After using the top AI NPC dev tools, here is my answer.
As we enter 2024, PC gaming remains strong. The Steam platform reached an all-time high of 33.7 million concurrent players on Sunday, and a record-breaking 14,531 games were launched on Steam in 2023 – roughly 40 new games per day! Meanwhile, Steam has announced support for AI-generated content in games, stating “We will release the vast majority of AI games.”
Will we see “Free Guy” like characters in the 2024 game market?
Last May at COMPUTEX 2023, Nvidia unveiled its new AI technology Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE). This is a real-time AI solution that provides AI models for speech, dialog, and character animation in games – adding real-time interactive capabilities to NPCs. At this year’s CES, they updated the system again. they demonstrated how ACE technology combines speech-to-text recognition and text-to-speech responses with generative AI facial animation and automated character personas to generate computer-created character interactions. BTW, the demo is developed by ConvAI and uses Unreal engine.
NPC Creation in Modern Gaming
In 2024’s upcoming AAA games and current game DLCs, NPCs are still relying heavily on massive human and resource investment for creation.
Games such as The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Cyberpunk 2077 showcase NPCs that possess remarkable freedom and autonomy, contributing substantially to the narrative’s depth and realism. However, the methodology employed in achieving this still adheres to traditional practices—relying on expansive teams and extensive scripting.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has over 1000 NPC characters across 100+ missions in 6 chapters. Each NPC has their own singer, artist, and voice actor, with nearly 8 years of development and $500 million in costs for the NPCs.
Even the highly anticipated GTA 6, with its colossal $2 billion budget, follows suit. Despite its more expansive open world, the creation of NPCs still necessitates manual intervention and intricate decision tree programming.
Despite this, studies show 52% of players complain current NPCs “just repeat dialogues”, 99% want more intelligent NPCs, and 81% would even pay more for them.
Which AI NPC development tool is better?
There are two major players in the AI NPC development tool market: Inworld and ConvAI. Both support Unreal and Unity engines and have similar functionality – creating 3D avatars, character design, natural conversation, emotions, and reactions. I tested both tools on different engines to set up a functional AI NPC in my 3D world within 2-3 hours. The time required depends on the engine and avatar used.
Unreal Engine:
- Inworld
- Couldn’t get it running on my Unreal project
- ConvAI
- Worked well overall. However, the AI voice was inconsistent in tone within conversations.
- Ready Player Me avatars don’t support gestures, following, or battles. Metahuman avatars can do more but require beefy hardware.
- The GUI is locked to the game view and can’t be hidden.
I also tried Inworld again in Unity:
- Inworld
- Quick and easy setup compared to ConvAI.
- Like Ready Player Me avatars in Unreal, no gesture, follow, or battle support.
In summary, the tools are quite similar – they provide comparable functionality and interaction capabilities. They can stand in for quest givers in 3D games but aren’t robust enough for complex tasks.
I won’t go into full details in this post, but let me know if you want more specifics on any part and I can expand on it in a future post. Comments and let me know.
Challenges Faced by AI NPCs
- Lack of Human-Like Characteristics
AI platforms like GPT-4, Claude 2.1, Inworld, and others boast powerful character generation capabilities. However, players easily discern differences in behavior and emotion compared to human interactions. This discrepancy can disrupt the sense of “real” character engagement, diminishing overall immersion. - Cost Barriers: The expenses associated with high-quality AI tools and platform APIs pose challenges for small and mid-sized developers, hindering widespread adoption. Economic constraints create barriers, impeding the swift integration of advanced AI technology in the gaming industry.
- Fundamental Model Limitations: The fundamental models underlying these AI tools are not specifically trained for game development purposes. This can complicate seamless integration into game projects. The lack of gaming-specific use cases and optimized configurations poses additional challenges for developers trying to leverage these tools.
- API Stability and Token Limits: Issues such as API stability and maximum token limits further hinder AI integration into the gaming landscape. Even advanced tools like GPT-4 encounter constraints, with token limits restricting the depth and length of NPC conversations. This limitation often results in AI forgetting initial conversation content, particularly detrimental in narratives that rely on extensive and intricate dialogues for in-game storytelling and character development.
Key Elements to “Free Guy”
- Intelligence Beyond Appearance
Just like talented human actors can portray roles well, the realism of AI NPCs depends first on having an underlying model that’s sufficiently smart – with strong general intelligence.
This is mostly determined by pretraining, but game NPC models need broad data plus lots of high-quality dialog, storytelling, etc. tailored to “roleplaying” – not just general text. This enables more human-like conversational ability.
- Cost Reduction
Current industry approaches rely on inefficient API calls across multiple teams. As base model prices fall and indexed knowledge bases for game NPCs emerge, costs can decrease dramatically. Otherwise, high API and token usage will raise game prices or require new monetization like in-game purchases for AI dialog.
- Advancements in Movement and Reactions
While current tools like ConvAI and Inworld excel in handling dialog, actions beyond simple facial expressions often require additional manual programming.
Recent research by Daniel Holden presents promising developments in lifelike simulated actions. When integrated with existing AI decision frameworks, this innovation has the potential to significantly elevate the realism of NPC movements, extending beyond gestures to actions like fighting or hiding.
All in all, In films like Westworld and Free Guy, the idea of NPCs with “consciousness” interacting dynamically with the game world is getting closer, thanks to advances in generative AI. However, these capabilities are mainly in top companies due to tech limitations and funding constraints.
The good news is these challenges are being actively worked on, but we likely won’t see major breakthroughs in 2024.
Comments? Any thoughts to share?
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