Games: AIs promise bigger and more complex productions – 7/1/2023 – Tech

The success of generative AI (artificial intelligence) tools, in particular ChatGPT, has resulted in a technology race in the gaming industry.

With the interest of investors on the rise and cash after the boom in games during the Covid-19 pandemic, major studios and hardware companies have launched in recent months a series of tools that seek to take advantage of this technology to create even bigger and more complex games. .

“Every day we see someone who has created a new application based on AI that solves a problem, that automates a task, that creates something that no one had imagined before”, says Alexandre Ziebert, Nvidia’s technical marketing manager for Latin America . “We are in a golden age of artificial intelligence.”

Nvidia itself has released technology that could change the way humans interact with non-player characters (NPCs, for its acronym in English). ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) for Games, presented at Computex 2023 in May, is capable of creating characters that converse in natural language with players.

Through this system, instead of selecting phrase options from a list, for example, the player can speak directly to the character, in this case an AI, which responds according to parameters predefined by the developers.

The technology impresses with its level of automation, but due to the robotic aspect of speech and the lack of naturalness in the construction of sentences, it still makes it clear that it is content developed by AI.

“Today you have extremely competent artists in the industry. They are experts in their areas and it is very difficult for you to get, through a tool, to match the result”, says Ziebert. “But we’re getting there.”

At the moment, however, simpler programs are more successful, which act as a co-pilot for artists and programmers to develop their functions better and faster.

Ubisoft, for example, announced in March, during the last GDC (Game Developers Conference), Ghostwriter, a tool that uses AI to diversify a game’s secondary lines (known as “barks”).

Developed internally by the company, the tool analyzes a sentence written by the screenwriter and suggests a series of others, with similar characteristics, which can also be used by the professional, speeding up his work.

In addition, Blizzard, owner of “World of Warcraft”, “Overwatch” and “Diablo”, trained an artificial intelligence with images of its games to produce new concept art, according to a report in the New York Times.

But even smaller studios can take advantage of AI tools. The Brazilian Pulsatrix, for example, took advantage of a program developed by Nvidia in the horror game “Phobia – St. Dinfna Hotel”, released in 2022 for PC and PlayStation and Xbox consoles.

The studio used the Audio2Face tool to optimize the mouth animation of the project’s 3D characters, which must be synchronized with the dubbing. As the game would be released in two languages ​​(Portuguese and English), the amount of work to complete the task was unfeasible for a team of 13 people.

The technology uses AI to add expressions to a three-dimensional model while maintaining lip-sync from a recording. It’s as if a WhatsApp audio was used to recreate the facial movement of the person who sent it.

Audio2Face integrates the Omniverse platform, focused on real-time 3D graphic design. Despite being free, it requires a model of GPU (video card) from the RTX series, developed by Nvidia, whose prices start at around R$ 1,500 and can exceed R$ 10,000.

“It’s an absurd time saver. ‘Fobia’ still didn’t have that many lines, about 400 lines in total, which is very little for a game. Even so, if we were to animate these recordings, it would take a considerable time for a company of our size”, said Fabio Martins, co-founder of Pulsatrix Studios.

Pulsatrix used the tool to animate the characters speaking in two languages, English and Portuguese, but could do the same for any language, according to Nvidia’s website.

Despite the success with the use of Audio2Face, Martins is skeptical about the use of generative AI in games. Even so, he recognizes that they can bring advantages in the future.

“These technologies are unlikely to be used to simply put a character in the game that talks like ChatGPT, in real time. We see that the answers are generally generic, they are different from what the game is about, the direction we want to give to the character “, he said.

“Two years from now, maybe you’ll already have a much more natural conversation, maybe you’ll be able to teach specific topics, teach how to be part of your game world. I think we’ll reach that point”.

The São Paulo-based studio is now working on the metalinguistic horror “AILA”, about an AI that creates games. The project raised BRL 371,000 in a crowdfunding campaign and should be launched in 2025.

In “AILA”, the player will be responsible for testing games generated by AI. The games will be generated from choices made by the user, with commands selected by the character. As this artificial intelligence loses its perception of what is real or not, the goal becomes to uncover its secrets and use them against it.

The founders of Pulsatrix, Fabio Martins and Thiago Matheus, however, guarantee that, at least for now, no AI will be used in the development of “AILA”. Better not risk it.