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Darryl Long can not do his Ultima IV, his favorite game of his training period. He is therefore working on artificial intelligence and cloud computing to help other designers and developers of Ubisoft Entertainment to create their Ultima IV.
Long is managing director of Ubisoft Winnipeg, which the French publisher opened last year. Winnipeg is a kind of headquarters for the company's efforts in artificial intelligence and cloud computing. These technologies allow Ubisoft to use its 32 studios worldwide – as one of its representatives said, the sun never sets on Ubisoft – to work on gigantic gaming worlds such as Assassin & # 39. Creed: Odyssey and online live-service games such as The Division. II.
Artificial intelligence helps animators and artists to break free, allowing them to do more than work on grassy areas and other mundane tasks. You can designate a zone and define boundaries. The artificial intelligence will fill it with grass and trees resembling an artist, and will use foliage adapted to the terrain and environmental conditions, even to erosion. Or, someone at Ubisoft Bucharest can work on a stage and another Montreal designer can watch the material while the Romanian studio continues to produce it.
I found it fascinating and Long introduced me to some of the basic principles of Winnipeg's work at a meeting of the 2019 Game Developers Conference. Here is a revised transcript of our interview.
Far from before
GameBeat: You talked about procedural algorithms. Looking at the latest games released by Ubisoft, what can you say when you used a procedural algorithm to do certain things?
Darryl Long: The best example I can give is Far Cry 5 because I produced Far Cry 5. I just did it recently. There is a gentleman named Etienne Carrier. He made a presentation at GDC last year, specifically on this topic. The most important thing I can tell you is the vegetation in our worlds. Back on the previous games of Far Cry, we had a system to place trees and shrubs and all the rest of the world, then we added the possibility of placing rocks and creating a decoration for the forest. The artists needed to draw the boundaries of this region by hand. It was a lot of work. What we did is that we automated this by using procedural algorithms. We would take the ground of the world and simulate how much light it received, how much moisture it received, what were the temperature gradients, etc., and what types of trees were growing there, what types of shrubs and shrubs, grass and whatever. And then, determine how much they would grow, even here. Something with a lot of wind, trees do not grow very high. The vegetation in Far Cry 5, the vast majority of it was built using a procedural algorithm complying with these rules.
GamesBeat: So, for example, here is a meadow, and the algorithm would know that the grass would grow so high and the trees would be as high depending on how the wind would go down the mountain to the west.
Long: Absolutely. Even further than that, he would decide where the meadow should go sometimes.
GamesBeat: Based on the terrain of the region?
Long: It could be that. It could be – on the flanks of these mountains in Montana, grasslands tend to descend at the height of erosion along the side of the mountain. Then the trees grow more in the valleys between them. These are rules that are programmed in the procedural algorithm, then he knows these things and generates a terrain. It's strong enough to keep them cool and make sure they do not feel repetitive.
GamesBeat: Would it also apply to Far Cry: New Dawn.
Long: I did not work on New Dawn, but we would absolutely – at Ubisoft, we want to make sure we do not reinvent the wheel all the time. Of course, we want to move technology from one game to another.
GamesBeat: Let's say that 10 years ago, a team of artists would achieve that by hand. Do not even talk about making the limits of the algorithm, but do everything by hand.
Long: Back on a game like "I try to come back far enough to remember what I was working on". It has never been published, but there is a game I worked on 15 or 16 years ago. When we make grass, we do not place each blade of grass specifically, but we make grass cards, as we call them. The grass cards were all placed by hand. An artist would say, I'm going to put a grass card here, a grass card here, and do a meadow that way. It has taken an incredible time, and of course, it limits the size of the world we can do. No one will want to create 16 meadows every day.
Above: This church went to the dogs.
Image Credit: Ubisoft
GamesBeat: And that limits what these artists can do from one to the other.
Long: Absolutely. I would much rather have an artist build a new mission or something, rather than placing blades of grass. It's about empowering our creators. If an artist can click a button and have grass everywhere, then decide how he wants to shape it and give it some feel afterwards, it's a tool that adds value. This improves the game that they can do. If we can create tools that allow them to say "I want a house" and they click a button to get an already built house filled with beds, tables, televisions and everything else, they can personalize. They can come in and tell a story. It's something artists can do, but machines can never do: tell a story. Put the soul in a creation that makes it really special and memorable for the player. When you enter an environment, a house or building, or something that was designed in a game, you immediately and unconsciously understand the story told in that scene. I do not believe that they are machines that can do it for us. They are artists.
GamesBeat: This also gives you the time and resources to talk to these geologists, meteorologists and herbalists to explain how these things behave in nature.
Long: For me, it was one of the highlights of Far Cry 5. Doing this kind of research has allowed us to meet people who understand how the world works and who take it into account. People came to see us and told us: I grew up in Montana and I feel like home.
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