If I turned to Ken Moss, chief know-how officer at Electronic Arts, and requested him if at some point his tech will let me add my aware right into a digital utopia – I wager he’d look me sq. within the eyes and inform me sure. In an official EA blog post announcing Project Atlas, he mentions virtually all the things else.
Project Atlas can be a game improvement platform powered by cloud computing and futuristic AI. Moss hopes that devs will use it to create hyper-personalised “living, breathing worlds that constantly evolve”, the place your chats with NPCs are “virtually indecipherable from a human interaction”. Presuming all this really works.
Here’s the place Moss describes undertaking Atlas most clearly:
“Project Atlas is designed to seamlessly converge EA’s Frostbite game engine and game services as well as artificial intelligence — giving rise to a new game development platform, optimized for a cloud-enabled world. This will be a fully integrated platform, capable of building the scalable, social, and large-scale experiences of the future. So, while in the past, features like cloud hosting, matchmaking, marketplace, data, AI, achievements, and social were separate from the development tools in the engine, the Project Atlas platform will be able to implement all of these services natively within a unified solution.”
It’s a really attention-grabbing publish. Moss begins by describing electrical desires that make Star Citizen’s objectives look modest, then goes on to speak about how Project Atlas will deliver collectively varied nascent applied sciences right into a creation engine that appears like its been ripped from science fiction.
Yet that overwhelming grandeur coalesces into little greater than underwhelming pants. Pants sewn from buzzwords.
EA say they’ve been “developing software that utilizes the cloud to remotely process and stream blockbuster, multiplayer HD games with the lowest possible latency”, however cloud computing in that vein has been round for yonks. It’s marrying this to as but non-existent AI that excites Moss, “blurring the lines between the discrete domains of game engines and game services. In fact, it is the merging of these two formerly distinct domains, along with the paradigm of cloud gaming, that is a key driver of the next-generation unified platform from EA.” It’s tough to pinpoint what which means.
Let’s return to the grandeur. Among different fantasies, Moss discusses how Atlas would possibly ship multiplayer open worlds with “infinite scalability from the cloud”, and “hyper-realistic destruction within new HD games, that is virtually indistinguishable from real life”.
They’ve acquired “over 1000 EA employees working on building it every day”, in line with Moss. I’m genuinely glad there are folks on the market with humongous assets and their sights set excessive, however I’m a bit nervous they’re craning their heads to this point upwards their necks would possibly fall off.
That aim of reality-level nuance and constancy permeates the publish: “Designers will within seconds generate not just a single mountain, but a series of mountains and all the surrounding environment with the realism of the real-world”. If you’ve ever dreamt about one thing that appeared technologically inconceivable in a game, chances are high its coated right here.
When Moss provides a particular instance of a sensible, AI-powered interplay with an NPC, he chooses – of all issues – contextual sports activities commentary if you make a particular play in Madden. The lead-up to this merely mentions “leveraging AI and machine learning”:
“So, instead of a pre-scripted, pattern-based logic for NPC behavior, this would make it possible for an NPC to engage in a way that is dynamic, contextual and absolutely believable. For example, imagine that you’re playing Madden, and you’ve just thrown your second interception of the game against the same cover 2 defense that caused the first turnover. Instead of the commentator simply stating that you threw a pick, the AI enables contextual, real-time commentary to reference the fact that you’re throwing to the sideline against a cover 2 defense and should have thrown against the weak zone over the middle to your tight end, who was open on the route. This would certainly push the game into a greater level of contextual and experiential realism. The AI is working with your gameplay. It’s responding to your needs as a player.”
So a lot hinges on pie within the sky AI: “When AI is available everywhere, developers will use it to optimize almost any element of a game — from the distribution of resources in an online shooter, to populating and evolving expansive virtual worlds with minimal manual intervention, to unlocking deep personalization of in-game agents at scale.”
The concept that algorithms would possibly turn into able to moulding experiences utilizing a deep understanding of particular person preferences isn’t one to dismiss out of hand. AI exists proper now with the disturbing functionality to build and act on personality profiles harvested from mass data. That functionality for manipulation is frightening, however those self same capabilities might be used to anticipate wishes and craft worlds, experiences and artwork that hones in on private style. It’s one thing I can get fairly enthusiastic about it, in the fitting context – however this soup of selling jargon isn’t one in every of them.
It’s all ambition, grand statements about glistening palaces of AI achievement with a murky view of the trail to succeed in them. But if EA wish to set greater than a thousand folks marching down that path, I gained’t complain. If they maintain marching lengthy sufficient, they’re sure to succeed in someplace at some point.
