Marvel Snap developer Nuverse is pioneering machine learning, as it strives to use AI technology to advance NPC speech and animation in games. During GDC, Nuverse is set to hold two lectures that give us a deep dive into the GPT-3 AI, showing off its plans to use this new technology to enhance how future games will look and feel, while also diving into high-quality rendering in games and how to tackle related issues.
Currently, the main goal of GPT-3 is to bring more life to NPCs in games by advancing their speech and animation, with Nuverse hoping that this will make for a more immersive and realistic experience for you in all your favourite titles.
Now, that may sound like a lot of jargon to you, but it’s actually a genuinely exciting concept. Instead of one-dimensional NPCs inhabiting those iconic game worlds, you could instead be meeting more expressive characters with a wider range of believable actions and emotions, offering you the option to have more meaningful interactions with them.
During the lectures, Nuverse further discusses how realistic devs can make their characters through paralinguistic elements, and how this will make it possible to achieve more realistic emotional expression and enhance in-game speech through facial animation and synthesis systems that provide natural-sounding voices. In fact, Nuverse has already put these generated voices to the test in its upcoming science-fiction survival game, Earth: Revival – and, amazingly, the majority of test players couldn’t tell that the voices are synthesised.
It goes without saying, but Nuverse notes that this new technology is both effective and very promising for the future of gaming, with testing revealing that the resulting animations have been both welcomed and praised by professional artists and ordinary players alike. Plus, it reduces the time and workload of the developers themselves, with the system taking less than 800 milliseconds to generate speech and compute full-body animations without manual intervention. For example, Nuverse highlights that it only took 30 minutes to generate over 11 hours of narrative animation for the aforementioned Earth: Revival.
Additionally, Nuverse’s second lecture addresses the topic of high-quality rendering, tackling the complex issues associated with moving games from PC to mobile and other platforms, with the intent of helping future developers further improve their titles. The team will go into detail on multiple issues, including how to scale high-quality rendering from PC to mobile to make them as close as possible, how to cover as many mobile devices as possible, and what valuable attempts have been made in the implementation of rendering features.
We’re super excited to see Nuverse taking charge on this interesting implementation of AI technology, and sharing these interesting findings in the GDC lectures. And, with the colossal success of Marvel Snap, we’re certainly looking forward to future projects, including the intriguing Earth: Revival.
If you want to find out more about Earth: Revival, be sure to check out the game’s official website. Or, if this high-tech reality has got you jonesing for a bit of high-tech fantasy, head over to our list of the best space games or the best Star Wars games on Switch and mobile.