Nvidia and Ubisoft have partnered to advance the development of AI-driven non-player characters (NPCs) for modern games.
The collaboration involves Nvidia’s Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technology and assistance from Inworld AI to create “NEO NPCs” that interact dynamically with players and the game environment.
NPCs’ personalities are crafted by human writers, who shape their character, backstory, and conversation style. The learning language model then improvises dialogue, which is continually tweaked to align with the writer’s vision.
These NPCs are designed to avoid repetitive behaviours and respond realistically to in-game events, enhancing immersion and storytelling.
Ubisoft’s narrative team contributed by developing complete backgrounds, knowledge bases, and conversational styles for two NPCs as a proof of concept.
The NEO NPCs possess environmental and contextual awareness, and conversational memory, and excel in collaboration and strategic decision-making.
NVIDIA‘s Audio2Face technology enables appropriate facial animations and lip-syncing for these characters, enhancing immersion further.
While no specific announcement about integrating this technology into Ubisoft titles was made, it is anticipated to be on the roadmap.
Nvidia also announced its next-generation GPUs, promising significant performance improvements and energy efficiency for training large language models like GPT-3.5.
NEO NPC is currently a prototype. Ubisoft’s team aims to gather industry feedback and refine the technology for broader implementation.