Since Nvidia began to show its technical demos that illustrate how to make the reactions and responses of NPCs (non-playable video game characters) more human, the big names in gaming have started to get to work. The idea is to create a new gaming genre with characters capable of responding in unique ways to player interactions, generating new responses that adapt to live gameplay. Each match would be ‘unique’ in the true sense of the word. Last week, Covert Protocol was unveiled in collaboration with Inworld AI, an AI gaming startup, using Nvidia’s Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technology. But the first publisher to come out was Ubisoft, which is experimenting with new types of interactive gameplay with dynamic NPCs. The ‘NEO NPCs’, the product of the company’s latest research and development project, are advanced characters designed to interact in real time with the protagonists, the environment and other characters, thus opening up new possibilities for dynamic and evolutionary storytelling.
Developed by a multidisciplinary team at Ubisoft Paris, NEO NPCs are the result of a close collaboration between Ubisoft designers and key technology partners, GenAI, Nvidia and Inworld AI. Inworld’s Character Engine and LLM technologies allowed Ubisoft’s narrative team to build a complete background and conversational style for each NPC, while NVIDIA Audio2Face, part of the NVIDIA ACE suite of technologies, is used to enable facial animation in real time. Ubisoft presented the capabilities of these NEO NPCs through three different demonstration scenarios. Each scenario focuses on different aspects of NPC behavior: perception of the environment and context, range of real-time reactions and animations, memory of conversations, collaboration and strategic decision making. The set of these discoveries, made through experimentation, shifts the boundaries of game design and game immersion. What changes compared to the past? From what we read, the personalities of these NPCs are not created by a machine, but by a writer, who shapes their character, their story and their conversation style, and then continues to modify them once the model language learning begins to improvise dialogue. So, it won’t be like having a generic ‘chatgpt’ to talk to. As Ubisoft managers explained at GDC in San Francisco, for now NEO NPC is a prototype. The main limitation is the one that concerns all AI gen chatbots, i.e. the presence of stereotypes and prejudices. Improvisation is fine, but in a game (and not only) the characters must follow the instructions of the person writing the plot, they must maintain narrative coherence. And this is (for now) the main issue to be resolved. Then there is the cost, but we will see later
#Convert #Protocol #Neo #NPCs #chatbots #video #games #human #unique
2024-04-04 09:45:36
