Character Engine (Spirit AI)

Does anybody knows something else about that Character Engine software than the information in the SpiritAI website? :thinking:

You can play Restless, a game Emily Short and her team made with it. She describes it as a small game that only uses a limited slice of the Character Engine’s capabilities, but it doesn’t feel that small to me.

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Thanks, Matt! I will take a look Ă–.Ă–

There’s some more about it in Conversation as Gameplay. And I think the game announcement post said that they’re opening it up for beta users, so you could contact them directly at the SpiritAI website…

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Oh hey! Yes, we’re doing a beta program currently that is open to IF folks, so if that interests you, let us know.

More generally: Character Engine consists of an SDK that can be plugged into Unity or Unreal (or treated as a standalone, if you’re comfortable with C++), plus an authoring tool. It is designed for writing characters you can interact with via dynamic menus as shown in Restless, or with natural language input more like a (rather advanced) chatbot.

As it happens, I’ve got a few posts about Character Engine lined up for my blog over the next few days, so if that interests you, stay tuned.

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That sounds wonderful! Is the work email address in the blog post still the way to go about this?

hello@spiritai.com will reach the person who is coordinating the beta program. (Or I can forward the email I receive, but this would likely be easier.)

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Thank you! Email sent!

…and the first of these posts is now live, on Spirit’s Medium account and cross-posted on my personal blog.

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…and a second one, about the natural language systems that we hook up to Character Engine. As before, it’s available from Spirit’s account and from my personal blog, but the personal blog version spends a little more time talking about how this approach compares with a conventional parser.

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This is exactly what I have been trying to do on my own (well, sort of). I am so happy I found this thread. For me it is the ability to adapt and learn. I want the “game” (though it may not be a game as such) to be able to sense real world information, from sensor networks, cameras, other peoples inputs, etc… and provide a representation we can learn from and tailor to our needs as it learns from user input (us and the external sources).

Hard to explain fully, but it builds on a previous industrial project that gave me the idea, but most of the basics were out of my reach (cost) or not invented yet. I definitely want to see if this can fit. I will probably start with a game. :wink:

Edit to add: In this sense, I am a hardware guy… forced to be a programmer because I design my own hardware or hardware combinations. My favorite programming language is solder with a bit level access to the internals. Yeah… sick mind. :sweat_smile:

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This is exciting:

If you wanted, you could build a set of classifiers that recognized standard text adventure commands like in the Inform library and hook those up to Character Engine, and use them either alone or in conjunction with more chat-focused understanding.