"But discovering the addresses was only half the problem. When you talk to a villager in Animal Crossing, the game normally displays dialogue instantly. Calling an AI model over the Internet takes several seconds. Willison examined the code and found Fonseca's solution: a watch_dialogue() function that polls memory 10 times per second. When it detects a conversation starting, it immediately writes placeholder text: three dots with hidden pause commands between them, followed by a "Press A to continue" prompt."
"Initially, he tried using a single AI model to handle both creative writing and technical formatting. "The results were a mess," he notes. "The AI was trying to be a creative writer and a technical programmer simultaneously and was bad at both." The solution: split the work between two models. A Writer AI creates dialogue using character sheets scraped from the Animal Crossing fan wiki. A Director AI then adds technical elem"
Developers located in-memory addresses for Animal Crossing dialogue and solved latency by using a watch_dialogue() function that polls memory ten times per second. When a conversation begins, the mod inserts placeholder text—three dots with hidden pause commands—and a "Press A to continue" prompt to bridge AI response delay. The mod then requests an AI model and translates the response into the game's encoded dialog format. The game uses control codes with a prefix byte 0x7F; missing proper end-of-conversation codes causes the game to hang. The decompilation community documented these codes, enabling encoder/decoder tools. Two separate AIs handle creative writing and technical formatting.
Read at Ars Technica
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