Procedural Generation

This paper discusses the results of several original digital game design experiments where generative landscapes are created to reference states of consciousness. Their designs take inspiration from hypnagogic states, geographically-located psychic trauma and dream-states, unconscious player input, dissociative worlds, and landscapes as autonomous, emotional entities. This series is a work-in-progress that points to future paths in expressive generative landscape design.

Simulation of everyday situations from real life can be a very useful tool in entertainment applications and training systems. Such applications, as games or computer animated movies usually need to provide virtual environments populated with virtual autonomous agents. Commonly, the agents need to be able to evolve in their environment, avoiding collision with each other and obstacles, besides interacting with other characters in order to provide realistic simulations. We present a model to simulate coherent group behaviors based on procedural modeling and semantic environments. Our main focus is virtual environments and agents, present in the background of games or movies generated with few/without user intervention.

We present a method for generating social networks for gameworlds with very many characters. The method, a generalization of the approach we employ in Talk of the Town, operates from a simple principle: characters' affinities for one another evolve as a function of the compatibility of their personalities and the amount of time they spend together. By this principle, friendships emerge as compatible characters interact more extensively and enmities emerge as incompatible characters do so. Beyond platonic affinity, our method evolves romantic feelings by the same principle (applied to romantic considerations). How exactly compatibility is defined (e.g., by operationalizing psychological, sociological, or artistic theories) may vary according to the goals of a particular project. In this paper, we describe our method in generalized terms that are agnostic to our specific application of it, so that interested readers may implement it in their own systems.