Procedural Attack! Procedural Generation for Populated Virtual Cities: A Survey
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17083/ijsg.v4i2.161Keywords:
Virtual Worlds, PCG, 3D Assets, Games, VR,Abstract
On the one hand, creating rich virtual worlds "by hand" like in the game Grand Theft Auto V is hugely expensive and limited to large studios. On the other hand, procedural content generation (PCG) allows tiny teams to create huge worlds like Hello Games did with only four people (in the beginning) for the recently released game No Man's Sky. Following in the footsteps of Hello Games, this paper tries to equip the reader with an overview about the state-of-the-art of how to build such a virtual world, i.e., a populated virtual city with buildings, streets, parks, vegetation, humans, and vehicles, using just PCG assets. Each PCG asset that is envisioned to bring the city to life is grouped and discussed in detail and the latest research trends in PCG are presented together with open questions. Using the above-mentioned PCG assets, instead of months, a city can be built in a mere couple of minutes by a user without much experience in designing 3D assets. The city can then be used for many applications like games, virtual reality (VR), or film.
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[2] Hello Games, No Man's Sky, 09-Aug-2016. [Online]. Available: http://www.no-mans-sky.com/. [Accessed: 02-May-2017].
[3] Stubbs D., The Hit, 04-Mar-2017. [Online]. Available: https://adfp.itch.io/the-hit. [Accessed: 02-May-2017].
[4] Thompson M.W., Evaluating the Hybridisation of Procedural Content Generation With a Design-Centric Editor. 2015.
[5] Müller P., Wonka P., Haegler S., Ulmer A., Van Gool L., Procedural Modeling of Buildings, presented at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Papers, New York, NY, USA, 2006, pages 614–623. https://doi.org/10.1145/1179352.1141931
[6] Yersin B., Maïm J., Pettré J., Thalmann D., Crowd Patches: Populating Large-scale Virtual Environments for Real-time Applications, presented at the Proceedings of the 2009 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, New York, NY, USA, 2009, pages 207–214. https://doi.org/10.1145/2538528.2538538
[7] Fernández-Vara C., Thomson A., Procedural Generation of Narrative Puzzles in Adventure Games: The Puzzle-Dice System, presented at the Proceedings of the The Third Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games, New York, NY, USA, 2012, pages 12:1–12:6.
[8] Sturtevant N., Smith G., Togelius J., Making Things Up: The Power and Peril of PCG, Mar-2015. [Online]. Available: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022134/Making-Things-Up-The-Power. [Accessed: 02-May-2017].
[9] Esri R&D Center Zurich, CityEngine Help. [Online]. Available: http://cehelp.esri.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.procedural.cityengine.help/html/manual/cga/basics/toc.html. [Accessed: 02-May-2017].
[10] Shiffman D., The Nature of Code. 2012.
[11] Parish Y.I.H., Müller P., Procedural Modeling of Cities, presented at the Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, New York, NY, USA, 2001, pages 301–308. https://doi.org/10.1145/383259.383292
[12] Martin A., Lim A., Colton S., Browne C., Evolving 3D Buildings for the Prototype Video Game Subversion, in Applications of Evolutionary Computation, Volume 6024, Number 12, C. Di Chio, S. Cagnoni, C. Cotta, M. Ebner, A. Ekárt, A. I. Esparcia-Alcazar, C.-K. Goh, J. J. Merelo, F. Neri, M. Preuß, J. Togelius, and G. N. Yannakakis, Eds. Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010, pages 111–120.
[13] Introversion Software, Subversion City Generator Introversion Software, YouTube, 22-Nov-2011. [Online]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR9xI0GgrBY. [Accessed: 02-May-2017].
[14] Wonka P., Wimmer M., Sillion F., Ribarsky W., Instant Architecture, presented at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 Papers, New York, NY, USA, 2003, Volume 22, Number 3, pages 669–677. https://doi.org/10.1145/1201775.882324
[15] Esri, Esri CityEngine. [Online]. Available: http://www.esri.com/software/cityengine. [Accessed: 02-May-2017].
[16] Kelly G., McCabe H., A survey of procedural techniques for city generation, ITB Journal, Volume 14, 2006.
[17] Gibson W., Neuromancer. 1984.
[18] Trescak T., Bogdanovych A., Simoff S., City of Uruk 3000 BC: Using genetic algorithms, dynamic planning and crowd simulation to re-enact everyday life of ancient Sumerians, presented at the Proceedings of the Simulation of the Past to Understand Human History Conference, 2014.
[19] Liang X., Zhuo B., Li P., He L., CNN based texture synthesize with Semantic segment, arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.04731, 2016.
[20] Gatys L.A., Ecker A.S., Bethge M., A neural algorithm of artistic style, arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.06576, 2015.
[21] Champandard A.J., Semantic Style Transfer and Turning Two-Bit Doodles into Fine Artworks, arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.01768, 2016.
[22] Champandard A.J., Deep Forger, 2015. [Online]. Available: https://deepforger.com/. [Accessed: 02-May-2017].
[23] ExUtumno, WaveFunctionCollapse, GitHub, 11-Oct-2016. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse. [Accessed: 02-May-2017].
[24] Delacian, Delacian's Scrapbook - Project Sprawl - Cyberpunk Procedural City Generation, Tumblr. [Online]. Available: http://delacian.tumblr.com/. [Accessed: 02-May-2017].
[25] Magnenat-Thalmann N., Thalmann D., Handbook of virtual humans. 2005.
[26] Bastioni M., Re S., Misra S., Ideas and Methods for Modeling 3D Human Figures: The Principal Algorithms Used by MakeHuman and Their Implementation in a New Approach to Parametric Modeling, presented at the Proceedings of the 1st Bangalore Annual Compute Conference, New York, NY, USA, 2008, pages 10:1–10:6. https://doi.org/10.1145/1341771.1341782
[27] Baran I., Popovi? J., Automatic Rigging and Animation of 3D Characters, presented at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 Papers, New York, NY, USA, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1145/1275808.1276467
[28] UMA Steering Group, UMA 2 - Unity Multipurpose Avatar, Unity Asset Store, 27-Apr-2015. [Online]. Available: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/35611. [Accessed: 02-May-2017].
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[32] Habel R., Kusternig A., Wimmer M., Physically Guided Animation of Trees, Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings EUROGRAPHICS 2009), Volume 28, Number 2, 2009.
[33] Palubicki W., Horel K., Longay S., Runions A., Lane B., Mech R., Prusinkiewicz P., Self-organizing Tree Models for Image Synthesis, presented at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 Papers, New York, NY, USA, 2009, pages 58:1–58:10. https://doi.org/10.1145/1576246.1531364
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[35] Sims K., Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics, presented at the Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, New York, NY, USA, 1991, pages 319–328. https://doi.org/10.1145/122718.122752
[36] la Re de A., Abad F., Camahort E., Juan M.C., Tools for Procedural Generation of Plants in Virtual Scenes, in Computational Science – ICCS 2009, Volume 5545, Number 89, G. Allen, J. Nabrzyski, E. Seidel, G. D. van Albada, J. Dongarra, and P. M. A. Sloot, Eds. Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009, pages 801–810.
[37] Griffin C.C., Automated Vehicle Articulation and Animation: A Maxscript Approach, 2010.
[38] Go J., Vu T., Kuffner J.J., Autonomous Behaviors for Interactive Vehicle Animations, presented at the Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland, Switzerland, 2004, pages 9–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/1028523.1028525
[39] Smith G.M., Expressive Design Tools: Procedural Content Generation for Game Designers, 2012.
[40] Liapis A., Togelius J., Sentient Sketchbook: Computer-Aided Game Level Authoring, presented at the Proceedings of the 8th Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2013, pages 213–220.
[41] Takagi H., Interactive evolutionary computation: fusion of the capabilities of EC optimization and human evaluation, Proceedings of the IEEE, Volume 89, Number 9, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1109/5.949485
[42] Merrell P.C., Model Synthesis, 2009.
[43] Harrison P.F., Image Texture Tools: Texture Synthesis, Texture Transfer, and Plausible Restoration, 2006.
[44] Fernández-Vara C., Thoughts on Procedural Content Generation, 29-Jun-2012. [Online]. Available: http://gambit.mit.edu/updates/2012/06/thoughts_on_procedural_content.php. [Accessed: 02-May-2017].
[45] Togelius J., Shaker N., Nelson M.J., Mixed-initiative Content Creation, in Procedural Content Generation in Games: A Textbook and an Overview of Current Research, N. Shaker, J. Togelius, and M. J. Nelson, Eds. 2015.
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2017-06-13
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How to Cite
Procedural Attack! Procedural Generation for Populated Virtual Cities: A Survey. (2017). International Journal of Serious Games, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.17083/ijsg.v4i2.161
