First, I’d like to say I really love this product. Thanks for making this.
Second, where are the companies that are doing this type of thing for NPC dialogue in games.
Imagine playing Mass Effect or Skyrim but where you get to ask whatever and the NPC responds with something that fits within the space of possible answers based on the prompt that defined their existence.
From what I read (on /r/gamedesign, /r/proceduralgeneration and Gamasutra) it's about control.
The AAA studies leave nothing to chance when it is about the game play. Once "AI" speech comes to a level where the NPC will only answer with pre-sanctioned content they might jump onto the band wagon ... but seeing that it is very much possible to generate porn with "censored" stable diffusion ... we won't see "free" AIs in games any time soon.
I've worked in game development (AAA and large indie games) for almost eight years and I would generally take the narratives on game subreddits with a healthy helping of salt. They're largely speculative and uninformed. Gamasutra is better, but often game journalism is full of simplifications and rough analogies.
The main problem with this type of content is that it needs to be solid enough that it adds to the experience. If you're allowed to have a conversation with any NPC you need to keep track of what they know, their responses need to be consistent with the world, and the time to generate the response needs to be reasonable.
Old RPGs such as The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall used to allow you to go up to any of thousands of NPCs and ask them about anything! And practically all the results were uninspiring cookie-cutter replies either saying they don't know or relaying some vague common knowledge on the subject. For me it lost its novelty very quickly. In Dwarf Fortress you can play Adventure Mode and go to any randomly generated NPC to talk about anything! Those NPCs are highly complex with intricate personalities, relationships, and emotional states. Their responses are... mainly the same type of response you'd get from Daggerfall. With a good helping of completely inconsistent replies. I once asked someone about another NPC, they said it was their husband. So I asked where that NPC was and they replied "I do not know who that is". Trying to talk to characters in AI Dungeon is similarly frustrating, with the added hilarity of the AI sometimes getting mixed up about who is who between you and them.
There have been a lot of experiments with more ambitious use of AI in games. The most well-known publicly disclosed failure being Oblivion's Radiant AI which was meant to be a lot more impressive than it turned out, because they had to seriously scale it down due to random irrational behaviour.
Do you have any sources on the development process of the Radiant AI that I could read up on?
I’ve only heard the marketing speak (“amazing!!!!”) followed by the actual product (“get X for Y at Z, 5 times”). I’ve never seen anything that explained the disconnect, aside from Todd just being a sheister.
I remember some anecdotes including how they couldn't stop NPCs from randomly going from town to town and steal or buy everything in every shop so there was never anything left for the player. I believe this was mentioned in the making of documentary which came with the collector's edition of Oblivion.
"AI" with pre-sanctioned content just sounds like Eliza-like chatbots [1] (a couple thousand pairs of regex-match to fitting answer). Those actually work great to create the impression of a conversation.
I think those even were used in a couple games ages ago. But they are not very good at steering the player and keeping him on track, which is how dialog systems are usually used in game design. They might be useful in a truly open world where the player discovers the story themselves (maybe like Fallout 1/2), but the AAA gaming industry has largely abandoned that idea in favor of "linear scripted stories in an open world".
I believe no company in the world would want to put out a game where an NPC could be coaxed into presenting a sexy story featuring an infant Adolph Hitler and Jesus Christ.
It's just a headache that I wouldn't want, I guess.
Or maybe we just need to evolve and realize that people are going to use tools for what they want them to be used for, not what we want them to be used for.
People have apparently already found workarounds for Midjourney's nudity filter.
StabilityAI was smart enough to realize people will get around that, and allowed the objectionable content filter to be removed via commenting out a few lines of code.
It's our sensibilities that need to change, not our tools.
I think it's "the space of possible answers" that's the struggle. It's hard not to start with a barbarian in a tavern and end up with a bunny space pirate in argentinian highschool in the space of five sentences.
If it were free text, sounds like a thing I would use once for the novelty then forget about, because it's not an entertaining gameplay feature.
Maybe an AI could generate incidental dialog, things NPCs yell out in reaction to things around them, to keep it from always being from the same list of two or three reactions.
Just my two cents. I want to play a well written and fun game, not a chat bot.
I do just want to say it because if you don't clarify all possible context on the internet you're an absolutist: I'm really excited to see more AI in games over the coming years! It has soooo many potential applications
Talk to NPCs for hours about their boring lives thatching roofs and keeping shops, until they get weirded out by all the questions. Yeah, doesn't really sound fun.
These days games have been moving in the other direction by making them play out a lot like movies, very controlled and measured experiences that provide a consistent and coherent story.
At that point, why not just have a human write those responses?
Every character using the same three lines doesn't seem like a technology problem. Getting voice acting out of the time-critical path by automating it might help, but I'm doubtful about the usefulness of AI-generated scripts.
> where are the companies that are doing this type of thing for NPC dialogue in games.
I'd put good money on AAA studios actively working on this. Voice acting budgets make up a non-trivial portion of expenses and actively constrain the scope of games. Studios are definitely investing in this, game dev cycles just take a lot of time on top of the R&D.
This is solving a different problem, the voice acting budget problem cannot be solved with this type of thing. To solve the voice acting problem, you need realistic text to speech.
This type of thing is solving the problem of generating infinite variation of text, which might make the NPC more realistic than hearing a series of predefined recordings. But you still have the problem of text2speech, you still need a realistic one if you want to include this into the game.
> where are the companies that are doing this type of thing for NPC dialogue in games.
"Event[0]"[0] is based on a great implementation of a chatbot NPC/adversary, and there's a nice video by Game Maker's Toolkit explaining how they achieved it [1].
My feeling is companies don't invest in this because there isn't much return they expect from it. If gamers are more interested in playing with other humans than interacting with in-game characters, spending a lot on the AI to make it work might not make sense economically.
I'm no insider, but I imagine the same sort of reasoning is applied to when companies don't invest enough in opponent AI to make them continuously competitive: people want to play with other humans.
But I suspect this will change if it's marketed well. I will like to see that happen!
Unreal Engine is popular because it removes the effort of designing and building a 3D engine from game creation (and it's my understanding that because it has fairly reasonable licensing agreement).
PRATTLE, or Persistent Realistic AI for Talk and Text Language & Engagement, could be the Unreal Engine of procedurally generated NPC speech in games! And it already has a name... all we have to do is, you know... the hard work...
Second, where are the companies that are doing this type of thing for NPC dialogue in games.
Imagine playing Mass Effect or Skyrim but where you get to ask whatever and the NPC responds with something that fits within the space of possible answers based on the prompt that defined their existence.