AI Video Game Mods, Chinese Cars Take Over UK, Apple Tightens Mac Data Controls | Diet TBPN

John Coogan (0:02)

October is the hardest month in the road to Christmas.

Jordi Hays (0:06)

Totally.

John Coogan (0:06)

And it's because everyone is gonna be looking at you. We're so close. But there's a distraction.

Jordi Hays (0:11)

Both of you feel so far.

John Coogan (0:12)

But there's a distraction.

Jordi Hays (0:13)

And, yeah, you're right.

John Coogan (0:13)

Halloween, Halloween. If you go up to somebody and you say, hey, there's only 80 days till Christmas, they'll be like, why aren't you counting down the days to Halloween? They'll start looking at you like you're crazy. You're not crazy, they're crazy for thinking that it's not worth counting the days till Christmas in October.

There's only 80 days, get ready. Halloween is a speed bump on the way to Christmas.

Jordi Hays (0:34)

That's right.

John Coogan (0:34)

That's what I've always said. So keep counting down those days. Ignore the distractions.

Jordi Hays (0:39)

Or don't, but we will.

John Coogan (0:41)

Okay. Who wants to play these AI generated video game mods? Kotaku does not. They posted an article that said, I don't want to play your AI generated mod that puts Skate 3 inside Modern Warfare 2, inside of Minecraft. They don't want to play them.

Tyler, what do you think? Do you want to play these? Or did I have to force you?

Tyler (1:02)

I want to play these.

John Coogan (1:03)

You want to play them?

Tyler (1:03)

I'm actually playing it right now.

John Coogan (1:04)

Okay. Well, Tyler's playing one of these AI generated mods. And it's very interesting because we've seen a lot of these. We talked about them. We pulled up a random one that we actually did an Instagram reel of.

I think it was Minecraft in Elden Ring. I've never been a big Minecraft person, so it wasn't big for me. This is Tyler's playing Modern Warfare 2 in Minecraft, but what's actually going on here, Tyler? Explain, like, how did you get this installed? What is this?

Tyler (1:38)

Yeah.

So from my understanding, it's basically like, there's no, you're not really like putting one game into another. It's fully like a Rust engine and then you're pulling assets from both games and like kind of pulling them together somehow. So like I had to buy Modern Warfare 2 on Steam.

John Coogan (1:54)

Yeah.

Tyler (1:54)

It's using the actual game assets and the same thing for Minecraft. Like it's using the actual assets. It found them online.

John Coogan (1:59)

Interesting.

Tyler (2:00)

And I basically had Codex like set it up, wired up so I can run it on Mac.

John Coogan (2:03)

Yeah.

Tyler (2:03)

But it's like fully featured. Like I can, I can mine, I can build. You can build using the... Can you get a nuke? I don't know if I can get a kill streak.

John Coogan (2:11)

That's the question. I gotta figure it out. Kill streaks aren't in it, it's not more than Warfare 2 Yeah. It doesn't make any sense.

There are actually a whole bunch of different, different ways people are modding things. It's interesting because they're all getting sort of lumped together into one bucket, but they are very different. Like the classic, like the most approved or like company approved mod might just be something like there's a Fortnite skin and you get to, and I don't know if they actually did like a Batman skin or Spider-Man skin, but those skins come over, and it's just assets that fully live inside of Fortnite. There's no game code from any other game coming over. It's purely just, okay, the Fortnite game developers looked at what Spider-Man looks like. They made a Fortnite model out of the Spider-Man character, and then you can play as them and everything is integrated fully. You're not going to risk changing any game files. It's fully approved by corporate. Now, these go a step further and run the gamut of different techniques. Some of them that you have seen, some of these mods actually are just the old ways.

Tyler (3:14)

Yeah, I'm playing.

Jordi Hays (3:15)

Could you try swimming?

Tyler (3:17)

Yeah, swimming is a little bit broken.

John Coogan (3:20)

And that's the nature of the vibe-coded slops.

Jordi Hays (3:23)

Oh, it's over for you.

John Coogan (3:24)

Yeah. Are you drowning, though?

Tyler (3:26)

I don't think so. I'm just basically walking as if there was no water.

John Coogan (3:29)

There's no, yeah. The mechanic is... Because, yeah, I think your health is being moderated by Modern Warfare 2, whereas Minecraft is just the geometry that you're around. I don't know.

Some of them are the old way of modifying, just bringing game assets into the actual game. None of the actual code is running. Others are actually merging two games. For that Mario in Elden Ring video that we saw the other day, the mod actually borrows a subsystem called LibSM64, which is derived from a Super Mario 64 decompilation. So what they'll do is they'll...