Ubisoft reveals Commit Assistant – AI driven bug fixing

Ubisoft reveals Commit Assistant - AI driven bug fixing

Ubisoft reveals Commit Assistant – AI driven bug fixing

Today’s software can be incredibly complex, especially in the gaming world and interactions become more varied, maps become larger, and graphics become more detailed. It is easy to see how mistakes can occur within such complicated software; developers are only human after all, leaving a considerable amount of both time and expense dedicated to bug fixing and code edits. 

Ubisoft La Forge is Ubisoft’s dedicated researching arm, originating from co-liberations with universities and other production teams to design and create new technology for developers, accelerating research and development within the company. La Forge has officially revealed Commit Assistant, an AI-driven tool which is designed to look into game code and spot bugs or regressions before they are committed to a project. 

Commit Assistant uses Deep Learning techniques to analyse past bugs and regressions to quickly spot new issues, with Ubisoft claiming that their software can catch 6 out of 10 bugs with 30% of hits being a false alarm. This AI is impressive for Ubisoft’s first effort, and like other AIs it will learn as Ubisoft provides it with more information to analyse, adding more bugs and regressions to the database and highlighting any false alarms. This process will teach the AI what to look for and tell it where it has gotten it wrong, allowing it to adapt and become better at spotting bugs.

Even more impressive is Commit Assist’s ability to spot areas where bugs are likely to occur, while also suggesting potential edits. With this software, Ubisoft believes that they can save 20% of their programmers time, allowing games to be created faster and with fewer bugs in the pipeline. 

  

 

Ubisoft says that bug squashing can cost as much as 70% of a game’s development costs, making the use of AI to accelerate this phase a potential gamechanger for high-cost AAA releases. 

Commit Assist has only started to make its way to Ubisoft’s development teams, so there is currently no data available on how useful this tool is in the wild. There is the potential that developers will not like this tool, as it effectively acts like a nagging aunt that reads over your shoulder and says “you’re doing that wrong”. 

Ubisoft wants to create more AI tools in the future to enhance video game development, though at this time it is unknown how widely the publisher intends to adopt this new technology. Will we see an AI created game in the future? (Probably not) 

You can join the discussion on Ubisoft’s creation of an AI bug catching tool on the OC3D Forums. 

Special Thanks to Warchild for the spot.Â