Extensible Multi-domain Generation of Virtual Worlds using Blackboards

Abstract

Abstract:Procedural generation of large virtual worlds remains a challenge, because current procedural methods mainly focus on generating assets for a single content domain, such as height maps, trees or buildings. Furthermore current approaches for multi-domain content generation, i.e. generating complete virtual environments, are often too ad-hoc to allow for varying design constraints from creatives industries such as the development of video games. In this paper, we propose a multi-domain procedural generation method that uses modularized, single-domain generation methods that interact on the data level while operating independently. Our method uses a blackboard architecture specialized to fit the needs of procedural content generation. We show that our approach is extensible to a wide range of use cases of virtual world generation and that manual or procedural editing of the generated content of one generator is automatically communicated to the other generators, which ensures a consistent and coherent virtual world. Furthermore, the blackboard approach automatically reasons about the generation process which allows 52% to 98% of the activations, i.e. executions of the single-domain content generators, to be discarded without compromising the generated content, resulting in better performing large world generation.