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.
Some of these suggestions are related to the interface itself (ACC), not the model (AI) that runs on the server. Modding ACC's features are possible since the code is open for anyone to edit. The rest will be only significantly improved when the model is upgraded.
In my view, ACC is more of a generic platform to chat with the bots in several separate threads, not really one that is focused solely on being an RPG adventure (like AI RPG for example). Something like this might be a different goal than what ACC intends to be. An upgrade to AI RPG with these features would sound more appropriate, I believe.
That is why AI Dungeon is called that, it is focused on a specific type of AI roleplay and usage. ACC is a general chatting platform, and more advanced users have tools available to modify it to their use case, similar to SillyTavern, for example.
Most of the AI problems you mentioned have to do with the low context window (6k tokens) it has. It's not able to ingest that much information, so unless it is properly curated with what is happening, the AI will miss things and details. Many other models on the market have immense context windows, from 64k or 128k to 1 million (or so Google claims). Until the text model is upgraded, the best you can do is curate the information available to it (past messages, summaries, character descriptions and General Writing Instructions are the most important).
Now, about the AI issues, let's start with chars not leaving the scene. I faced this problem a lot more with narrator characters or using a single character. One thing to keep in mind is that the description of the main AI of the thread is always sent to the AI on every message. So, if you're having an actual character as the main AI, even if they left the scene, their description is always sent. This can cause the AI to keep referring to them, especially if their description is long.
I started using a narrator character (more of a "hub" character just to host common lorebooks and other things) and never posted as them, but with my main chars. This description was always sent to the AI and improved the narrative instead, but on very rare occasions it would still refer to them as "The Narrator".
Using multiple chars made this a lot more consistent, and the AI was able to read previous messages to better decide what was their status. Had a long 2v2 battle between chars, and once two of them died, they stayed dead, had no issues there. Make sure to always track your summaries and memories to avoid wrong information being fed to the AI.
I eventually found out multiple chars in the same thread causes all their descriptions to be sent (for the chars that posted on the last 20 messages), so this made the AI receive more information about them instead of it being only collected from previous messages or only occasionally retrieved if on the lorebook (which has a low limit of how many entries can be retrieved).
Perchance uses an old text model, curating the information, understanding its limitations, and knowing what information it's receiving helps improving you dealing with it better and improving your experience. You'll have to micromanage? Sure, but the AI is not magical, it has limitations that can become apparent after a while unless you work around them. There are several tricks available like using character injection or hidden system messages.
Eventually, I decided to code a script to adjust which char description was sent, so that I could conserve tokens and also better indicate that a character has left the immediate area. This solved the problem of chars being mistakenly referred to as if they were still around. It is available on my fork that VioneT posted, at the options bar on the bottom right.
Hello Petra, I appreciate the technical clarity you presented, yes I’m fully aware of the ACC vs. model distinction, and yes, I've aware about the multiple ACC forks that exist.
The issue is that ACC is being treated like a general chat app, something like c. ai, you can make an argument like "that's how it supposed to work" but we all know how it's being used by looking at the users, we can't ignore that 90-95% of the userbase are using it for narrative driven rp, lore rich stories and looong dramas, ACC have lore entries, instructions and reminder notes that enhance the characters beyond casual conversations with your OCs, if “ACC wasn’t made for that” then that defeats the purpose for its users, the original post was about the possibility of evolving/improving ACC during or after the text model update based on how it's being used by the majority of users, hitting two birds with one stone. I've seen countless RPs, slowburn stories, and interactive novels that are littering the subreddit and being shared among users, despite the limitations and quirks. I'm aware that ACC is limited and requires knowledge in coding, babysitting and whatnot to get the most of it and change its behaviours through added functionalities and features, yes, technically, ACC was not meant for that due to its limitations and the way it is, but in my opinion, the userbase defines utility, it needs to evolve.
A better model will marginally improve ACC since it lacks a sophisticated interface and the logic to compliment it, I've tried an Ai chat that uses LLama 3.3 70B (128k tokens) out of curiosity and the character still behaves exactly like the ones in ACC, no surround awareness, no Location-based dialogue and no dynamic presence, I was really deep in some dungeon and my dwarf companion that's waiting for me miles away at the entrance keep spouting things like "don't yee forget about me! I'm waiting for yee, me bottle of ale keep me company" and shit like that, despite the fact that the bot was clearly told to stay put and don't following me and the obvious distance between me and him, he still acts like an omnipresent entity, this proves that if the new model is used within the current limitations of ACC’s interface, the change will be minimal in this specific case.
It’s great that perchance has many talented people that are patient enough to make forks, introduce solutions, figure out fixes and share codes to make ACC more tolerable and user-friendly, but if we really need to have coding literacy, constant modifying through forks, manually fix everything, heavily depend on band-aid and DIY solutions, then perchance will stagnate and rot, it won't thrive at all, which will discourage new and old users from using it and seek alternatives if it didn't evolve, there's two things that's keeping perchance afloat: full creative freedom and limitless usability, unlike a more sophisticated but limited use tools like SillyTavern, which has plugins that fixes few issues currently present in ACC, many people stopped using ACC and are waiting for the new model, we both switched to SillyTavern, but the limited uses per day, countless issues and bugs (not related to the interface or models, it hates my phone and pc for some reason) really suffocated my playthrough/sessions.
Finally I want to make something very clear: I'm not criticizing, demanding or making a wishlist for the devs to fulfill and hand them back to me in a golden platter, I'm presenting couple of issues and suggestions from my experience as a long time perchance user, I can't complain about something that kept me entertained for countless hours and I really want perchance be the pinnacle of ai chat/adventure as many apps, websites and "games" are emerging with the same premise, each one keeps innovating and making claims and add lucrative features to entice users. I made this post to see if it's possible for the presented issues to be natively fixed on ACC, without shortsighted fixes and the usage of different forks. With all of that said, I'm really grateful for the help and tips from you and VioneT, I greatly appreciate that, the only thing we can do now is to wait and see how ACC deals with the new model.
I don't really have much to add since most of your suggestions are reasonable and valid.
One thing I must say is that in my experience, 90% to 95% of the user base actually uses ACC for NSFW and sexual stuff with their characters lmao, and not narrative driven RP with lore rich stories and long dramas. At least for most of discord and reddit this is what I see. Last one that wasn't was a user that had images and nice lore about a black ooze on Reddit. I even wished more people were interested in this sort of use for AI Chats as I'd be interested in sharing and reading stories, but it seems to be a rarity.
Still, without accurate data, we can only guess what people actually use it most for.
The image upgrade was much better than I was expecting, so at least we can be hopeful the new model will be just as good and provide good uses for both ACC and specific use cases like AI RPG (which also might need improvements to match ACC's features).
Well it looks like I underestimated perchance's goon squad, I'm not in perchance's discord neither do I visit nsfw tabs in ACC, but I do see many users share their OCs and real life video game and anime characters, some even share the lore/characters in the subreddit, the only nsfw stuff I see are posts on the subreddit, where users ask questions about the image Gen model and how to make celebrities, but you are right, Ai RPG does need some TLC, it looks like some obscure text app from 90s, if it received the changes it deserves then I feel like it will compete/compliment ACC.