For the longest time, AI has been associated with non-player characters (NPC) in the video game industry and divided between control structures and path-finding. “If you are in the chasing state, you’re using a path-finding algorithm to try to find the shortest path to the player character,” explains Julian Togelius, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU and Co-Founder and Research Director, modl.ai. “If you are in the patrolling state, you are basically executing a fixed set of moves. Traditionally, you have all of these simple, symbolic AI techniques that have been there in one form or another since the 1980s. This is because when most modern game genres were developed, like role-playing games, first-person shooters and strategy games, we didn’t have modern AI algorithms, and we certainly didn’t have computers that could run them.”
Togelius believes that AI is going to cause even further fragmentation in game development. “There will be designers who look at the new AI methods and say, ‘This doesn’t help me with the kind of games that I do.’ Other designers will go, ‘Hey, let’s start from the new AI methods, design around that and see what new things we get.’ Basically, what we call a game will expand even more in different ways.”
Open research and development initiative Ubisoft La Forge has been exploring applications of machine learning in video games productions for over a decade. “AI works best when there is a lot of data available that represent the tasks you’re targeting,” states Yves Jacquier, Executive Director of Ubisoft La Forge. “As such, repetitive tasks are particularly suited to be generalized and automated.” By using motion capture data to train AI models, realisticand fluid character animation will be generated. Jacquier explains, “AI also has the potential to assist in automating the animation workflow, reducing the time and effort required by animators. A good example for that is Choreograph, a technology developed by La Forge and used in Far Cry 6, which helped create the animations in the game through an AI-driven technique known as ‘motion matching.’ Another prototype we developed at La Forge is Zoobuilder, which helps create 3D animations for animals from videos using machine learning. We’ve been using generative AI in voice synthesis, DeepMotion, text-to-speech and now Ghostwriter, our in-house tool created to assist scriptwriters. We’re seeing fast progress in terms of adoption internally in areas like ideation or concept art. We expect a similar trend in programming with assistance for writing code or finding the potential source of a bug and proposing a fix. We can expect the use of AI assistants to rise and progressively become an integral part of our everyday routine, going beyond basic functions to handle intricate tasks, such as assisting with coding and executing complex commands.”
