So people are patiently waiting for the new text Gen model and I'm one of them, it's a good thing that the devs are taking their time with it, but there's an issue that has been plaguing ACC since day 1 and it's the inability to leave the character, you can't go anywhere else without them talking to you, even if you are absent. you could leave the tavern that they are in and go to Jupiter and the character will still talk to you as if you are still there, even if the model acknowledge that you are not with them, and you are like, 50 miles away from them, they will repeat phrases like "don't forget, we are a team, be safe and I will be here when you come back", "be quick, I will wait for you here" and "I will wait, but don't you forget about me!", even if the the character is dead, ACC will make it all about them, you can't just escape.
It's frustrating, I feel like ACC will receive a massive upgrade if it incorporated some elements from Ai RPG and Ai adventure, here's some examples (also double as suggestions):
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you can roam freely on while your companion(s) stay in their own residence/club/school of magic and you can visit them from time to time, if the setting is in the real world and you haven't talked to them in a while, you can get messages like "bro where are you? Haven't seen you in days! Are you alright?"
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Your companion aren't eternally bound to you and not invincible, they can get trapped somewhere for example and you need to find help from far away to get them out of their miserable situation.
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they can get caught by bandits and you have to track them down to get them back, a solo adventure until you get set them free.
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if you enter a cave or a dungeon and there's a forked path, you and your companion(s) can split to cover the entire area, continuing your exploration alone for a while until you group up with them.
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when the character is talking to you, you can see their portrait alongside their names like normal, but when you are on your own, without them physically around you, it changes to just text like Ai RPG/adventure, no names, no portraits (except yours) just a wall of text until you meet/interact with them. Let's say you made a character that's deep in some dungeon/cave and you are going on your way to meet them, there will be no interactions until you get to them, this builds tension and immersion.
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reserve emojis usage for mobile interactions, characters can use them only if they are messaging you through their smartphones/pc.
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(this one is complicated, could be very hard to implement but I'm throwing it out anyway) if you are in very dark dungeon and your companions are split throughout the place, you can hear commotion, grumbles, murmurs, groans, insults and cries, these ambient sounds could be anyone, your enemies, your friends, who knows? you don't know who is it for sure, if they are not far away, instead of receiving text only responses since you are on your own, the responses of the characters during their fights appears but their names and portraits are covered/blacked out, you are given subtle hints on who is it, like imagine seeing a response from "unknown" with a black/question mark portrait saying things like "have at thee! you hear the grunts of an old man and the clanging of swords" with the hints that are given, you know it's your paladin companion, but until you see them yourself or they announce themselves to you, their names and portraits are unknown/covered, Would be amazing in horror/mystery/thriller type adventures.
Now I'm not a programmer, I have no experience with Ai or LLMs, I'm just a casual ACC user and have been using it for over a year now, my questions are: how hard it is for those suggestions to be implemented? Is it going to be difficult, take a ton of time to or borderline impossible to work on? With few of these suggestions implemented (or potentially, all of them) perchance's ACC would topple the competition and would see a traffic surge, just like the traffic pump with the image Gen update, since it fixes many, if not all the issues with ACC, keep in mind, this isn't my demand list, just a couple of suggestions to iron out the quirks and issues that ACC is known for and give it QoL features that will elevate immersion and roleplay.
So, essentially removing the AI from the conversation temporarily. One method of doing this is to remove the ‘auto reply’ of the AIs, then use the ‘narrator’ or other ‘narrator character’ that you have to continue the story.
This can also probably be done with custom code, in which you might have a ‘code word’ that would have your messages not expect a reply, removing the AI temporarily. IIRC you can’t have the ‘system’ or ‘narrator’ auto reply. So those functions are only manual.
You could have a custom code that tracks the number of messages sent after removing yourself from the scene, then have the AI push a 'how are you' message.
The solution above, where you wouldn’t expect the AI to reply to you may be used to enforce this.
You can also probably have a custom code to have your messages (and the narrator’s) hidden from the AI so that they wouldn’t know what transpired outside of their perception.
Best way to do multiple stories at once is also probably duplicating the thread, but of course the story would be separated from each other, so you would have to integrate each of their stories into the main thread. Hard to do this in a main thread since it can easily derail the past from the present.
You can use the message rendering custom code to remove those and use the ‘flags’ and statuses talked above. You can also make a custom keyword or command to return the portraits automatically.
Sadly if you are using multiple characters, they wouldn’t auto reply. Auto-reply only works for the main thread character, and you also can’t use the custom code to have the invited characters reply. You have to manually have them reply (at least of the original ACC, some other forks have auto-replying bots and I don’t know how they work).
Can probably just have a section in the General Writing Instructions to remove this.
For portrait blocking out, you can use the message rendering pipeline custom code to use a temporary avatar for the ‘unknown’ character. But it might be hard to enforce to the AI replying that they are currently unknown to the person they are replying to.
You could also probably have a custom code to rotate/change the role instruction of the Narrator Character to differentiate between the scenarios i.e. you are currently solo, there is a time limit, etc.
Hello VioneT, Thank you for your input! I appreciate the reply, I don't know if my post was misunderstood or I'm missing something, because these examples/suggestions weren’t requests for workaround/fixes/techniques for the current model, I'm aware of its limitations and quirks, I'm simply proposing a native support for the listed suggestions into the upcoming gen text model and inquire about the feasibility of their implementation without a hassle for the devs, as implementing them would enhance RP potential and give the user general QoL improvements, not to manually patch current model with codes, workarounds and janky micromanagement, because they make using ACC annoying, feels like a chore and ruin immersion (I already use many techniques and fixes, I've gained experience because I use it so much, I even discovered some myself, also user feedback in the subreddit and trial & errors, so far many of them are hit or miss, some doesn't work, some work when they feel like it, others work but lobotomise the bot beyond belief and others demand constant micromanagement, you can imagine how much of a chore that can be. I will be completely honest, I've never used codes in ACC because 1) I have zero experience with coding 2) codes provided by chatgpt and deepseek are ass and brick the bots that I make 3) i don't want beg and nag for codes from users, that why I made this post, to see if the suggested fixes can be implemented or not. If the next Gen update made the Ai in ACC smarter but still retain all of its issues and quirks, then the update won't do it justice. The main goal of the post is to give insights about the possibility of improving AI behaviors and changing them for the better, without user-side fixes, codes and workarounds, it's about what can be natively implemented.
I haven't misunderstood your post, and I'm just giving my ideas on how to implement some of them by utilizing the custom code feature. Having those natively implemented would be the best, but in case it isn't, there are still ways to 'implement' it ourselves. We can even create our own fork of the page and implement them natively although there might be a lot of finicking around the current code (some of examples of forks are: TPS Group Chat that allows other characters to auto reply and Petrafied ACC further fork of the TPS Group Chat and gives approximate number of tokens that your Role Instruction would add to the context length, for multiple characters).
I can't speak for the Dev (so I'll ping them) on how hard these would be to implement natively, but I would think that this would be implemented on the 'thread' level of the chat (at least if I would create a custom code, it would be stored there). The statuses (away from/with character, avatar/portrait states) would be stored on the thread and there would be triggers (maybe through keywords) that would replace those statuses and also automatically set if the character would auto-reply to the messages or the narrator. There would still be a lot of 'micro-managing' with the increase of additional factors. You would have to 'set up' the unknown character(s), how you would meet the new character, how frequent would the character be sending the 'how are you' messages, how the story progresses outside of the user's view, etc.
Just to clarify, 'model' refers to the AI model that we use that generates the responses. 'ACC' or 'AI Character Chat' is the user interface or page that use the 'model'. Using custom codes usually modifies the 'ACC' and not the 'model', so essentially, we're 'modding' the user interface.
A new 'model' would make the AI smarter, as long as the 'context length' would be increased (since the AI would have more context for its next response/replies) but the longer the chat goes, the more it also takes up the 'context length' and will degrade over time.
Ok now I get what you're saying, I just wanted to clarify myself in case something was misunderstood.
It kinda suck that we would still need to micromanage stuff, but it is what it is, it's not all sunshine and rainbows, but in my opinion, if ACC is to move past the flawed sandbox that it is now and move toward something that eclipses AI Dungeon and other ai chatbots, it needs core overhaul for stuff like absence, tension, disconnection, and character state awareness, because treating all characters as omnipresent, immortal and clingy conjoined twin gets old really fast as you try to do something alone in the story (the narrator doesn't help).
I hope the devs will give their insights on the matter.