Ubisoft and Nvidia are collaborating on non-player characters created by artificial intelligence. At a developer conference in San Francisco, they showed off an experiment showing possible futures for non-player characters, including interactive gameplay and emergent storytelling.
Ubisoft is exploring new types of interactive gameplay using dynamic NPCs. With the advent of generative artificial intelligence technologies, this field is experiencing rapid development. They are the result of research and development. NEO NPC, which can communicate and interact with players, the environment and other characters in real time. This opens up new possibilities for storytelling.
NEO NPC was developed by Ubisoft’s multidisciplinary team based in Paris in close collaboration with partners GenAI, NVIDIA and Inworld AI. The Inworld Character Engine and LLM technologies allow Ubisoft to create individual character traits, assign them the necessary skills and customize them. conversational style. Real-time facial animation syncs with NPC speech and expresses their emotions. NVIDIA Audio2Facepart of the NVIDIA ACE technology suite.
At GDC 2024, Ubisoft showed off the capabilities of its NEO NPCs through three separate demo scenarios. Each focuses on different aspects of the characters’ behavior, their awareness of the environment and the context of the situation, the range of reactions and real-time animations, as well as the possibilities of cooperation, the ability of NPCs to remember conversations and their strategic decisions. manufacturing.
“Generation AI will bring players experiences we can barely imagine yet, with smarter worlds, nuanced characters, and new and adaptive stories.” said Guillemette Picard, senior vice president of production technology at Ubisoft.
“By working with NVIDIA on our NEO NPC prototype and NVIDIA Audio2Face solution, we can offer players deeper immersion through truly impromptu conversations with NPCs with real-time facial animation.”
“Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that can significantly improve player experiences by making games more dynamic, immersive and unique.” – adds John Spitzer, vice president of engineering and performance technologies at NVIDIA. “We are excited to partner with Ubisoft and use NVIDIA ACE to develop digital characters.”
Of course, companies still have a lot of work to do, but as a cornerstone it sounds good. Now I’m just waiting for a full demonstration.
Let’s remember a year ago Ubisoft introduced Ghostwriter, artificial intelligence to make the writers’ jobs easier. It is designed to create a first draft of mob chatter and NPC lines. It’s the sounds and sentences that, while crucial to immersing players in game worlds, take up too much of the writers’ time. So AI shouldn’t replace writers, but make it easier for them to work on very chatty games. Human intervention will still be necessary. It should work in such a way that the AI creates dialogue from a few keywords, which is then used by the scriptwriters.
Source :Indian TV
