GAMEWORLD: Procedural Worlds for Games

01.09.2007 - 31.08.2012
Research funding project
The aim of the GAMEWORLD project is to procedurally generate cities, villages and other game environments mainly to be used in tomorrow¿s video games, but also in any general application using virtual environments. Typically, 3D game and virtual environments are created using off-the-shelf software like Autodesk Maya or MAX. While these tools allow professional artists to produce very high-quality models, their usage is quite labor intensive and time consuming and therewith expensive. This is one of the most important problems in game development, so that finding suitable automatic modeling techniques has become somewhat of a holy grail of game development. Even though interesting procedural modelling techniques have recently been introduced, they are not yet used in game development. In this research project, we plan to solve a number of problems that make current procedural modeling systems unsuitable for game development. First, we will extend grammars designed for architecture to cover more general objects, including textures, terrains, streets and green spaces, urban furniture, roofs, indoor environments, and semantic game annotations. We will provide solutions to problems such as arbitration between different grammars, controlled derivation, and probabilistic rule modeling. Furthermore, we aim to make the modeling system accessible for users in the game community by providing an interactive rule editor and grammar-based multi-resolution editing based on progressive modeling. Finally, the output of the grammar-based system has to be optimized for real-time rendering using optimization strategies such as levels of detail, clustering and instancing.

People

Project leader

Project personnel

Institute

Grant funds

  • FFG - Österr. Forschungsförderungs- gesellschaft mbH (National) Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)

Research focus

  • Media Informatics and Visual Computing: 100%

Keywords

GermanEnglish
Prozedurale Modellierungprocedural modeling
Computerspielecomputer games
Computergenerierte Architekturcomputer-generated architecture

External partner

  • Arizona State Univ.
  • Sproing Interactive Media GmbH

Publications