Ubisoft and Tencent are both on board with Nvidia's new expansion to their Ace Platform, which can generate fully interactive NPCs using AI. Read on to learn more about Nvidia's Ace platform, its new expansion, and what publishers are on board with it.
Nvidia Reveals Expansion of AI Game-Making Tool at CES 2024
Being called an NPC might not be so bad anymore with the reveal of Nvidia’s expansion to their Nvidia Ace platform at the global tech expo CES 2024. Dubbed Ace Production Microservices, the expansion now allows partners to pick and choose specific parts of the platform’s suite of multi-faceted tools capable of generating non-playable characters (NPCs) through AI.
Nvidia Ace as a Platform for Game Developers
Nvidia’s Avatar Cloud Engine – referred to as ACE for short – was initially revealed at CES 2023 and was open to early access soon after. This developer suite was designed to create NPCs quickly, which it achieved through its host of dev tools.
To give you a glimpse of its capabilities, ACE can generate an NPC based on given parameters and dynamically render them straight into a game scene, complete with an auto lip-sync function to animate their mouth movement to match what they’re saying. Furthermore, in functionality similar to a popular Skyrim mod, user speech can be translated into text and fed into the generated NPC, who then churns out a response via a separate text-to-speech tool.
In short, it can create fully-voiced, dynamic, and fully interactive video game NPCs set to the parameters you’ve given it. This opens the floodgates for games and programs that rely on massive worlds but can’t spare the development time to fully flesh out every single NPC.
Nvidia Partners are Already On Board with the New Microservice
As stated before, Nvidia Ace itself isn’t new and has been out for a while, but the expansion of the service gives partners the freedom to use what tools they need without availing the rest of the closed platform’s suite. While this provides more accessibility to lesser-known partners with smaller budgets, the announcement revealed that industry giants have already noticed and are on board.
To name a few of the partners interested in the new microservice, we have Ubisoft and Tencent leading the pack, followed by Inworld, Charisma, Convai, Ourpalm, UneeQ, NetEase, and the developer for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, MiHoYo.
Implications of AI-Generated NPCs to the Industry
The use of AI in industries fueled by creativity—present company included—has always been a touchy subject. While many are quick to adopt AI as a new asset for the sake of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, opponents to the notion cite artistic integrity and unethical use as downsides to the practice.
While Ace is undoubtedly a powerful tool, it’s currently unclear what data it is trained on, with Nvidia’s response of "there’s no clear answer" proving insufficient to bolster confidence among skeptics.
With many big names already on board, conversations regarding Ace’s training data will surface. As far as artists know, their performances could be fed into the AI without their consent, though that much remains to be seen. For the time being, one can only fathom the depth of games to come with the advent of this powerful new tool.
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Ubisoft, Tencent will begin using Nvidia’s AI-generated NPC tools
