Intro to Generative AI NPC's

NPCs or non-player characters have always existed in games, and have generally maintained a well-crafted approximation of intelligence to the best of the game designers’ and programmers’ abilities.

Such NPCs and “enemies” in games are colloquially referred to as “AI”, however with the advent of Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, a whole new tier of NPCs are now possible.

Hand-Crafted Boundaries

In terms of dialogue and interactivity, NPCs are well-defined entities which do not exceed their rigid boundaries. Such boundaries are hand-crafted by game designers, narrative and scenario writers, and executed by game programmers.

Players of RPGs are very familiar with the phrase “exhausting dialogue”, wherein a player exhausts all possible dialogue trees for an NPC. While some players take joy in “completing” games to their fullest extent, some consider the experience immersion-breaking.

Enter Generative AI …

What if..?

Generative AI tools of today’s standards are able to process and remember new information, allowing for NPCs with a wider breadth of possible conversations/dialogue. Such unscripted NPCs would utilise AI to generate their behaviours and responses in real-time based on user input, contextualised to games’ setting. Let’s have a look at a few examples of such technologies today.

Unreal Engine’s Metahumans

Metahumans, introduced alongside Unreal Engine 5 from Epic Games, is a framework to create high-fidelity fully rigged human 3D models with incredible ease. Users can create animate and deploy these models in an incredibly short time with life-like detail.

Unreal Engine has also demoed its real-time facial animation feature during its State of Unreal 2023 event :

NVidia ACE

Shown off in their “Kairos” demo at Computex 2023, NVidia ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) aims to incorporate generative AI into digital avatars. During the demo, we see the ACE-powered NPC interact with the player in real-time, generating text and matching facial animations in a context-aware environment.

Here’s the latest on ACE at Computext 2024!

Inworld Origins

By Inworld.ai, Origins is a free-to-play demo available on Steam which is a neo-noir detective story with completely unscripted NPCs. All of their interactions are powered by Generative AI such that no playthrough by any player is the exact same. Players get to interact with NPCs by conversing with them via voice, which is then processed by the NPC characters and their responses generated via AI.

Not just Games

With generative AI trained on a sufficiently large dataset, the possibilities of creating high-quality interactive experiences are near endless. With IoT serving as data conduits, the ability to process information, and the breadth of information available to be fed into Generative AI is vast. Such data collection can lead to truly smart assistants which predict and solve issues before they happen and much more.