The South Korean company NCSOFT mainly deals with the creation of MMORPG games. At the ongoing GDC 2023 event, they just unveiled a new game they are working on. The presented trailer of “Project M” shows the company’s latest technological achievements in the field of creating digital people. The game will be based on a new graphics engine from Epic Games – Unreal Engine 5. In turn, it is intended to debut on consoles.

At the GDC 2023 event, NCSOFT presented a trailer for a new game called Project M. Its main distinguishing feature is the technology used to create digital people and the game is based on Unreal Engine 5.

Unreal Engine 5.2 – a technological demo of the latest version of the graphics engine was shown at GDC 2023

NCSOFT is known for such titles as Aion, Lineage or Blade & Soul. This time the company decided to focus more on developed characters and the use of technological innovations. At the beginning of the trailer, we see a digitally created character of Creative Director (CCO) Taekjin Kim. The technology itself using artificial intelligence algorithms has quite a lot of potential. The character’s voice was completely generated by a synthesizer, taking into account the original accent and emotions. Watching the video, you have to admit that it’s pretty well done. Recently, one of our readers mentioned on the topic of Unreal Engine 5 that after the demonstration of possibilities, now it’s time to “lip-sync with audio (different languages) without having to generate materials for each character separately”. As it turns out, we didn’t have to wait long, because this feature is also present here.

AMD FSR 2.2 is now available as a plug-in for the Unreal Engine

The entire digitally generated face is based on the proprietary Voice-to-Face technology. Not only are the facial expressions and facial animations associated with them generated automatically, but the algorithms adjust the mouth movements to the spoken words. It will certainly (but not only) contribute to faster video game development. It is also possible to change the storyline depending on our choices in the game. NCSOFT describes Project M as their “most ambitious project to date”. For its implementation, the technology of 3D scanning, VFX effects and motion capture is used. At the moment, no approximate release date has been given. However, it can be expected that a game using such technologies will turn out to be a show of current possibilities at worst.

Source: TechPowerUp