ABSTRACT
World maps contribute a significant part of the interactivity and entertainment to modern video games. While large-scale industrial world map generation tools exist, their use usually implies a substantial learning curve, and the cost of licences restricts the accessibility of these tools to individual game developers.
In this paper, we introduce a world map generator for Unity-based games that exploits model-based techniques. After the game-specific concepts of the world map are captured and turned into a metamodel, the world map generation problem is first formulated as a consistent graph generation problem solved by a state-of-the-art model generator. This graph model is subsequently refined into a concrete world within the Unity game engine by (1) mapping the abstract graph elements into Unity game objects and (2) creating a height map based on user-defined properties with the Perlin Noise technique. Demonstration video: https://youtu.be/03BbD61EKpk
- Tarn Adams and Zach Adams. 2011. Dwarf Fortress. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Architecture and Design, Object number 1748.2012, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/164920.Google Scholar
- Jonathon Doran and Ian Parberry. 2010. Controlled procedural terrain generation using software agents. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 2, 2 (2010), 111--119.Google ScholarCross Ref
- World Machine Software LLC. 2020. World Machine. https://www.world-machine.com/Google Scholar
- Andrew Pech, Philip Hingston, Martin Masek, and Chiou Peng Lam. 2015. Evolving Cellular Automata for Maze Generation. In Artificial Life and Computational Intelligence, Stephan K. Chalup, Alan D. Blair, and Marcus Randall (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 112--124.Google Scholar
- Ken Perlin. 1985. An image synthesizer. ACM Siggraph Computer Graphics 19, 3 (1985), 287--296.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mike Preuss, Antonios Liapis, and Julian Togelius. 2014. Searching for good and diverse game levels. In 2014 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games. IEEE, 1--8.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Oszkár Semeráth, Rebeka Farkas, Gábor Bergmann, and Dániel Varró. 2020. Diversity of graph models and graph generators in mutation testing. International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer 22, 1 (2020), 57--78.Google ScholarCross Ref
- O. Semeráth, A. A. Babikian, S. Pilarski, and D. Varró. 2019. VIATRA Solver: A Framework for the Automated Generation of Consistent Domain-Specific Models. In 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion). 43--46.Google Scholar
- Ruben Michaël Smelik, Tim Tutenel, Klaas Jan de Kraker, and Rafael Bidarra. 2011. A declarative approach to procedural modeling of virtual worlds. Computers & Graphics 35, 2 (2011), 352--363.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Anthony J Smith and Joanna J Bryson. 2014. A logical approach to building dungeons: Answer set programming for hierarchical procedural content generation in roguelike games. In Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Convention of the AISB.Google Scholar
- Gillian Smith. 2015. An Analog History of Procedural Content Generation. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, José Pablo Zagal, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, and Julian Togelius (Eds.). Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games.Google Scholar
- Thomas Smith, Julian Padget, and Andrew Vidler. 2018. Graph-Based Generation of Action-Adventure Dungeon Levels Using Answer Set Programming. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 52, 10 pages.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Unity Technologies. 2020. Unity. https://unity.com/Google Scholar
- Julian Togelius, Mike Preuss, and Georgios N. Yannakakis. 2010. Towards Multiobjective Procedural Map Generation. In Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games (Monterey, California) (PCGames '10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 3, 8 pages.Google Scholar
- Dániel Varró, Gábor Bergmann, Ábel Hegedüs, Ákos Horváth, István Ráth, and Zoltán Ujhelyi. 2016. Road to a Reactive and Incremental Model Transformation Platform: Three Generations of the VIATRA Framework. Softw. Syst. Model. 15, 3 (July 2016), 609--629.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Breno MF Viana and Selan R dos Santos. 2019. A Survey of Procedural Dungeon Generation. In 2019 18th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames). IEEE, 29--38.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Wikipedia contributors. 2020. List of games using procedural generation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_using_procedural_generationGoogle Scholar
- Ken Xu and Damian Campeanuy. 2014. Houdini Engine: Evolution towards a Procedural Pipeline. In Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium on Digital Production (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) (DigiPro '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 13--18.Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Automated video game world map synthesis by model-based techniques
Recommendations
The interplay between immersion and appeal in video games
A 2í 2 study on immersion and appeal of video games is presented.Immersion and appeal are found to be highly related.Immersion is found to be unaffected by playing experience.Appeal is found to be affected both by game played and playing experience. ...
Is cheating a human function? The roles of presence, state hostility, and enjoyment in an unfair video game
In sports and board games, when an opponent cheats, the other players typically greet it with disdain, anger, and disengagement. However, work has yet to fully address the role of the computer cheating in video games. In this study, participants played ...
Automated Evaluation of Game Experience based on Game Dynamics and Motives for Play
CHI PLAY '22: Extended Abstracts of the 2022 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in PlayThis paper describes an automated evaluation of the overall game experience using a synthetic agent, that we contextualize for First-Person Shooter games. This evaluation method is based on the characterization of the game experience through dynamics ...
Comments