Forging ahead
Inside the Ubisoft R&D department investigating AI’s potential throughout game development
How Ubisoft La Forge is harnessing AI to assist creators
Once upon a time, Yves Jacquier was a research engineer at CERN, working on the world’s largest particle detector as part of the Large Hadron Collider experiment. Since 2004, though, he has been at Ubisoft, rising through IT and production services to found La Forge: a crossdisciplinary R&D department with the goal of bridging the gap between academic research and videogame production. Where once we might have expected major game publishers to guard their technical innovations jealously, this is becoming increasingly common practice: Electronic Arts, for example, has its own equivalent called SEED. When La Forge was founded at Ubisoft Montreal in 2016, though, it was among the first of its kind.
Last year, the publisher expanded La Forge, introducing teams to its offices in Toronto, Shanghai, Chengdu and Bordeaux. The company claims that more than 90 technology prototypes have been developed by these teams, 42 of which have made it into Ubisoft’s games, and the group is behind around 25 academic publications in the field of AI and machine learning. Jacquier says that, although his group has worked on a range of topics, AI is one area to which it has dedicated considerable time.
For example, he says, La Forge has been working on an AI tool to warn programmers when they’re about to introduce a potential bug, as well as tools for AI-generated dialogue. “You need to make sure that if you have two people discussing in an open world, you do not hear the same sentences again and again,” he says. “And this can be daunting for writers, because if I’m asking you to create ten versions of two characters at the market selling or buying fish, at some point you might start lacking ideas.”
The result is a system known as Ghost Writer, being revealed to the world at GDC this year. The idea is that the writer provides a general intention, such as this market conversation, and the system will provide a stream of suggested dialogue from which they can pick. But it’s not about letting an AI generate dialogue on the fly during gameplay. “From a pure technical standpoint, we’re not there yet,” says Jacquier, who adds that the human should not be removed from the loop. “What makes any creation interesting is the human intention that is behind it. Our approach is not to assist the creation, it’s to assist the creator.”
Another system La Forge has created is Choreograph, which uses deep learning to create super-smooth animation. “You create a dataset of animations,” Jacquier explains, “and then Choreograph will generate the right animation, depending on the context. For example, [when] you’re pushing something or you’re getting close to a table, you can arrive from different angles way more naturally.” You’ve already seen the results: he adds that the system was used for the thirdperson view in Far Cry 6, as well as for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. La Forge also developed a system for automatically converting text to speech: “We included that in the Assassin’s Creed Discovery Tour as a blind test to see if people would notice.”
However, most of the things La Forge has worked on are of a more behind-the-scenes nature. Jacquier notes, for example, that the team has managed to automate the cleanup of motion-capture data, while quality assurance seems to have been a particular focus for the team. (News that might ring alarm bells for some, given that – as we write this – it’s being reported that EA has laid off 200 QA staffers at its Baton Rouge office.) The group has developed bots that will run through service games overnight to ensure that any content additions don’t provide unexpected exploits or break the core game in some way. “But we also have low-level testing, such as bots that go through the virtual world and see if we have drops in terms of memory and framerate.”
Looking ahead, Jacquier expects AI to be the key focus for his team. “We’re at a pivotal moment of La Forge where we need to help Ubisoft accelerate into that.” He sees collaboration with academia as the way forward, “not only AI researchers, but also people from social science”. And he foresees La Forge taking a much bigger role within Ubisoft: “If you think that all crafts that involve data are impacted by AI, it means basically all of our crafts. So we want to make sure that we are able to support those different crafts with the right tooling, with the right training, but also by creating new skills, like data engineering for animators, for voice designers, for character designers. That’s really what we should be focusing on during the next three years.”
“If you think that all crafts that involve data are impacted by AI, it means basically all of our crafts”