Designing Adventure (pt. 2)

Hey guys it’s Mark again.

We’re nearing the end of sprint 2 now, so that entails yet another blog post.

Good news, the BSP algorithm is finally operational.   There were definitely quite a few rough spots but we powered through them well enough with assistance.   Part of the algorithm needed tweaking as the rooms generated at first tended to the side of extreme proportions. Rooms would look like corridors or almost appear non-existant.

Michael Mateas here at UCSC is teaching a Game AI course that everyone on the team is taking, including myself.  Part of the class involves us taking up a final project involving artificial intelligence in games.  For our level generation team we’ve decided to do an extension of our current workload with a bit of help from some of the other guys.  Chris, our engine guy, and Clement, an upstanding resident of the game lab are with us on this.

Long story short our group is planning on incorporating a third algorithm and doing work towards having multiple algorithms used within the same level.  Rather than having a level purely generated using digging or BSP, we can instead have two or potentially three different algorithms operating in the same area.  So an outdoor clearing could be a made with the digging algorithm connected to an indoor section made with the conventional BSP algorithm.  We have plans on refactoring  BSP code to operate in this context, seeing as it does a good job of dividing an area into reasonable chunks.

The third algorithm we haven’t really ironed out yet.  My suggestion was using a pre-established maze generation algorithm then simply filling in dead ends to make it appear less sparse.  Maze generation algorithms are easy to come by, the logic for filling in gaps is a little less defined.  Alternatively Chris suggested we do something with particle systems that connected particles together to form a level.  It bears similarity to a cellular automata building algorithm, but it sounds interesting nevertheless.  I’m excited to see where it all goes.

-Mark “I really can’t find time for pictures” Zablan