That's one of my favorite parts: that IS what they're going with. I'm sure the UI might get some changes here and there for better functionality (like right now the inventory screen has a lot of issues, that definitely needs some changes) but the aesthetics of the whole thing? Absolutely already there. Particularly since the UI is designed to be able to show all the AI art as you go, every item/character/object/location/anything gets its own generated image. Though again if your machine cant handle Stable Diffusion working on high settings, the resulting art that comes from it sure aint gonna look so good. Mine can take it, so I get the full effect. Some of the things it comes up with are amazing really.
Oh, that makes sense! I remember trying SD with just a basic frontend that somebody made and 500x500 images were taking like >5 minutes to generate! That made me realize pretty much immediately why most services aren't free, or why free tiers of things like leonardo AI are so limited!
Honestly the game's only real issue as I see it is that it really is so intricately linked to the AI, and not everyone will be able to pay for the connection with ChatGPT. The weaker the AI you are using (there's a bunch of options, with ChatGPT being the highest), the less coherent and stable the whole thing gets. If you're using the weakest option... generally the one that can just run on your GPU... it'll be completely insane and all this cool super-dynamic stuff just isnt going to work right because the AI simply wont be anywhere near smart enough to handle it.
Well the other problem is that it's still just early access. Gotta be able to be patient about glitches and wobbly incomplete features if you're going to play any early access game.
In that case I might have to watch some videos of it for now, but that's good to know! I would've probably preemptively pulled the trigger on it at some point and got super bummed out that things were either lackluster for me and / or much better for others without really putting it all together!
I tell ya, it's great when I'm playing Minecraft or Terraria or some game like those where normally I'd be making a million trips to the stupid wikis, now I just ask a question directly there and it tells me what I need to know, since it can just go over the wiki itself.
I've always had issues with this, too! In one of them (Junk Jack, a Terraria knockoff) you actually get penalized for using quick crafting, and get a few extra inventory slots if you just look up the recipes... but browsing through pages gets annoying and it would be so much easier to just have it all on command like that!
You know what would be a potential solution to slow SD loading times? Something that looks a little more like Caves of Qud / Dwarf Fortress, but with the guts of AI Roguelite. I feel like they could maybe scale it down even further for those of us who are working with burnt potatoes