Nvidia Gives Video Game Characters Generative AI With New Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE)
NVIDIA has introduced a new tool for enhancing non-player characters in video games with generative AI. The new Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games is designed to help video game developers produce more realistic and dynamic virtual people that can interact with players
ACE for Games
The ACE for Games foundry service generates AI models for NPCs with unique personalities, behaviors, and dialogue for NPCs. The result is a more immersive gaming experience. The technology is supposed to mean NPCs act more like real people and react to each player in a different way. Nvidia hopes developers use it to build new models and even edit existing ones to take advantage of the neural networks behind the technology, which is optimized for different game and system capabilities. ACE for Games can be employed by systems using the Nvidia NeMo model for language, the Riva tool for automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech, and even Audio2Face, which applies voice data to animate three-dimensional skin and muscles on a virtual face.
“Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the interactivity players can have with game characters and dramatically increase immersion in games,” Nvidia vice president of developer and performance technology John Spitzer said. “Building on our expertise in AI and decades of experience working with game developers, Nvidia is spearheading the use of generative AI in games.”
Generative Games
Creating and enhancing video games with generative AI has been a natural realm for those experimenting with its potential. Roblox is experimenting with generative AI tools for game creation, writing the code for objects and their behavior in a virtual environment. Meanwhile, digital human creator Didimo published Popul8, which uses generative AI t tweak uploaded character templates into hundreds of variations that still fit the style of the game. There’s also Scenario, which uses generative AI for video game art, while game developer Latitude created AI Dungeon to use advanced language models to produce the game’s text and interact with players through its characters. Meanwhile, Google has experimented with using its Imagen text-to-image AI tool to augment classic 1970s text adventure Zork with graphics.
“The creation of non-playable characters (NPCs) has evolved as games have become more sophisticated. The number of pre-recorded lines has grown, the number of options a player has to interact with NPCs has increased, and facial animations have become more realistic. Yet player interactions with NPCs still tend to be transactional, scripted, and short-lived, as dialogue options exhaust quickly, serving only to push the story forward,” Nvidia senior product marketing manager Ike Nnoli explained in a blog post. “Now, generative AI can make NPCs more intelligent by improving their conversational skills, creating persistent personalities that evolve over time, and enabling dynamic responses that are unique to the player.”
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