[CakeMix: AI Companions] - Make your own characters and live out your fantasies

Projects
, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
61

I have a VR headset I have not used since 2022 or 2023 and steamVR installed and uh oculus something or other installed but since I haven’t used them in many years I have no idea what they’re doing if anything, they’ve never interfered before. Is there a force flag for ignoring VR I could add to the shortcut?

The X drive is a normal drive, it’s just something I got used to using over say E when I was young and kept the habit.

I should also mention in order to generate the log file I appear to have to use the task manager to kill the cakemix demo process. But the process is doing nothing…

It’s just stuck like this, and no window appears to indicate it’s trying to do anything.

image

I got the force flag copy pasted into the right place but it had no effect.

Mono path[0] = ‘X:/CakeMix_Demo_1.2.0/cakemix_demo_Data/Managed’
Mono config path = ‘X:/CakeMix_Demo_1.2.0/MonoBleedingEdge/etc’
Input System module state changed to: Initialized.
[PhysX] Initialized MultithreadedTaskDispatcher with 16 workers.
Initialize engine version: 2022.3.62f2 (7670c08855a9)
[Subsystems] Discovering subsystems at path X:/CakeMix_Demo_1.2.0/cakemix_demo_Data/UnitySubsystems
[Subsystems] No descriptors matched for examples in UnitySubsystems/UnityOpenXR/UnitySubsystemsManifest.json.
[Subsystems] 1 ‘inputs’ descriptors matched in UnitySubsystems/UnityOpenXR/UnitySubsystemsManifest.json
[Subsystems] 1 ‘displays’ descriptors matched in UnitySubsystems/UnityOpenXR/UnitySubsystemsManifest.json
[Subsystems] No descriptors matched for meshings in UnitySubsystems/UnityOpenXR/UnitySubsystemsManifest.json.
Forcing GfxDevice: Direct3D 11
GfxDevice: creating device client; threaded=1; jobified=1

EDIT: redownloading did not change anything.

62

There’s currently no way to save your place in a story; each one is a standalone thing. With that said, I’ve been working on a way to do it, so if I can get it working well then it will be in a future update.

63

Very interesting. I’m honestly not sure why it’s not running, then. There have been hundreds of downloads and no reports of this specific issue, so it’s a stumper. I’m going to dive in deeper and see what I can come up with. If I find a possible solution I’ll put it in the next demo. The only thing I can think of at the moment is that it may have -something- to do with the OpenXR settings.

I assume that you are able to play other modern games and that CakeMix is the only one giving trouble. Have you had any issues running any other games lately?

Also, you didn’t mention whether you were using up to date NVidia drivers. If not, that could be causing the issue. Anyway I’m looking into it and I appreciate you taking the time to let me know the details of the problem.

One more thing to try. In the data folder where those logs and all that are, there is a file called cakemix.ini. Open that in a text editor and change numGPULayers=x to numGPULayers=20

If it was some other number, please let me know. I did actually add a thing to this version where that number is getting set automatically, and it’s possible that it’s getting it wrong.

64

okay than how will I be able to see the weight gain progress of companions?

65

If you mean when using weight gain over time… every time you load the character in, she’ll have gained weight, in real time. So if she gains X pounds per week, then it will add up each day, so if you load her in a few days after saving her, she’ll have gained that much weight.

If you’re wanting her to gain weight more quickly, during a story, you can go to the Character Creator using the little button that appears when it’s your turn to type, then change her weight in there with sliders. When you go back to the story it will know she’s gained weight.

In a new update I’m putting out soon there will be an easier way to gain weight instantly during stories. I mostly focused on weight over real time since that’s what the poll I posted indicated was most wanted, but I’m also putting in the instant gain for this next update.

1 Like
66

cakemix.ini did not exist, could you post the entire contents of it and I will create it? Other games work, and I have up to date drivers but they’re studio not game ready, aka early January not late January. I find that typically studio drivers are less buggy than game ready drivers though unless a triple A game JUST came out that week and you want to play it.

67

Ah, yeah it won’t create the cakemix.ini file if the game hasn’t started. But I do see something in your post…

It could very well be that you’re using a Studio driver and not a game-ready driver. Studio drivers are optimized for apps like Photoshop, Blender, etc., not necessarily games. I have a feeling that is the issue right there. Are you able to play any modern games without trouble? Even so, CakeMix/Unity might just not work with a Studio driver.

If you can I would uninstall the Studio driver and do a full clean install of game ready drivers. That’s assuming it’s important enough for you wanting to try CakeMix. If not, no problem, but I imagine that the driver is the issue.

68

I am willing to try that but you’re entirely wrong about what a studio driver is. Game ready drivers are betas for studio drivers and studio drivers are identical to the game ready driver that Nvidia considers most stable from the past month.

Hence the only reason to use game ready drivers is to play games newer than january6th which I haven’t done. But I’ve run plenty of triple a 3d gpu intensive games from 2025 on a regular basis. Without issue.

But maybe your game somehow just does count as a newer than January 6th despite it looking like a lot of your unity files are quite a bit older than that.

tldr: will do. Doubt it will work. Still desiring a cakemix.ini file I can try to plug in maybe the step it is failing on is related to the ini somehow?

69

Regarding the cakemix.ini file, there’s no need as the game isn’t starting at all. If it starts, it will create that file.

Regarding drivers: I might be somewhat wrong regarding the full details of Studio drivers, but I don’t believe I am “entirely wrong”. From what I understand, Studio drivers are meant for creators, and game-ready drivers are meant for gamers. Yes, you can use either, but there is a difference. They’re not the same.

So my thought is that it’s very possible that the Studio driver is causing the issue. I can’t guarantee that, but this is the only report of the game not starting at all, and there are reports online with Unity games having issues with Studio drivers.

“But maybe your game somehow just does count as a newer than January 6th despite it looking like a lot of your unity files are quite a bit older than that.”

Yes, the demo just came out the other day. The way Unity games work is that some of the files in the build are older, but the build itself is newer.

Are you able to run other modern Unity games, with those drivers installed?

From the NVidia FAQ:

What is the NVIDIA Studio Driver?

…
NVIDIA Studio Drivers are drivers that are specially designed for creators. They are released on a regular, longer cadence that matches major app launches, typically every month. This way your PC is ready every time your favorite app updates, but your work is not disrupted often. These drivers are extensively tested against the top creative apps to ensure that your system won’t have any issues. New updates unlock performance boosts and sometimes new features in creative apps, providing artists, creators and 3D developers the best performance and reliability.

How do Studio Drivers differ from Game Ready Drivers (GRD)?
In 2014, NVIDIA created the Game Ready Driver program to provide the best day-0 gaming experience. In order to accomplish this, the release cadence for Game Ready Drivers is driven by the release of major new game content giving our driver team as much time as possible to work on a given title. In similar fashion, NVIDIA now offers the Studio Driver program.

Designed to provide the ultimate in functionality and stability for creative applications, Studio Drivers provide extensive testing against top creative applications and workflows for the best performance possible, and support any major creative app updates to ensure that you are ready to update any apps on Day 1.

I am both a gamer and a creator. Which driver should I install?
All NVIDIA drivers provide full features and application support for top games and creative applications.

  • If you are a gamer who prioritizes day of launch support for the latest games, patches, and DLCs, choose Game Ready Drivers.

  • If you are a content creator who prioritizes stability and quality for creative workflows including video editing, animation, photography, graphic design, and live-streaming, choose Studio Drivers.

While you can only install one driver at a time, switching is easy! Within GeForce Experience, click the menu (three vertical dots in the top right corner) to reveal a toggle and select the driver of your choice.

70

I just put the older demo version up on CakeMix: Companions by ripened peach. If you want to try that one out and see if it works, that might help me to narrow down the problem.

Thanks!

71

1.1.1 same problem.

updated from studio to game ready and didn’t fix it…. something else must be wrong. I reckon the fact all my games launch via steam might mean steam is fixing whatever is wrong with my setup that makes this nonsteam unity game fail me?

EDIT: with no feedback and no clue, I am not sure I can do anything further, I installed the latest game ready driver and rebooted and the process simply does nothing, I haven’t run into this trouble before but it could easily be my fault, I do not typically do anything VR related, despite having installed some VR apps years ago.

The only similar app I can think to run that is not steam based is virt-a-mate which runs just fine (in desktop mode)

EDIT2: Maybe the fact I do not have a headset set up is causing the problem? (because I used to have a headset but I have not hooked it up in years…)

72

Yeah this one is difficult. Are you saying that you launch all games through Steam? Are you launching CakeMix that way? I do that for some games, but maybe CakeMix doesn’t work that way. If you are launching it through Steam, try just double clicking the exe file in the folder and see if that works.

In any case, I’m sorry that I can’t figure this one out. The video card isn’t initializing when the game tries to start, but that could be any number of things causing it. I’m working on new updates all the time so hopefully one will work for you in the future.

Thanks again for your reports.

73

No, I am not launching all games through steam, just steam games, which is most games :slight_smile: I mention this because you ask me if other modern games work, and they do, it’s just steam sometimes does something the first time you launch a new game, something over my head.

1 Like
74

How does the week gain work exactly

75

It’s weight gain over time in real time, meaning in real weeks she will gain weight. Make a character with that set, then wait a few days and load her in. She’ll have gained weight.

I’m currently adding in instant weight gain commands you can use during chat, so if you don’t want real time weight gain you can just do that instead (or in addition).

1 Like
76

After having spent more time on the newest free demo than I’d care to admit, I thought I’d drop some feedback. Please note, I believe some of the points I’ll bring up have already been discussed here, but I thought I’d record all of my notes for posterity anyway.

Also, I want to say that when it comes to something with “AI”, this is something I can respect - the LLM runs local and is there as an interactive medium for the user while the rest of it (GUI, models, etc.) is all man made. Kudos!

Now, for my (somewhat) organized thoughts.

Overall Thoughts:

  • I can’t lie - there are times where I’m actually impressed at the the prose and creativity of the LLM. It can be quite capable of creating some well described scenes and even organically introducing twists and story progression… until it isn’t (more on that later).
  • I was also surprised at how much variation I could get out of a scene. I got it do everything from magical instant gains to multi-month plotlines (which weren’t always perfectly successful, but still kind of worked).
  • The whole package itself is great - the models look good, the lighting tools are very slick, the custom scenarios you wrote are fun, and you’ve designed a very slick and informative user interface.
  • All in all, this is a step above most… heck, all chatbots I’ve interacted with (granted I haven’t messed with many since Cleverbot, but I digress)

The LLM:

  • I will call my various interaction with the LLM… frustratingly inconsistent. Sometimes it’s on a heater and sometimes it’s just rough.
  • One of these issues is what I call the AI getting “bored” (I’m sure there’s some technical term). This is where it writes this amazingly detailed series of scenes that frequently requiring a scroll to read and is interacting well with my responses… and then suddenly it refuses to give me anything more than a paragraph or 2, tops. It’s almost like it just wants this interaction to end.
  • I also would sometimes run into classic “Chatbot Dementia” where it would bring something up, I’d respond to that, and then it would act as if I just introduced that to the conversation. Kind of nostalgic tbh, I remember them always doing that.
  • I’ve also been driven insane by the AI having my character speak inside of its scene. This is totally fine on its own… but too many times it would end on my character saying something and waiting for the girl’s response! How do I interact with that? (I typically just hit enter or try to speak for the girl and that often works, but kind of clunky)
  • Just out of curiosity, was the LLM trained on soap operas? Because the amount of times it tried to shoehorn some random love rival or long lost relative just appearing out of thin air as we are half undressed made it feel like one (and not often in a good way, imo).
  • Also, it has a few particularly odd fixations: Truth or Dare (which it doesn’t understand the rules of and constantly changes), patience (which is demanded after they both initiated escalation and already have their tongue halfway down my virtual throat), and ice breaker questions (in the middle of a conversation).
  • Please note these are mostly the complaints for feedback purposes, but as I said before it is also capable of some solid story telling, too!

The Weight System/Demo Features:

  • So, I’ve seen some things on the new weight gaining system and the original vote. As a late comer, I didn’t vote on it, but I wonder if there is a disconnect on what people were looking for with ‘realistic gain’. Maybe I’m the odd one out, but I think people may mean they enjoy a story where the gain is spread out over multiple weeks/months and occurs at a natural rate like that as opposed to over real world time. So, the story’s time scale is long, but the gain could be faster in real time. Again, maybe that’s just my incorrect interpretation.
  • The system itself seems intriguing, but I haven’t had it downloaded long enough to see Maren change really at all, yet.
  • I’d also think it’d be great to have the in-scenario ability to change a character model’s weight like you mentioned you’re working on. It’d be even neater if you could get it to react organically to the story, but I’m sure that would be a herculean programming feat.
  • As someone who played around with having a scenario that involved the transformation of some features to be non-human, the Coffin Cake features do intrigue me.
  • On the subject of Maren (and the other downloads) - I completely understand you need to make money on what you’re doing, and I’m just a moocher (who due to life circumstances can’t be dropping cash on something like this rn), so you can throw the next few items out and I won’t be offended - but I do find it frustrating you get about 2 prompts before you get the “insert credit card” hard stop. They’re basically unplayable given how long it can sometimes take the LLM to get a good back and forth rolling.
  • I’d also love to be able to at least demo the character creator, even if that means limited customization options or just a limit of only 1 custom character or something. Just to get a peek under the hood to see how much I’m missing out on by being a tightwad.

Miscellaneous:

  • I’ve seen some other people have issues with the auto download of the LLM - I did too. My solution (and I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned) was that, somehow, my VPN was blocking the download in the background. When I booted up the game without my VPN on, everything worked as intended. So you may want to add that to your troubleshooting recommendations.
  • I appreciate the work you do to have so many great tool tips scattered throughout the GUI. Although, I would appreciate even more detail on how to manipulate the AI (like, what does OOC even mean?) or maybe some strong description on some of the setting you can manipulate in the backend file.

I think I captured most of the things I wanted to relay. Sorry for the yapping, but you seem like a dev who likes to get some feedback and I already put… too much time into this to not give you some.

8 Likes
77

Wow, thanks for the write-up. Much appreciated! I just released the latest update on Patreon and used some of your suggestions to tweak things. The demo will be out in a few days once I verify that there aren’t any bugs to iron out.

I’m always tweaking things in the background to improve the AI responses. They’re small LLMs so they do tend to do some weird things sometimes or get stuck in strange “moods”. You can also swap out the model pretty easily in Advanced Settings to try different ones out. They all have their quirks, but some are better than others.

I’ve added a fix to this new version that greatly reduces the tendency for the AI end a part in non-intuitive ways. So it should (fingers crossed) no longer leave people having to answer for the character, etc. As far as it speaking for the player during the story, I keep that in because it keeps the story moving forward. When I put in regular chat mode I’ll code that out.

The “soap opera” plot twists, lol. I reduced the number of times they happen in this new build, and more adventurous souls can change the frequency in cakemix.ini.

Truth or Dare! Yes, the default LLM definitely loves that game, and it also like to “play with fire” and “dance”. Quirks of the model. Changing out the LLMs is the fix for that. I’ve tried telling it in the background to NEVER say some things, but then like a brat it insists on saying them. A difficult balance.

Thanks for your thoughts about the weight gain over time thing. I started to wonder if it just didn’t make sense, and my wife said basically what you did, that it might be confused with weight gain over “game” time instead of “real” time. I left it in, but I also added weight gain/loss over chat time in this new build. So a lot more control.

I’ll be releasing the new demo in a few days and put some of this stuff in, as well as a bit more info to make things more clear. In the demo right now you can chat with official characters for as long as you like, but as you noticed, with custom characters there’s a cutoff point. The demo is more for just seeing if it works on your PC and getting a feel for the whole thing. I might increase the number of chat turns before the cutoff (or likely make it random), but I need to have some cutoff point in there to get people to support. As it is, I work full time on this right now, and still not making enough to actually justify it, so like everything else, it’s a balance.

Thanks for the heads-up about the VPN thing. That didn’t even occur to me. I added a note about it on the panel that pops up to download the LLM.

Again, thank you for taking the time to write out your thoughts. It really helps!

4 Likes
78

Oh yeah, that never works. You gotta find the things least compatible with what you don’t want, and encourage those. I think there’s a way to use advanced tools to sus out which neurons correspond or anti-correspond to the unwanted stuff, and bias those up or down. Look into Golden Gate Claude.

Definitely this. A lot of us want some vague sense of realism, but it’s all happening firmly within the realm of fiction, where time moves at whatever pace is most convenient for the reader. Having a 1:1 or even fixed relation between game time and real time, a kinda Tamagotchi thing, can be good, but it’s niche and you probably shouldn’t do it unless you’re sure it’ll pay off.

1 Like
79

I can only speak for myself, but I definitely was thinking of weight gain over in-game time, not real life time. So things like having events happen in the chat where you might not see the character for a while, only to see they’ve put on a few pounds when you next see them.

3 Likes
80

I’m glad I could be of help!

I know you have a couple others mentioned on your site somewhere - are there other models you recommend to? I’m just curious.

Sounds like your wife is a smart lady! Now if only I could convince Mrs. Feep I have good ideas, too…

I’m looking forward to giving it a whirl! And thanks for responding to my little quibbles of how my free ride isn’t free enough, haha. The content you offer for free is already very generous, so I completely do understand your need to keep some thing paywalled!

Again, I’m glad that all my ramblings are helpful - I try to offer as much as I can, in the original spirit of the forums! I love to see projects improve over time!

1 Like