How to Make AI NPCs in Unreal

Galaxy Shop is a demo that we whipped together to show how AI-driven characters could be integrated into a game. Galaxy Shop features a classic merchant NPC. But unlike most NPCs, AI-driven characters from Inworld are capable of generative dialogue and can respond to any question a player has. In this tutorial, you'll see how easy it is to create characters in Inworld and integrate them into your Unreal project. Since we're focused on powering the characters' brains and dialogue, we used Unreal's MetaHuman for the visuals.
For the nitty gritty of setting up your Unreal integration, check out our documentation here: docs.inworld.ai/docs/tutorial...
Props to our technical creative director, Matthew Kim, for hacking this demo together during nights and weekends where he learned Unreal from KZbin tutorials just like this one.

[@GG-cn6es]

imagine a GTA game where all the NPCs talk and act like real people.

[@jak3legacy]

Right now the compute needed for that kind of scale is out of reach. But it's interesting to think about the implications in the future! Something at that level is probably more GTA 7 or 8 than GTA 6.

[@metahimik]

ну да, просто каждому NPC разработчикам нужно прописать промпты с описанием их характера и будет вообще крутизна неописуемая - можно на улицу не выходить - круче всяких Симпсов

[@stanpikaliri1621]

Finally something in the right direction.

[@RichardServello]

Based on that slider you made him more peaceful.

[@Melodic_Analysis]

One of these days we will get to a final boss in a game, and rather than fight them they will give us step by step instructions on how to make a tonkotsu ramen 😂

[@JohnyK07]

5:45 Nice reference xD I was half expecting him to then waddle away... waddle waddle

[@AlexChee]

Awesome!

[@NgnMark]

Super cool :)

[@archcast5550]

Dude!! Subscribing!

[@lindage8661]

I didn't understand too well? What the video shows is that after defining the trigger conditions and results in Inword, the conditions (language, behavior) and results (emotion change, language response) are then implemented in unreal as a behavior tree? Wouldn't it be the same to write such conditions and results directly in unreal? What is the difference between them?

[@wackcrewpeeps]

All the results are defined in the studio web interface but the conditions and triggers are entirely designed/made in unreal.

[@rerere284]

Out of curiosity, how does it handle one-few-many types of situations with what the player is doing? e.g. If the player has the ability to summon a dog, and a goal action is triggered for each dog spawned. does the AI automatically respond differently for 1 vs 10 vs 100 dogs summoned if there's only one goal action for summoning a dog, or do you have to set multiple types of responses and have an external script keep track of the magnitude? ( when dog spawned -> if floor(log(#dogs)) is different from previous value -> send different custom event depending on floor(log(#dogs)) ) or maybe change the goal action instruction depending on #dogs ? I'm just imagining the npcs in skyrim not reacting to filling a room with cheese wheels, and I'm not sure if this AI by default it would react to 100 any differently than reacting to 1 without code relating to log(#cheese)

[@wackcrewpeeps]

That's up to you as the developer to decide! At the moment we don't support dynamic goal setting but you could set up a "single dog" "some dogs" and "tons of dogs" goal which gets triggered from game logic depending on how many dogs are summoned.

[@thatboydillz]

Is their a way to implement dialogue text and dialogue choices from in world for people who can't use a mic or would prefer maybe some RPG dialogue that's more traditional. Id like my players to have options. Is that weird? Should I stick with open ended and responsive dialogue show in this and other videos?

[@inworldai]

Our SDKs allow both text and voice chat options. You can likely customize the integration to create chat options but we don't have that as a feature. Our SDK is very flexible. I'd recommend asking this question in our Discord as some of our users might have already tried that and might have suggestions.

[@benblaumentalism6245]

Could you please release a video that comprehensively covers body animations for InworldMetahumans?

[@inworldai]

I'll add this to our tutorial wish list.

[@LeighElliott78]

Does Inworld have support for 3rd party audio? It would be good to explore other text-to-speech or speech-to-speech options to create NPCs with more realistic voices. The demo voices out of the box sound very robotic.

[@Dante02d12]

From what I seen, the tts is a component in UE. That means you can decide not to use it, and use another tts component.

[@benblaumentalism6245]

I have my Inworld account linked to my ElevenVoice account. That works great.

[@niolink954]

Can this system trigger events? For example, if I want a character to start combat with the player if the Player insults them, can I make it trigger a "StartCombat" event?

[@inworldai]

You can! Check out scene triggers to add immediate context to a change. We also have goals and actions under experimental features. Would love to hear your feedback on these.

[@bryanmourier30]

@@inworldai that is crazyyy thanks man !

[@eloirivera394]

is there a way to have 1 character on multiple Character in game with different names for the town people to be interactive or do i have to create each and every character thats in town like the example your doing in your video instead of making 5 other shop characters i can just use that single one for all shops but they each have their own name

[@inworldai]

Right now to do that, you can copy and paste the character descriptions into different characters with different names. You can also create auto-generated characters -- a new feature. So, if you just add the character description when creating a new character, we'll automatically create a similar character for you. You would have to tweak it a bit. There are plans to be able to clone characters in the future, but we don't currently offer that functionality. I hope that helps!

[@eloirivera394]

How do I get the ai to only respond when the player talks I messing with it now the ai just keeps talks stops talks stops talks endlessly till I back a way from it this is in vr

[@inworldai]

@@eloirivera394 Good question. Sometimes if you have the audio turned up too loud it can hear itself and then talks to itself. You could try turning down your audio and see if that helps. I'll submit this as a potential bug, just in case though and let you know what I hear back!

[@jaaj1236]

Hello, can I use this for interactions in spanish?

[@inworldai]

Hi Alejandro, currently we're focused on support for English, but we hope to expand to other languages in future.

[@eloirivera394]

anyway to trigger custom event when talking to AI

[@inworldai]

Yes! We have a video that shows how to do that. It's called Create AI NPCs: Advanced Character Creation Bootcamp -- it's the second part of a two part series that takes you through our core functionalities!

[@eloirivera394]

@@inworldai a way to run Custom event when i ask the npc I want to Buy or What do you have for sell then i can just run a custom event that opens up my Shop UI

[@eloirivera394]

Using just your voice no triggers if not is that some you guy plan on adding in

[@siddharthpaul6539]

why my npc is not talking!!!!😫😫😫😫😫😫😫😫😫😫

[@inworldai]

If you're still having difficulties, I recommend joining Discord as we provide support through that channel. We're happy to answer your questions there.

[@GodSeed666]

So far I have tried this and convai and both are completely unstable at best, and unrealistically expensive for a real game. Gamers have no patience so when an NPC takes five minutes to respond or simply goes silent for a long period of time its game over for the games reputation..

[@inworldai]

We tend to have extremely low latency on our interactions. If you're having issues with latency, please report them in our Discord and we'll help you solve them or fix the bug that might be causing them.

[@Syntox94]

2kliksphilip =)

[@metahimik]

Dude, please buy a mic with a damper or put it off the table so that the clatter of the keyboard does not clutter your voice)