[sixto]

One of the things that I think has always been a strength of Markus and OOTP has been an eagerness to be an early adopter. FaceGen being a great example of a new technology that was incorporated into the game early and in an innovative way. BABIP another, flawed though it may have been — that kind of adaptability is in OOTP's blood.

I believe the OOTP ethos will be an asset as AI makes its way into game development. Here are 9 ways that I think AI could be utilized in the very near future to take OOTP leaps and bounds beyond where it is today. Licensing costs for the technology not considered!

1. Logo and Uniform Creation. I'm guessing anyone who has played OOTP has dabbled with AI and logo creation. AI gets better at it every day, and I'm sure this will be a part of OOTP sooner rather than later.

2. Player photos and identities. AI (and many graphics engines) have advanced so far in this area. AI can not only create a face, but also readily create photo effects to make the image look the proper vintage. 19th century players in grainy black and white? 60s players in fuzzy color? What AI can do would have to be adapted to the OOTP game engine, but the possibilities are literally endless.

3. Ballparks. If you're like me you've also asked AI image generators to create baseball stadiums by now. Me, I like photorealistic, but you may want a ballpark in Mordor or on the edge of a waterfall. How long before what AI can do is merged with what OOTP can do? I'm guessing not as long as one might think. Create-a-Stadium is sort of stuck in neutral at the moment — no one has created new modules for use in the game. A whole new level of innovation might be the answer.

4. Player creation and development. Imagine being able to type into OOTP, "Create a new free agent, age 20, similar to Cal Ripken, but a catcher with a great arm, great framing and no speed." Training AI to convert instructions into player data should not be especially difficult. We'll have to be protected from ourselves of course so that we don't create impossible freaks of nature.

AI probably also already understands the way that players typically develop as well if not better than any human mind, having been fed all the statistics by now. There will be a time when games like OOTP don't have to rely on fragile algorithmic estimations of how players age. And give AI license to deviate from expectation a certain amount of the time, and watch out! AI will be able to create Brady Andersons and Jose Bautistas far more readily than any algorithm.

5. AI-generated sound effects. Crowd noise, the crack of the bat, the seventh-inning stretch. I realize that not that many people actually play games out one by one, which is a real shame — IMO, it's the most fun way to play. That said, the sounds are limited, repetitious, and at times, not quite appropriate for the situation. AI is already adept at creating ambient sounds. When this kind of technology is adopted into OOTP, it will become a mode of play that I think more people will feel compelled to explore.

6. Original radio broadcasts. Along the same theme: AI has presumably been trained at this point (legally or not so legally) on who knows how many baseball broadcasts. The nuts and bolts, the banter, even the promo spots — AI will be able to do them all, maybe can do them all already.

It's an ethical gray area whether to try to use AI to faithfully re-create the vocals of real life people, alive or dead. But as much as I would love to hear Vin Scully or Harry Kalas broadcast just one more game, I don't think that's necessarily the right road to go down. OOTP could instead use what AI knows about how announcers of different eras have sounded to create, or allow us to create, original baseball broadcasters that violate no IP laws nor tread indecently on anyone's memory, and enable us to listen to baseball games featuring whichever stars and teams we'd like to hear. This one is probably further down the road than the first five, but it's one to wish for, in my book.

7. AI. Lol, of course! AI will at some point, probably not too far from now, be integrated into the AI managers and general managers and owners of OOTP. Realistic dialogue with an AI GM about a trade you want to propose? It will happen some day. I don't know when. It's really exciting to think about, especially if you are old like me and have been playing baseball sims for almost 40 years.

8. News generation. AI can already write sports articles as well as just about any stringer. Adding the basics like game summaries would probably be fairly simple to implement. An all-out media ecosystem generating trade rumors, prospect scouting reports and feature stories custom made for each league market will be possible, but also potentially overwhelming. Still, AI has so much potential here, and in Football Manager for that matter, to really step up to incredible levels of detail and immersion.

9. Play results. What a chore it must have been to have to program into the game hundreds of different game outcomes and then program the game to illustrate those outcomes in a watchable way. And the method has limitations, like the game not always knowing or understanding how far away the fences are, or how that plays into park effects. But here comes AI, able to be given a 3D picture of a baseball stadium made up of thousands (millions?) of coordinates, and being tasked with figuring out where a pitched or batted ball will fly, how far it will go, how much humidity and wind affects it, and what it all looks like when it happens. AI could generate results that are exactly like the results of a real game. It isn't even about letting AI decide the actual outcomes — for a while, that may still need to be programmed by a human. But in terms of how that is rendered in the game engine, AI should be able to help sooner rather than later.

I could go on all day. Thanks for reading that much. Really excited to see how AI helps turn OOTP into the game of (beyond) our dreams.