Hi everyone.
We’re building an AI engine to power NPCs in Unreal. We’ve been working on it for a couple years, and would love to get feedback from some of the devs here.
Bitpart powers NPCs that navigate, interact with objects, and converse with each other. We’re inspired by games with big living worlds like RDR2, BG3, KCD, and want to make it easier for teams of any size to create worlds filled with engaging, autonomous NPCs. We’re focusing on use cases like ambient life, hub environments, smart crowds, narratives, and quests. We do not yet have the features required for combat, but plan to expand into combat in 2027.
Years ago, I built the AI for FEAR, which used a planning system called GOAP. FEAR’s system could sequence actions at runtime, allowing NPCs to adapt to player behavior, and to each other. Bitpart takes a similar approach, using a different form of planning.
This is a video that introduces our V0.4 release. Video starts by highlighting conditional behavior, followed by a 2 min general overview of Bitpart.
Coppola is our no-code authoring tool for non-experts to create behaviors with actions and dialogue. The tools are intended for designers & writers. The Bitpart runtime runs locally (no cloud connection). Our plugin on Fab includes the runtime SDK and our C++ library Aesop, which powers our AI Director.
Bitpart’s core runtime technology is an advanced HTN planning system. We are not using generative AI at runtime, and our tech runs on regular CPUs. Our HTN is unique in being both multi-agent and multi-modal, meaning we can plan & execute behaviors (Tasks) for multiple NPCs to interact, and behavior can fluidly mix dialogue and physical actions with objects. The Coppola authoring tool does include optional gen AI assistance to remove some of the manual labor involved in creating Tasks and Methods of an HTN, including both actions and dialogue.
Everything you need to get started with Bitpart is here: