A Semantic Scene Description Language for Procedural Layout Solving Problems

Procedural content generation is becoming more and more relevant to solve the problem of content creation for the ever growing virtual worlds of games, simulations and other applications. However, these procedures are often unintuitive or use vague parameters, making it somewhat difficult for a designer to express his or her creative intent. Even worse, most of these techniques lack an accessible and easy to use interface.We have developed a generic layout solving approach to automatically create sensible content for virtual worlds. In that context, this paper proposes a high-level scene description language that allows designers to specify particular types of scenes. This description language allows designers to easily specify which objects need to be present in a scene, their attributes, and possible interrelationships. Application of the language, based on the rich vocabulary taken from a semantic library, is illustrated with several examples, showing its flexibility, intuitiveness and ease of use

Using Semantics to Improve the Design of Game Worlds

Design of game worlds is becoming more and more labor-intensive because of the increasing demand and complexity of content. This is being partially addressed by developing semi-automated procedural techniques that help generate (parts of) game worlds (e.g terrains, cities and buildings). However, most level editors rather deficiently capture and deploy designer's intent. For example, common positional or functional relationships between objects are usually limited to pre-processing a number of anticipated cases. In this paper we propose a novel scheme for specifying high-level semantics of objects within a game virtual world, and in particular we illustrate its application to a variety of layout solving problems raised by procedural generation methods. Our approach combines the genericity of a semantic class library with the power of a layout solver, and it shows to be both very flexible and effective. Moreover, this scheme can be useful for improving both manual, automated and mixed modeling techniques, always leading to a more efficient layouting process for game worlds. We conclude that by allowing designers to capture more of their intent and real-life knowledge in the objects with which they populate a game world, the integration of semantics will strongly contribute to stimulate content reusability, enrich the game play, and eventually also significantly cut down design duration and cost

The Role of Semantics in Games and Simulations

Powerful graphics hardware is enabling strong improvements in both the appearance and the complexity of virtual worlds for games and simulations. However, current practices in the design and development of virtual worlds mostly resemble high-tech variants of traditional handcrafts, resulting in increasingly unbearable design costs. In this article we state that an essential key to overcoming these problems lies in the enrichment of object models with several kinds of semantic data. We discuss numerous and promising uses for semantic information in virtual worlds, and show, for many of them, how previous results of recent research can be successfully applied. We also identify the fundamental challenges in this new cross-disciplinary area, and point out a number of open issues lying ahead, including the need for (i) a suitable way of specifying semantic data, providing a powerful vocabulary that is useful and usable for all disciplines involved in game design and development; (ii) a seamless integration of semantic data integrated with procedural generation techniques, in order to provide designers with a new and powerful generation of tools; and (iii) a consistency maintenance among evolving objects in a changeable environment, for which powerful constraint-solving methods will be instrumental. We conclude that, as the expectancy for future games and simulations steadily shifts from improved graphics and appearance towards improved character behavior, plausible realism and coherent gameplay, embedding the game world and its objects with richer semantics is going to play a crucial role.We can therefore expect that, in the near future, increasing research efforts and influential results will be emerging in this new exciting area

A Survey of Procedural Methods for Terrain Modelling

Procedural methods are a promising but underused alternative to manual content creation. Commonly heard drawbacks are the randomness of and the lack of control over the output and the absence of integrated solutions, although more recent publications increasingly address these issues. This paper surveys procedural methods applied to terrain modelling, evaluating realism of their output, performance and control users can exert over the procedure.