299 research outputs found
Automatic generation of level maps with the do what's possible representation
© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Automatic generation of level maps is a popular form of automatic content generation. In this study, a recently developed technique employing the do what's possible representation is used to create open-ended level maps. Generation of the map can continue indefinitely, yielding a highly scalable representation. A parameter study is performed to find good parameters for the evolutionary algorithm used to locate high quality map generators. Variations on the technique are presented, demonstrating its versatility, and an algorithmic variant is given that both improves performance and changes the character of maps located. The ability of the map to adapt to different regions where the map is permitted to occupy space are also tested.Final Accepted Versio
Using genetic algorithms to find cellular automata rule sets capable of generating maze-like game level layouts
The video game industry has grown substantially over the last decade and the quality of video games has also been advancing rapidly. In recent years, video games have been advancing to a point that the increased time required to manually create their content is making this process too costly. This has made procedural content generation a desirable option for game developers due to its speed of generating content, and the variety of content that a single PCG method can produced.
The main purpose of this dissertation is to detail a new approach to procedurally generate video game level layouts, and to aid in further research in the area of procedural video game content generation. The new PCG approach investigated and developed in this study combined a genetic algorithm with cellular automata and a maze generation technique into a method for generating game level layouts with desired maze-like properties. The GA in this approach was utilized to evolve CA rules that, when applied to a maze configuration, would produce layouts with desired properties.
This research discovered that CA rules could be evolved to generate level layouts with desired properties, and that there were a number of parameters which could affect the layouts these rules produced. These parameters include the number of cell states used in the CA, as well as the CA’s neighbourhood size and the number of times the CA rules were applied to their maze configurations. This research also discovered that the one factor that had the largest impact on the visual aspect of the generated layouts was the chosen chromosome representation
Generating Levels That Teach Mechanics
The automatic generation of game tutorials is a challenging AI problem. While
it is possible to generate annotations and instructions that explain to the
player how the game is played, this paper focuses on generating a gameplay
experience that introduces the player to a game mechanic. It evolves small
levels for the Mario AI Framework that can only be beaten by an agent that
knows how to perform specific actions in the game. It uses variations of a
perfect A* agent that are limited in various ways, such as not being able to
jump high or see enemies, to test how failing to do certain actions can stop
the player from beating the level.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, PCG Workshop at FDG 2018, 9th International
Workshop on Procedural Content Generation (PCG2018
Arbitrarily Scalable Environment Generators via Neural Cellular Automata
We study the problem of generating arbitrarily large environments to improve
the throughput of multi-robot systems. Prior work proposes Quality Diversity
(QD) algorithms as an effective method for optimizing the environments of
automated warehouses. However, these approaches optimize only relatively small
environments, falling short when it comes to replicating real-world warehouse
sizes. The challenge arises from the exponential increase in the search space
as the environment size increases. Additionally, the previous methods have only
been tested with up to 350 robots in simulations, while practical warehouses
could host thousands of robots. In this paper, instead of optimizing
environments, we propose to optimize Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) environment
generators via QD algorithms. We train a collection of NCA generators with QD
algorithms in small environments and then generate arbitrarily large
environments from the generators at test time. We show that NCA environment
generators maintain consistent, regularized patterns regardless of environment
size, significantly enhancing the scalability of multi-robot systems in two
different domains with up to 2,350 robots. Additionally, we demonstrate that
our method scales a single-agent reinforcement learning policy to arbitrarily
large environments with similar patterns. We include the source code at
\url{https://github.com/lunjohnzhang/warehouse_env_gen_nca_public}.Comment: Accepted to Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
(NeurIPS), 202
Illuminating Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning through Procedural Level Generation
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown impressive results in a variety of
domains, learning directly from high-dimensional sensory streams. However, when
neural networks are trained in a fixed environment, such as a single level in a
video game, they will usually overfit and fail to generalize to new levels.
When RL models overfit, even slight modifications to the environment can result
in poor agent performance. This paper explores how procedurally generated
levels during training can increase generality. We show that for some games
procedural level generation enables generalization to new levels within the
same distribution. Additionally, it is possible to achieve better performance
with less data by manipulating the difficulty of the levels in response to the
performance of the agent. The generality of the learned behaviors is also
evaluated on a set of human-designed levels. The results suggest that the
ability to generalize to human-designed levels highly depends on the design of
the level generators. We apply dimensionality reduction and clustering
techniques to visualize the generators' distributions of levels and analyze to
what degree they can produce levels similar to those designed by a human.Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS Deep RL Workshop 201
Terrain generation algorithms
Procedural terrain generation has become common in games as a whole and in indie games in particular. With procedural terrain generation developers can relatively easily create static or dynamically expanding game areas. Also it is more cost effective since large part of manual work can be automated which traditional game areas would require.
Goal of this thesis is to introduce and evaluate different algorithms that are used or have potential use cases in terrain generation. Such algorithms as various noise functions, which are widely used in the realm of terrain generation, a number of dungeon algorithms, which use variety of methods to generate the dungeon, fractal algorithm, and volumetric terrain generation algorithm which uses a combination of noise and fractal algorithms. Algorithms and techniques will be searched from various scientific articles and literary sources. Metrics used for terrain generation algorithm evaluation will also be introduced, and algorithms in this thesis will be evaluated using these metrics.
During evaluation it was noticed that the evaluated noise functions are generally capable of runtime terrain generation, but are lacking in customization and control since parameters are usually related to the algorithm rather than the resulting terrain. Albeit these shortcomings both Perlin and Simplex noise stand out for their ability to generate good quality terrains. On the other hand most of the evaluated dungeon generation algorithms are incapable of generating terrain during runtime with few exceptions. Also guaranteeing connectivity of rooms or areas in dungeon can be challenge in some algorithms. The introduced fractal algorithm is metrics wise similar to Perlin and Simplex noise even though it uses completely different method to generate the terrain. The volumetric terrain generation algorithm is the only algorithm capable of generating volumetric terrain and its high level of parametrization and customization is its strongest quality
Start Small: Training Game Level Generators from Nothing by Learning at Multiple Sizes
A procedural level generator is a tool that generates levels from noise. One
approach to build generators is using machine learning, but given the training
data rarity, multiple methods have been proposed to train generators from
nothing. However, level generation tasks tend to have sparse feedback, which is
commonly mitigated using game-specific supplemental rewards. This paper
proposes a novel approach to train generators from nothing by learning at
multiple level sizes starting from a small size up to the desired sizes. This
approach employs the observed phenomenon that feedback is denser at smaller
sizes to avoid supplemental rewards. It also presents the benefit of training
generators to output levels at various sizes. We apply this approach to train
controllable generators using generative flow networks. We also modify
diversity sampling to be compatible with generative flow networks and to expand
the expressive range. The results show that our methods can generate
high-quality diverse levels for Sokoban, Zelda and Danger Dave for a variety of
sizes, after only 3h 29min up to 6h 11min (depending on the game) of training
on a single commodity machine. Also, the results show that our generators can
output levels for sizes that were unavailable during training.Comment: 26 pages, 7 tables, 7 figures. Code:
https://github.com/yahiaetman/ms-level-ge
- …