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Comment by rl3 | Hacker News Reader

This is amazing. It should even be possible to have characters traverse obstacles differently depending on their in-game skill level.

Imagine this system used to implement rock climbing. The player is simply pressing the "W" key to go up, but depending on their character's skill level the speed and manner in which traversal occurs could be very different.

I really hope Bethesda is paying attention to this, because open world games could use it more than anything. In Skyrim you climb mountains by mashing the jump button. Far from ideal, and tends to break immersion.

The tech could even be used to power melee animations some day, perhaps entire fighting styles.

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Fully agreed. While Skyrim Horse Physics™ was entertaining in its own way, something like the OP would be a huge leap forward for immersion.

It would likely have secondary effects of easing the burden on animators, allowing them to concentrate on more important aspects of the game, like facial interactions.

(Looking at you, BioWare.)

That's a good point. I suspect neural nets would be suitable for near-perfect lip syncing animations that aren't too expensive.

We can already synthesize the speech itself to the point it sounds real, although it's very computationally intensive at present. Infusing the speech with emotion remains very difficult. Some day voice actors will probably just license their likeness along with a sample of emotive recordings.

After that, one of the few remaining holy grails is generative dialog for NPCs that's both believable, dynamic in relation to the game world, and don't sound like glorified ELIZA bot output.

Neural nets can probably be used for level design today. One use case might be creating an entire urban environment complete with residential interiors, where the artists don't have to slave over each individual apartment for it to be believable. Imagine playing a war game where the levels look like there's actually people living there.

Speaking of emotive, synthesized speech: https://lyrebird.ai/demo

Clearly early days, but still, the promise is there.

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