Neural emotion matrix for NPCs
Hey! I built this system to humanize NPCs by giving them emotions using Rust and ML. The system provides emotion coordinates (based on Russell's circumplex model) from text input or actions, with persistent emotional memory per entity. Think NPCs that remember how they feel about specific players or events. I pre-trained a DistilBERT model on ~1k video game dialogues (Skyrim, Cyberpunk, etc.) and plan to extract and evaluate 100k+ dialogues soon. However studio/team can manually add dialogues to enrich their own dataset. The matrix doesn't generate dialogue, it only analyzes content.…
Neural emotion matrix for NPCs launched on September 29, 2025 with 48 votes, #444 of 8,160 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
Neural Emotion Matrix for NPCs is a Rust-based system that analyzes text and actions to assign emotional states to video game characters. Built using DistilBERT machine learning, it maps emotions onto Russell's circumplex model, tracking valence and arousal levels while maintaining persistent emotional memory per NPC. The system is designed for game developers and studios seeking to create characters with consistent emotional responses to player interactions and events. It analyzes content rather than generating dialogue, and teams can add their own training data to customize emotional recognition.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Emotional intelligence for NPCs . Contribute to mavdol/npc-neural-affect-matrix development by creating an account on GitHub.
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey! I built this system to humanize NPCs by giving them emotions using Rust and ML. The system provides emotion coordinates (based on Russell's circumplex model) from text input or actions, with persistent emotional memory per entity. Think NPCs that remember how they feel about specific players or events. I…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
I ran a language model on a PS2Mar 2026 · github.com · ▲46The Emotion Engine has 32 MB of RAM total, so the trick is streaming weights from CD-ROM one matrix at a time during the forward pass — only activations, KV cache and embeddings live in RAM. This means models bigger than the RAM can still run, they just read more from disc. Had to build a custom quantized format (PSNT), hack endianness, write a tokenizer pipeline, and most of the PS2 SDK from scratch (releasing that separately). The model itself is also custom — a 10M param Llama-style architecture I trained specifically for this. And it works. On real hardware.
Noctie – A chess AI that predicts your rating2022 · noctie.ai · ▲134I built over the last two years a human-like neural network chess engine that tries to predict your rating from a single game. It automatically adapts to your play and tries to play like a human at your level would play, giving you a balanced game. At the core I’m using an AlphaZero / Leela Chess Zero style neural network that I have trained on 1 billion human games from the lichess.org open database. Around this network I have built a chess engine in Rust with algorithms that use the outputs from the NN to produce human-like moves at a given rating from beginner to world champion, as…
More ai this month
the category →
Paintings by AI models: programs run through a simulation of oil paint.
AI · 20d ago · stillwet.art
PixVerse R2▲381A real-time world model you can explore and change
AI · 29d ago · world.pixverse.video
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, September 2025
the whole month →
The site hit #1 on HN about a year ago. Got enough traffic that I turned it into a proper API. What's there: - REST API — 35k products, manually filterable by category, free key, 60 req/min - CLI — npx anycrap random -c food - faker.js plugin — bundled, no API call, works offline - HuggingFace dataset — full 35k rows for ML/training https://anycrap.shop/developers
AI · 2025 · anycrap.shop
I made a built-from scratch Wayland Compositor to display any GUI app* in the terminal! I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in custom Wayland compositors, a lot of really cool things you can embed existing applications into! So, I started with embedding apps into the terminal because that is the easiest input/output (output is just utf-8 and I use the great `chafa` library for that, and I just read from stdin for the input). If you have any other ideas for cool Wayland compositors, let me know. I purposedly wrote 80% the app in Typescript to appeal to the most developers and…
Dev tools · 2025 · github.com
- IR
Years ago I stumbled across a basic version of this concept and it stuck with me. I knew if I was ever going to take on such a project, it would need to be flawless, but without coding experience it was just another idea that would never happen. By the end of 2024, as AI coding tools exploded everywhere, I finally had a way to make it real. I started from zero knowledge and spent months collaborating with AI agents as a learning experience. Every pixel and every function went through me. The AI translated what I asked for into code, but every decision was human. I didn't use existing OS…
AI · 2025 · mitchivin.com
