A Brief History of Infinite Worlds

As soon as ChatGPT was released I spent lots of time trying to get choose-your-own-adventure style games working on it. At first it was mind-blowingly good, but over time it became frustrating as the AI would constantly forget what was happening.

With the release of GPT-4-turbo it became possible to build good quality, long-lasting stories, and since November 2023 I have been working and iterating on a system to get the very best out of the latest AIs.

-- Friendly Fox

The Early Days

This was a dark time, when people thought that Tiger (GPT-4o) was good.

The Wildcat era

From late 2024 through to early 2025, the dominant models on IW were Wildcat and similar models such as Gryphon.

08/2024 - Wildcat added

09/2024 - Flux.1 available

10/2024 - Tracked items are added - a pretty major feature! At this point in time, tracked items were handled by a separate call to Wildcat. This meant that tracked item updates didn't "see" as much of the story as the regular turn-writing AI call did, and they could get out of sync.

The Brief Reign of Ocelot

26/01/2025 - Ocelot

Late January, Ocelot (DeepSeek R1) became available on IW. This marked a turning point in LLM capabilities; Ocelot was a significant step up from Wildcat and Wildcat-like models. It tended to write longer turns, with much better descriptive text. Perhaps more significantly, it also seemed to be more proactive, where Wildcat tends to wait for the player to drive everything. Furthermore, Ocelot never seemed to repeat itself in the degenerate way which older models did (sometimes literally writing out the same text word for word).

After a little while, Ocelot's flaws became apparent. It had a tendency to write inappropriately dark or violent content, and various adjustments were made to its base prompt to try and curb this. It was zanier than older models, seeming to introduce more unexpected elements, which could be a pro but also a con. It also often wrote turns that didn't make a lot of sense, particularly conversations, typically in a fairly subtle way (they sounded good, but the logic was flawed).

New models were soon on the horizon, and Ocelot was quickly relegated to a niche option before being retired. However its introduction could be seen as the transition from Wildcat-class models to Lion-class models.

02/2025 - Shishi added to IW - Shishi was like Ocelot but not insane.

Lion and Friends

26/02/2025 - Lion added

Late Feb 2025, Lion (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) came along. Lion was pretty great, and definitely better than Ocelot, though it was obsessed with conspiracies. There was an older model called Lion back in the Bad Old Days - not the same thing! Lion marked another turning point; like Ocelot, it wrote better than Wildcat, was more proactive, and didn't repeat itself or get into degenerate states so much. It was also more expensive, but it nevertheless quickly became the majority model and was eventually set as IW's default (replacing Wildcat).

10/04/2025 - Leopard (Gemini 2.5 Pro), Panther (OG Panther, Grok3), Gwampus/Grimalkin and Wampus were added - though this earlier version of Panther was not terribly popular, it and Leopard were aiming at the same quality/price point as Lion. Gwampus, later renamed Grimalkin, a slightly cheaper model, was also added, along with Wampus (not the same as a previous Wampus!). Both were mysteries at the time but Grimalkin was soon revealed to be GPT4.1 whereas Wampus is something Ocelot-like.

Extra instruction blocks

13/03/2025 - Extra instruction blocks were added - a core feature that are now considered a staple of worldbuilding, allowing world editors to manipulate the world instructions via triggers far more easily than before (when the instructions could be replaced, but only all in one go, not in chunks).

Manticore and Wyvern Image Models

There had been no new image models for a long time, with the majority of IW users and worlds using Flux.1 and the other options largely deemed legacy options. The release of two new image models, codenamed Wyvern and Manticore, gave IW more choice. Despite pros and cons, these models were largely deemed improvements on Flux and many worlds were converted from Flux to Manticore.

Sabertooth, Smiloden and Stuff

Over time, yet more new models were added, Smiloden replacing Lion as the standard option and the other Claude family models (Lynx, Massivecat) soon joining the roster.

Major Functionality Updates

09/03/2026 - Tracked items updated to allow modification/addition to in-progress games and, significantly, new triggers were added to allow modification of tracked items (including names, update instructions and visibility). This gave games a plehtora of new options for using tracked items in creative ways.