LEVERAGING LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLING FOR NEXT-GENERATION GAMING EXPERIENCES: A Holistic Approach to Virtual World Design

Designing a virtual environment within a digital game occupies a large part of the design procedure, requiring holistic attention and a broad arrangement of the game constituents. Considering other design disciplines, they occupy a unified design methodology; however, a comprehensive literature review reveals the lack of the intended design methodology in the digital game domain's virtual environment development, despite a currently proposed theoretical methodology trying to dissolve the issue. Hence, this research aims to determine the industry's requirements and provide a set of assets included in current digital games as an initial step of providing such a design methodology for the domain. In this regard, the researchers reverse-engineered ten selected digital games, understanding the current condition of digital games via adopting the mentioned currently available design methodology. This dataset reveals a lack in the assets of the story layer in the recent digital games, despite their focus on being story-based. This dilemma leads to long text or speech conversations between game characters, disrupting the players while following the game. The current design focuses on environmental resources only, however, as a virtual landscape, the story needs to be reinforced to be a balanced and well-designed game. Hence, increasing the ratio of the assets in this layer will advance the games' interactivity. Also, as future work, this data set could pave the way for a digital game industry design tool regarding the virtual environment

URBAN DESIGN ANALYSIS OF NEW YORK CITY’S VIRTUAL MODEL - THE CASE OF TOM CLANCY’S THE DIVISION

People have started spending time with digital tools and virtual worlds to escape reality\u27s horrors. However, designed spaces are more than the players\u27 needs, especially those digital games that their stories involve urban environments. This inefficiency causes spending futile efforts both in time and cost for the digital games\u27 productions; The urban environments in these digital games are replicas of real-world cities. Some companies use some techniques for downgrading replicas. Therefore, this study aims to uncover the used techniques for designing Tom Clancy\u27s The Division (2016). By using reverse engineering methodology and qualitative comparative analysis, the in-game map compared with the real-world map. Based on the results, the used techniques allowed the designers to scale down the game environment to be 2.5 times smaller than the actual city. Rather, verisimilitude is achieved by combining sufficiently accurate elements to give the impression of complete accuracy. By implementing the results of this research, designers can develop smaller replicas to be perceived as more extensive

Procedural Infinite Terrain Generation

Käesolevas bakalaureusetöös kirjeldatakse müraalgoritme nagu väärtusmüra, Perlini müra ja simpleksmüra ning nende praktilisi rakendusi pseudolõpmatu maastiku genereerimiseks. Töös kirjeldatav autori loodud maastiku genereerimise algoritm genereerib mitmekülgset maastikku, jagades maailma bioomide ehk makroökosüsteemide vahel ning seejärel kujundades neid erineva pinnase, maastiku kuju ning taimkattega. Algoritm on implementeeritud programmeerimiskeeles C# ja mängumootoriga Unity loodud rakendusena.This Bachelor’s thesis describes several noise algorithms such as value noise, Perlin noise and simplex noise and their practical applications in generation of pseudo-infinite terrains. The described generation algorithm generates diverse landscape by dividing the world between different biomes and then shapes the terrain and determines the ground material and flora depending on the biome. The algorithm is available as an application written in C# using the Unity game engine

Evoluindo representações de mapas para o jogo Cube 2 : Sauerbraten

Monografia (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Departamento de Ciência da Computação, 2015.Este trabalho apresenta alternativas às representações de mapas introduzidos no artigo “Evolving Interesting Maps for a First Person Shooter”, de Luigi Cardamone et al.. Representação de mapas é utilizado para facilitar ou diminuir os custos de desenvolvimento para Jogos de Tiro em Primeira Pessoa. Para esta monografia, desenvolvemos quatro representações de mapas que aderem as técnicas de projeto de níveis do jogo Cube 2: Sauerbraten (C2) descritas por Marc Saltzman em Secrets of the sages: Level design. Visando possibilitar a comparação das representações, implementamos três das quatro representações de mapas descritas em “Evolving Interesting Maps for a First Person Shooter” bem como as representações propostas nesta monografia. Dessa forma, tornouse possível realizar experimentos de comparação baseadas nas mesmas métricas e testes usados por Luigi Cardamone et al.. Os resultados das comparações demonstram que as representações de mapas desenvolvidas para esta monografia podem ser utilizadas como alternativas as descritas em “Evolving Interesting Maps for a First Person Shooter”.This work attempts to create alternative map representations to the ones presented in the research “Evolving Interesting Maps for a First Person Shooter” [5] utilized to facilitate or lessen the development costs of First Person Shooter (FPS)es. We propose four representations that follow the design techniques for the game Cube 2: Sauerbraten (C2) as described by [36], these will be compared to three of the four map representations described in [5] with the same metrics and tests. These comparisons gave us results that show that our map representations can be used as viable alternatives to the ones described in

VIRTUAL LANDSCAPE IN SERIOUS GAMES: A FRAMEWORK FOR ENHANCING THE PLAYER INTERACTION FOCUSING ON THE LEARNING RATE

Throughout history, education has always been essential for humanity's justice and fundamental for the creation of a free and satisfying society with the dissemination of knowledge. Hence, in addition to the life occurrences educating people, traditional higher education methods have played an important role for a long period. However, the age of technology has changed the educational system along with the people's lifestyles to meet the continuously changing conditions. During the past twenty years, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) led to the emergence of e-learning non-traditional educational methods bringing about an innovative dimension of virtual learning. With its beneficial features provided by the Internet and various technologies, this method passes the control of time and location from the tutors to the students during the learning process. Despite the entrance of online education into the students' life many years ago, the Covid-19 outbreak initiated in 2020 turned this method into the only possible way of education for almost two years. Afterward, plenty of studies investigated its effects on students' social and academic life, mostly considering its negative impacts on their mental health and motivation due to interaction issues. They also pointed out the specific problems of tactile learner students in the lack of face-to-face design courses. As an innovative solution able to be adopted, game technologies, increasing immersion of the learner in a real-world skill, and triggering motivation are one of the best methods integrated into educational systems. Known as serious games, these games, adopted by almost any domain, convey educational content along with entertainment, increasing interaction. They train or enhance a certain skill or topic to the player by immersing them. While serious games are more expanded nowadays, they are still not being played by the mass public due to people's immersiveness expectations of a game. Hence, the Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), with their emergence, increased the players' engagement and immersion with all types of virtual environments in digital games. This technology, however, evolved serious games area most, among others, by enabling the opportunity to provide a riskless and low-cost learning environment for real-world skills. In the process of suggesting serious games as a replacement for the traditional educational methods, the most important factor is being aware of their effectiveness for education. Generally, digital games, one of the world's biggest and fastest-growing industries, rely heavily on the virtual landscape, a major part of its development process. Its design demands remarkable effort, and it directly affects the whole game's characteristics. Hence, serious games, as a type of digital game, carry the same attributes. With the appearance of virtual reality technology, gaming started to gain more immersiveness and engagement with artificial elements and environments. Although virtual landscapes were always being developed since the emergence of digital games, the studies taking virtual landscapes into account are mostly using them as a tool for enhancing real spaces, not as a domain for the sake of its development. While other design domains are applying various design methodologies, it is challenging to find a standard design methodology for the design and production of virtual landscapes in the gaming industry, leading to inconsistent and low-quality results. Hence, it comes to the question of what is the virtual landscapes' role in serious games and their effect on the data comprehension rate. Since the literature lacks regarding the gradual change of the virtual landscape in serious games and the content they transmit, this thesis aims to figure out the gradual chronological evolution of the virtual landscapes in serious games. It also aims to seek how this change and the virtual reality technology invention have affected the contents transmitted by digital games and its influence on the player interaction and learning rate. To do so, in the process of this thesis, we developed, tested, and evaluated various serious games, both text-based and with 360° photos. The steps taken revealed the reluctance of the players to follow the providing educational content and their inadequacy of interaction. Hence, the thesis seeks the reasons ending to this result and the ways of increasing this learning rate. Afterward, the thesis uses a currently available but not massively used digital game classification methodology. This methodology, which is based on the principles of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning, classifies the games based on their constituting virtual landscapes. Hence, the thesis considers all Steam games, one of the biggest video game digital distribution services, filtered with the 'education' tag, ending in 2531 digital games. Afterward, adding the 'game' tag the result reduced to 1102 games. Finally, with some manual filterings ignoring the irrelevant content, the final number decreased to 702. Sorting chronologically, we made an Excel database including the games' introductory information, the content they transmit, their release date, if they support HMD or not, and whether they are simulation games or not. Due to Steam's dating spectrum, our database includes games dating back from 1992 to 2020. Afterward, we classified all of these games using the virtual landscape classification methodology and generated their related codes based on their player scale, story, dimension, space shape, and interaction level. Investigating the results, they revealed some growth patterns relating to the content educated in the game, the VR technology, and the virtual landscape evolution. Adding the user reviews of Steam, we reverse engineered five of the best serious games on the database due to the digital game design methodology. This methodology divides the games' virtual environment into five layers, namely, player activity map (PAM), story layer, natural environment layer, virtual environment layer, and media layer. Reverse engineering the five best digital games ever, based on the IGN database, enabled us to compare the outcomes. Due to released data, we understand how the games' assets are distributed within the various layers of the virtual environment in the most successful games. Finally, the thesis aims to provide a framework based on these results for developing serious games to increase player interaction and enhance the learning rate. However, these results can be expanded to any virtual landscape other than only serious games' for their interaction enhancement. Currently, the landscape architecture domain only adopts the virtual landscape area as a tool for enhancing design in the real world. However, in the near future, landscape architects will perform in the virtual landscape area as a domain to be enhanced. Hence, that day, the results of this study will play an important role and will be a roadmap for generating highly interactive virtual landscapes