Procedural filters for customization of virtual worlds

Abstract

Designing virtual game worlds is often a long and laborintensive process. Moreover, when a game world needs to be slightly altered in appearance, the entire process needs to be repeated, or will at least require some repetitious tasks. Ideally, when the same game world is needed under different circumstances (e.g. in another season, before and after a war, in prosperous or poor economic conditions), the designer should be aided in this process using procedural generation techniques.We propose an approach for the specification of procedural filters that describe how (parts of) virtual worlds should be customized to fit a particular situation based on their semantics and the conditions of the situation. This description will guide the customization process by triggering and parametrizing, among others, procedural instructions that can change the appearance of the virtual world. We will discuss how the generic nature of this approach, which favors reusability, and its integration with semantics, which increases the intuitiveness of the design process, can eliminate many of the repetitious tasks involved in performing these actions manually.We describe an implementation of this approach that shows how some simple procedural filters can i) age an urban environment and simulate the effects of poor living conditions on the look of that environment, and ii) apply a party atmosphere to an ordinary office scene. Figure 1: The painting Girl with a pearl earring, by Delft painter Johannes Vermeer; from left to right: original photo, with an emboss filter applied, and with a patchwork filter applied. and Modeling]: Types of Simulation-Gaming

Designing Semantic Game Worlds

“…But a game might need the same world under different circumstances. Instead of forcing designers to manually rebuild every element of the game world all over again, we proposed the concept of using procedural filters [34]. Procedural filters provide a layer of customization that can be applied to a finished game world or the objects therein.…”

10 Years of the PCG workshop: Past and Future Trends

“…as 3D models of buildings, as interior placement of furniture [7] or decoration [106]. Often, the distinction between architecture and level design is difficult; for instance, settlement generation [39,74] is attributed to the latter while texture changes on a building [103] is grouped under architecture. The main criteria for the classification as generated architecture was based on fidelity with real-world patterns and the focus on aesthetic appeal rather than gameplay.…”

“…"Serious" games, or games with a purpose beyond entertainment, have been targeted by PCG workshop papers in the context of language learning [67], rehabilitation [3,22], training scenarios [52,59] and human computation [108]. Real-world simulations have also been common, simulating realistic urban planning [41,75,86,93], architecture & interior design [7,79,103], environments [1], locomotion [48] or economies [52].…”

Orchestrating Game Generation

“…According to the type of features needed in a game world, a large variety of procedural modeling methods and techniques have been proposed to generate them [10]. Most of the methods for generating visuals are based on computer graphics techniques; however, there have been a few attempts at AI-based generation of visuals, such as the evolution of graphic shaders toward a designer-specified color palette [11], procedural filters based on semantics for slight visual changes to modeled scenes [12], and evolution of arcade-style spaceships toward visual properties such as symmetry, simplicity, and other patterns [13].…”