NVIDIA has announced that its ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) will be first featured on upcoming multiplayer shooter Mecha Break, which is slated for release in 2025. For the uninitiated, the tech is a suite of technologies that enable real-time conversations with artificial humans or in-game NPCs (non-playable characters) through generative AI.
Mecha Break will utilise an updated version of the engine, dubbed ACE NIM, which is a new small language model (SLM) that allows game developers to add AI-powered NPCs easily into their games. The tech incorporates several features altogether, providing a single means for devs to implement voice-to-text recognition, language model response generation, and audio-to-facial animation technology.
Unlike the engine’s earlier iteration, which was showcased during CES and Computex, NVIDIA ACE NIM processes everything locally. The essence of this technology is that it uses the local processing power of the company’s GPU to power an AI language model on-device. This can then be used to interpret your voice or text input without the need for strict fixed dialogue selections, much like how you’d interact with large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, though responses won’t be as sophisticated.
During Gamescom 2024, NVIDIA and Mecha Break demonstrated the tech by having the player interact with an NPC by simply talking to it via a microphone. Responses are relevant and fast, though it’s hard to shake the feeling that the conversation feels very artificial – as if you’re talking to Apple’s Siri voice assistant. The demo also saw the character giving the player advice on choosing the right mech and weapon loadouts for certain types of missions, which is pretty cool.
One thing to note is that ACE NIM will only work on NVIDIA’s RTX AI GPUs. While Mecha Break does support AMD GPUs, users on other systems will be missing out on this tech, though we doubt that conversing with generative AI-powered NPCs won’t be the thing you should be looking forward to in a mech-based shooting game.
Apart from Mecha Break, game publisher and developer Perfect World Games also showcased NVIDIA ACE with its digital human technology tech demo, Legends (shown above). This provides the in-game character Yun Ni the ability to see gamers as well as identify people and objects in the real world through a camera. Totally not creepy.
(Source: NVIDIA [official blog])
