No scripting needed? NVIDIA is preparing to revolutionize gaming

Neural networks are on the rise today: they draw pictures, write texts, and help with programming. Naturally, sooner or later there had to be ways to use them in game development. NVIDIA, a familiar company to gamers, has its own version of the industry's development, and in collaboration with Convai they have brought a demonstration of the ACE for Games technology to Computex 2023. It's essentially a way to communicate with virtual characters without pre-scripted lines for them.

Computer characters, or NPCs, are an important part of any game, whether it's a single-player adventure, a cooperative shooter, or an MMORPG. Usually the conversations with them are created in advance by the writers, but in the future this may change thanks to ACE - Avatar Cloud Engine. This technology generates phrases in real time, as we can see in the video, where the player Kai is communicating with NPC named Jin. Of course, the algorithms are limited to the virtual world and act according to the instructions, so you can hardly chat with them on distracting topics. But the authors of the technology claim that Jean, shown in the video, speaks without a script or voice actor - his behavior is generated by the AI, and this is already a great progress.

It's easy to see that Kai speaks his lines into a microphone, and the machine recognizes his voice, decodes it and gives an adequate response. In addition, NVIDIA employees claim that the NeMo Guardrails system will prevent the AI from accidentally giving out anything offensive or inappropriate to the user. On the other hand, these neural networks promise to be trainable, so that each developer can better adapt them to their project. How soon ACE will appear in real games, rather than demonstrations at the show, is unknown.