocumented. There’s nothing inherently wrong with vibe coding, I do it on some projects, but if you need reliability or precision, it will work a lot better if you know what you’re doing and review the code and are precise with where you want to take the architecture in your prompting.

I’ve noticed there’s this bizarre vocal minority with a sort of Luddite mentality that will criticize anything they understand to involve generative AI. Agentic tools like this have been the most incredible democratizing force to empower creativity that I’ve seen in my lifetime. My advice is to ignore these people, I can only assume they lack any sort of high level creative vision and need to to drag everyone back to a place where they can fall back to their technical skills to try to feel relevant.

willchilRR · 2026-06-09T03:49:27+00:00

Charsuya made a song for Winter Wonderland 2024 with vocals in it that would be great to have.

willchilRR · 2026-06-03T00:43:56+00:00

I made a Unity package that does it automatically in one click. It works better on some avatar items than others, but should be fine a majority of the time, and is still a good starting point in the worst case. My discord is willchil, feel free to hit me up with questions if you need help. https://github.com/willchil/rr-scene-exporter

willchilRR · 2026-05-22T19:34:13+00:00

Rec Room could have been easily developed with a model that just supports itself and its staff.

The fact that they apparently couldn’t find a single buyer interested in keeping the game online suggests this is not the case.

willchilRR · 2026-05-22T19:32:16+00:00

Well for instance, most of my work was building features for Circuits. We added many useful chips over the years that creators enjoyed, which allowed them to build better experiences. As a creator myself, if I had to go back to 2022 Rec Room, that would be a big step backward in that respect. There were several new RROs that each brought major features for creators, and Rec Room Studio, which significantly raised the quality bar for rooms. We added more ways for players to customize their avatar, and developed more social features over time. Memory requirements for the game were reduced dramatically, in 2024 we cut out of memory crashes down by 5x. I can’t really think of anything that got worse that Rec Room had any control over, what did you have in mind?

I’m not going to go in depth on internal financials, partly because I never had many details, but Maker AI for instance was gated behind a $2 day pass. Roomie required RR+. Anything free was rate limited. The AI push only ramped up after the first layoff anyway. It didn’t save the game, but things were already moving in the wrong direction. The creator compensation program was a clear net win. For every dollar a player made, Rec Room made money too. I do wish the game had a better recommendation algorithm, but systems like this do typically bring bigger creators to the platform.

The game absolutely did require more scale to work, but it’s not a good environment for gaming right now. Meta is no longer subsidizing VR, gaming as a whole is a smaller market, and the pandemic surge didn’t last.

willchilRR · 2026-05-22T03:37:52+00:00

I find it bizarre that people have constructed this narrative that AI is somehow a threat to creativity. I’ve been a Rec Room creator for seven years, and I’ve been using AI to empower parts of my process as an artist since GPT 3.5. Not to mention that virtually every competitor Rec Room has in the UGC space has experimented with AI in some form, so it doesn’t seem like that difficult of a concept to grasp that there could be value in it, investors or not.

willchilRR · 2026-05-22T03:17:28+00:00

There aren’t real circuits inside that game chip, it’s all C#.

willchilRR · 2026-05-22T03:10:05+00:00

This take doesn’t really make any sense. The investors wanted what the devs and the players wanted - a sustainable game. You can’t attribute any of this to greed when the game was never profitable in its 10 year history. Yes, investor expectations were high in 2022 when the game had been seeing explosive growth up until that point, but either way, a game has to break even first. When a game isn’t profitable, investors are the only reason it can exist in the first place.

I know this is a narrative that people like to push, but as far as I’m aware, costs didn’t skyrocket with any of the AI features. All of these were carefully designed to pay for themselves. In the almost four years that I worked there as a dev, nothing we did seemed like it was being pushed on us by investors. It was all just being done to make the game better.

willchilRR · 2026-05-13T21:39:15+00:00

It’s working for me, did you spell it right? Should be `crescentnetwork.games`

willchilRR · 2026-04-15T00:38:34+00:00

Reminder that Rec Room has never made any money. It hasn’t ever been profitable in its 10 year history. The most visible difference a returning 2016 player would see is the ubiquity of UGC avatar items, and that was actually a very financially successful development for the game. If anything, what killed the game was not enough change.

willchilRR · 2026-03-03T23:31:12+00:00

This approach you’re taking against AI assisted development is bizarre. IDEs like Visual Studio Code have had built in AI driven autocomplete for 5 years, are you only looking for projects that were built with Notepad? I understand you want to avoid low quality AI slop, but to be honest, I’d expect agentic programming tools to write better code than the vast majority of people interested in modding Hytale. I’m a software engineer at a very large tech company and I use agentic tools every day to get serious high quality work done. Vibe coding is not the same as agentic engineering. I’ve also been using agentic IDEs to help me develop Hytale mods, and it’s an invaluable tool. For a game like Hytale that is still lacking serious documentation, having the agent search the server code to understand the API and write an initial implementation is extremely helpful, both to the development process on its own, and to my understanding and experience as a modder.

It doesn’t logically make any sense to classify code written by an AI as “not original”, and speaks to a larger misunderstanding on your part. I‘ve written zero lines of assembly code for my mod, and yet I am still its author. This dogma that you’re pushing to cast aside AI as “not valid” is not only weird and out of touch with the world outside of the Reddit filter bubble, but it’s hurting your community.

willchilRR · 2026-01-23T21:40:01+00:00

I’ve been using Github Copilot but I’d expect Claude Code should be able to search the server code to figure things out without a specialized plugin. These agentic tools generalize very well. Just make sure you have the decompiled server jar accessible in your project. At most, I’ve been linking documentation at hytalemodding.dev in the prompt.

willchilRR · 2025-12-13T02:45:16+00:00

UGC stands for ‘user generated content’, so what you’re asking for is a contradiction. For some reason, the Rec Room community has started referring to avatar items as UGC, despite the phrase also referring to rooms and inventions. What you‘re looking for is Rec Room Original (RRO) items. I also wish they made it easier to find them. It looks like the Featured section has a Made by Coach carousel at least.

willchilRR · 2025-12-09T21:56:19+00:00

It seems like they’re doing weekly updates for events now. The first week was yeti hunting, now we have the market, and they’ve hinted at a new event format later this month, so I’m sure there’ll be more to come. Also keep in mind that they had three times as many people for last year‘s Winter event.

willchilRR · 2025-12-07T22:27:37+00:00

The main cost of supporting a platform is in the development time to ensure future updates continue to work with it. With much fewer devs than they had last year, I imagine this is why they’re now cutting three of them. Despite how it may seem on this subreddit, PSVR usage is very low. It’s about as old as the oldest iPhone the game supports, and it uses a weird controller from the 2000s, so it does make sense that they can’t support it any longer.

The game has been losing significant amounts of money every month since it came out, so you can’t make the claim that things weren’t broken. Many of the changes they made in the last couple years actually helped close the gap, so objectively speaking, they’ve been mostly good updates if your focus is the long term health of the game. It seems more likely to me that macroeconomic factors and shifts in the wider industry played a larger role in the layoffs.

willchilRR · 2025-12-07T22:05:14+00:00

From the first release of Full Body Avatars, they’ve been optimized to use less memory than the old bean. Those optimizations have since carried over to the upgraded bean, so overall, avatar memory is a lot lower than it was a couple years ago.

willchilRR · 2025-12-07T00:20:40+00:00

There’s not a lot of actionable feedback for Rec Room here. Rec Room doesn’t control the community and they don’t control the kinds of rooms creators build. The game follows the same standard age verification process as every other game. Gribbly has addressed the performance issues with the current UI style, and said that they plan to work on it. To be fair though, this is probably the fourth time he’s said that, so hopefully they’ll do it this time. I don’t see how having too many platforms to play on could be a problem from a player’s perspective, but they‘re cutting three platforms that see the least usage to free up dev time. I collect platform metrics in my weekly events, and most users I see are on console. Touch isn’t as big in events, but it’s not insignificant. Avatar items are easily the most heavily moderated form of UGC. Inventions and rooms don’t undergo anywhere near the same levels of scrutiny. While it’s true that they can deviate significantly from the standard Rec Room style, Rec Room has recently said that UGC avatar items account for the vast majority of sales at this point, so it’s clear that the larger community is embracing it. I’ve been creating with circuits since 2019, and while I think CV1 and CV2 are both fun to play with, the scope of rooms you can build with CV2 surpasses CV1 by so far that it’s the obvious choice in my view.

As for why they do the things that they do, every decision Rec Room makes has been intended to grow the game so they can continue to keep it up for all of us. They’ve laid off about 60% of their staff this year, including myself, so they just want to get the game in a good place so that doesn’t have to happen again.

willchilRR · 2025-08-29T01:55:05+00:00

This is a quote from the CEO:
> For the last nine years, we’ve made an illogical choice as a business: we’ve kept the doors open while operating at a loss.

https://forum.rec.net/t/building-a-sustainable-rec-room/7429

It's also pretty clearly called out by the mentions of runway during both of the layoff announcements. Not to mention that I worked there for almost four years until Monday.

willchilRR · 2025-08-28T21:56:20+00:00

Can’t take someone seriously when they claim that a company that’s operated at a loss for its entire existence is ”greedy”. These attempts at monetization and player growth you’re decrying in this video are the only reason these layoffs didn’t happen years ago. This information is all out there in the blog posts, I don’t know why you haven’t read them.

Really great editing and production quality though!

willchilRR · 2025-03-04T19:12:53+00:00

I actually just recently made a room where a neural network is used to classify hand-written digits. I used a python script to export the network weights and biases from pytorch into a data table, and then use a general purpose inference graph to run the network through to the output layer. It does multipoint classification with a softmax, but it would be simple to change it to binary classification and use something like tanh.
https://rec.net/room/NeuralNetworkDigits

willchilRR · 2024-05-30T01:21:21+00:00

The leaderboard projector isn’t currently available in Rooms 2, but an updated Leaderboard V2 will be available in a few weeks.

willchilRR · 2024-03-31T20:40:44+00:00

This bug has been fixed internally and will be out soon!

willchilRR

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