Thanjavur in Fable

Peter Gostev of arena.ai shared his experiences generating 3d worlds today. I highly recommend you to watch this. Granted, most of these are voxel art but some of these were quite mindblowing. For e.g., the water texture especially in some of those generations was quite accurate. I also personally enjoyed the Mt. Vesuvius/Pompei recreation - I fondly remembered being obsessed with knowing about this when I was young.

As a thought experiment, I wanted to understand if Fable would know anything about Thanjavur and chola-era customs and sure enough it knows about the Brihadeeswara Temple and of course it would have this in its training data as images or articles from the Internet.

My plan here was relatively simple. I first asked Sonnet 5 to draft me a spec.

Help me devise a prompt for Fable 5 to build the thanjavur from the time of Raja Raja Cholan.

Ok to use voxel architectures but prominent ones like the big temple, other minor temples, city buildings, palaces should be accurate

be generous about people, market and a bustling economy

as a secret mode, have a toggle to turn on tunnel mode where evertything fades to show an intricate set of tunnels underground connecting several important buildings and leading out of the city

we'll be building this in three.js

quiz me for more details as you build this prompt

Sonnet had a few questions for me around camera orientation, scale, tunnel mode visualization, audio, economy/population etc. I asked it to use reasonable defaults and here’s the full spec.

What was interesting is observing the cycle of events that Fable had generated. There was a decent cycle of events through the day - morning, afternoon, evening rituatls; processions around the perimeter; activity in the market area etc. The sound was pretty good too - reminded me a lot of Cities Skylines with amplitude proportional to the zoom factor and different sounds getting interspersed.

Here’re some images.

The full temple complex

The entrance to the temple

A cute little elephant

Of course, there were bugs that I prompted a few times to fix - specifically around the sound, tunnels not showing up. It was also interesting that Sonnet correctly mentioned that the palace of Rajaraja Cholan was never archaeologically found but it was willing to take liberty to place it within the city perimeter. The city was also too grid-oriented for my liking - ancient Indian cities were planned to an extent but this was too perfect. And there are errors where occasionally, the carts and elephants would start walking backwards. I didn’t bother to fix this since it brought out a chuckle! :)

This opens up a great possibility for building microworlds with LLMs. I can imagine a world where students can prompt an LLM to build a low-fidelity environment to understand a historical occurence or even complex objects like an organ and all its blood vessels as an example. Of course, this might not be perfect but so is a mnemonic.

Overall, this was a fun little experiment and I’m pretty sure with more focused tunings, this could be better.

And here’s the full rendered output.