Unreal Agent

ttrollied about 3 hours ago 47 commentsRead Article on unreallabs.ai

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https://github.com/unreallabsai/unreal-agent

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Discussion Sentiment

72% Positive

Analyzed from 1492 words in the discussion.

Discussion (47 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

dvt•about 1 hour ago

I think this space is very untapped. Models are interesting, but I am absolutely obsessed with some things I've been researching/working on for the past few years:

Fractal tool discovery: tool taxonomy where an agent can "drill deeper" to find what specific tool it's looking for. Helps if/when polluting context with a zillion (mostly unnecessary) tools.

Leveraging splay trees: this is my favorite data structure and I think relatively unused in the context of agents/harnesses. A lot of times, recently-used workflows/tool-chains will be used again, so having those at the top of the search hierarchy is an awesome optimization.

Virtual containerized notebooks: models working in sandboxed (WASI) Python notebooks is incredible. Even local models (if given enough time) will usually converge on a good solution. Being able to mount tools/resources/fs is again, imo quite untapped. Some problems here are running native things (thing numpy/pandas) in containers is a nightmare (or impossible).

Anyway, happy to see other folks seriously doing stuff in this space. If anyone wants to collaborate on anything don't hesitate to reach out :) I'm also actively looking for a job or some contract gigs.

Fun times ahead.

wyre•3 minutes ago

Fractal tool discovery is a fascinating idea! Have you worked on implimenting this into any agent harnesses already to any success? My first impression is allowing the agent to fork itself, not unlike launching a subagent, then returning it's response back to the main agent.

tracerbulletx•about 1 hour ago

What makes it fractal?

dvt•about 1 hour ago

It's kind of self-expanding/looping; fractal is just a cute name I like, but it's technically a directed cyclic graph (since you always have/want cycles).

mejutoco•14 minutes ago

I think recursive fits better, but I get it.

tekacs•about 2 hours ago

The headline graph is kind of bizarre.

For some reason they're comparing their harness running on Astra xhigh to Codex with Astra max?

---

Also worth noting that OpenAI just added support for async tool calling to their harness, which isn't 1:1 with this approach, but is slowly ramping up in being able to provide something similar.

A big part of why Codex uses so many tokens is that it basically hot loops on polling tasks it starts for... absolutely no good reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1wdlp7q/weve_discove...

I fixed it on my fork of Codex too, also back in Jan/Feb – I keep this patch rebased, for anyone who wants it: https://github.com/tekacs/codex/commit/9ffcf8db9078eae43d411...

It results in token savings similar in scale to those displayed here by Unreal.

---

My harness has used a slightly fancier version of the approach that Unreal is using since ~Feb, and... it definitely works excellently, but it's also assuredly smoother with Astra and other recent models that are more aware of async tool calling.

NostraDavid•about 1 hour ago

To reduce the codex polling I slapped this into my ~/.codex/config.toml:

  [features.multi_agent_v2]
  enabled = true
  wait_agent_enabled = true
  min_wait_timeout_ms = 10000 # 10s
  default_wait_timeout_ms = 300000 # 5m
  max_wait_timeout_ms = 3600000 # 1h

Seems to do the job and reduce usage; I just ran Astra for ~5 hours (using a goal) and it used the last 30% of my usage. And now they released GPT-6 Sol and Luna (which is basically 5.6 Sol and Luna, but a bit better and also 50% cheaper) ;_;

AmazingTurtle•about 1 hour ago

Perfect, I will incorporate this as default as well as the commit from the other guy into my own codex fork https://github.com/AmazingTurtle/codex btw. I'm rebasing on 0.156.0 right now

tontinton•8 minutes ago

Oh very nice, can you also compare it to https://maki.sh?

Would be interesting to compare to a harness optimizing for cost reduction too.

tapoxi•about 2 hours ago

Sounds like a trademark issue when Epic ships a wildly popular Unreal Engine

bryant•37 minutes ago

I had to scroll to the bottom to realize that this had absolutely nothing to do with Unreal Engine or Epic. There's no reason to think that Epic wouldn't have an "Unreal Labs" creating harnesses to help them with software engineering.

This plainly seems like a trademark issue in progress considering it's in the same exact domain and considering how many others were confused the way I probably was.

nosyke•34 minutes ago

yep, can confirm i was confused too

orliesaurus•about 2 hours ago

But I don't think you can trademark a generic word like Unreal...

neuronexmachina•about 2 hours ago

They've trademarked it for quite a few closely-related domains: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87709072&caseSearchType=U...

>Computer software, namely, game engine software for video game development and operation; Computer software, namely, software development tools for the creation of computer-generated imagery and graphics for the production of video games; Computer software, namely, software development tools for the creation of computer-generated imagery and graphics for the production of content for virtual worlds and 3D platforms; Computer software, namely, software development tools for the creation of computer-generated imagery and graphics for the production of motion pictures, television shows, videos, 3D animations, 3D simulations, 3D visualizations, virtual reality motion pictures, virtual reality television shows; Computer software, namely, software development tools for the creation of computer-generated imagery and graphics for the production of virtual reality video games; Virtual reality game software; Virtual reality software for creating multimedia content; Augmented reality game software; Augmented reality software for use in mobile devices for integrating electronic data with real world environments for the purposes of entertainment

willy_k•about 1 hour ago

Those do all seem directly tied to what Unreal Engine does i.e. graphics

mey•about 2 hours ago

Apple? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

ompogUe•about 1 hour ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi

llm_nerd•about 1 hour ago

Unreal is trademarked. This is not in question. And personally I 100% thought this was an agent specifically for dealing with the Unreal Engine, and was interpreting all of that information in that context. Very weird name for a company/product.

seanalltogether•about 1 hour ago

Same, I thought this was going to be a plugin for creating content in Unreal engine.

ramesh31•about 2 hours ago

>"But I don't think you can trademark a generic word like Unreal..."

Sure you can, trademarks are contextual. If they were a landscaping business it wouldn't matter. But within the same industry absolutely.

vblanco•37 minutes ago

In my projects i use unreal and me and my team have tested out multiple things. We have settled on no MCP complications whatsoever other than simply exposing the python scripting from the editor + a export step that can write the blueprints and asset data into plaintext so that the bot can grep them. This has given by far the strongest results, and we now have no issues having the agents edit game code and do operations.

We found this massively outperforms any kind of agent like this and the official unreal MCP systems. Its similar to the Blender MCP which also just exposes scripting + very minimal api to claude code/others.

gillesjacobs•14 minutes ago

OP is a coding agent and harness tool named Unreal, not the game engine by Epic.

joshstrange•42 minutes ago

If the frontier labs (well, I guess just Anthropic) would go full OAuth support even on a subscription we would see, an even bigger, explosion in harness improvements. I maintain that there is a ton of low-hanging fruit and new ideas/concepts that should be tried but the costs are holding people back (using API pricing only).

It's both expensive to test alternative harnesses and it's expensive to develop them (if using API pricing).

ChaseRensberger•about 1 hour ago

happy to see more harnesses in the Go space, i've had a fun time building https://github.com/ChaseRensberger/wingman

i think the language primitives map well to the natural desire to use these tools across networks and in concurrent workloads.

another Go harness i keep up to date with is: https://github.com/boldsoftware/shelley (exe.dev team)

solarkraft•about 2 hours ago

I think this is what I’ve been waiting for! Live interactions with models are fundamentally asynchronous! This will be great for interactivity.

What a good time for harness design. Just while OpenCode is growing up a bit and focusing on their harness. I’m delighted to see people focusing on good general solid harness design principles.

Someone make an OpenCode API (the best general agent end UI API I know) compatible server for it!

Sucks that I haven’t upgraded my client to V2 yet and I don’t really want to build on an outdated API ...

Edit: It would be cool to get streaming responses :) But I understand (and actually applaud) that the authors seem to have been very focused on the core mechanics.

Also note that this works with the responses API!

basisword•10 minutes ago

When did we just give up on the challenge of giving something a unique name? I see products launch everyday on HN now that just take a well known brand and use it as their own. I thought this would be a feature for Unreal engine.

nylonstrung•about 2 hours ago

I don't really understand how async tool calls translate to token savings

It says that it removes tokens wasted while a model is waiting on synchronous tool calls. What tokens exactly is Pi using when waiting?

dumberquestions•about 2 hours ago

I think a running agent periodically checks if a process it started has finished.

vb-8448•37 minutes ago

Does it support subscriptions ? If not it's a no go for me.

aslkalska•about 1 hour ago

that's like the worst name you could have picked

rafaelmn•about 2 hours ago

Honestly the fact that we're still modeling agent harnesses like chat and strapping them into shell sessions instead of building async actor systems with sandboxed OS functionality access actors is bananas to me. So much easy wins can be had just by building on right abstractions... Hopefully will get enough time to play with this idea soon on my own.

dirtbag__dad•about 1 hour ago

Do you have any examples of this approach?

rafaelmn•about 1 hour ago

I'm actually taking the time to hash out the details to do this as a side experiment project, but basically what I read this project as showing is that if you leverage asynchrony you can let agents be more efficient - and you get this "for free" if you model your "agents" as actors that interact with the system through message passing. Then all the system operations become messages to different actors, need to read a file => message the fs actor => get reply from FS actor as a message when it's done. You'd probably need some out of mailbox ways to share blob resources and sockets for realtime (audio), but for the most part simple message passing should handle most of what LLM agents do.

Actors can have identities and roles for RBAC, etc. you - cross agent communication is the same as sending any other message to a actors.

Not to mention that actors can be on your device, another device, etc. whatever the router can resolve - it's transparent to the agents.

orliesaurus•about 2 hours ago

Why don't you explain what's different?

im_down_w_otp•about 1 hour ago

I’m sad to discover that this is not a mod for Unreal to extend TacOps with a clandestine gameplay mode which prioritizes stealth and spy craft.

underlipton•about 1 hour ago

This feels like it's begging for a lawsuit from Epic.

redog•about 1 hour ago

Epic harness -- unreal agent!

jcmontx•about 2 hours ago

Can I use it with my codex sub?

SparkyMcUnicorn•about 1 hour ago

I think the biggest selling point of a codex sub vs a claude sub is that you can use codex subs in any harness you want.

FanaHOVA•about 1 hour ago

This is not an Unreal Engine agents? Very disappointed

himata4113•about 2 hours ago

omp.sh does this way better by just allowing structural toolcall execution in eval with python/js.

jedisct1•about 2 hours ago

Happy with swival.dev ...

calmingsolitude•about 2 hours ago

Mildly disappointed that this has nothing to do with Unreal Engine, the popular game engine.

neuronexmachina•about 2 hours ago

Yeah, I was hoping it would be something to make it easier for agents to interface with Unreal Engine games.

pavlov•about 2 hours ago

I was imagining a talking head avatar rendered in Unreal Engine, with lip sync and facial expressions driven by a multimodal LLM that produces the speech.

teamonkey•about 1 hour ago

Unreal 5.8 has a MCP plugin