Using semantics to improve the design of game worlds

Due to the recent advancement in procedural generation techniques, games are presenting players with ever growing cities and terrains to explore. However most sandbox-style games situated in cities, do not allow players to wander into buildings. In past research, space planning techniques have already been utilized to generate suitable layouts for both building floor plans and room layouts. We introduce a novel rule-based layout solving approach, especially suited for use in conjunction with procedural generation methods. We show how this solving approach can be used for procedural generation by providing the solver with a user-defined plan. In this plan, users can specify objects to be placed as instances of classes, which in turn contain rules about how instances should be placed. This approach gives us the opportunity to use our generic solver in different procedural generation scenarios. In this paper, we will illustrate mainly with interior generation examples.

@InProceedings { TSBD09a,
  author       = "Tutenel, Tim and Smelik, Ruben M. and Bidarra, Rafael and Kraker, Klaas Jan de ",
  title        = "Using semantics to improve the design of game worlds",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of AIIDE 2009 - 5th Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment",
  month        = "oct",
  year         = "2009",
  address      = "Stanford, CA",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2009/TSBD09a"
}