Multi agent based approach to assist the design process of 3D game environments

Abstract

Designing complex and reasonable 3D environments for modern 3D games is one of the time consuming challenges faced by present video game industry. We have critically reviewed the existing approaches to automate the design of 3D environments. It was identified that current 3D environment generation techniques being specific to one or few types of environments and the lack of customizable frameworks which are common to many types of environments as the main issues to be addressed. According to literature, surprisingly complex and interesting global behaviours can arise in multi agent systems as a result of simple rules that are followed by number of simple agents operate in an environment. We hypothesize that this emergent behaviour of multi agent systems can be used to design 3D game environments with emergence properties that were not visible in initial constituents. The proposed solution provides a multi agent based approach to develop a framework which is common to design many types of 3D game environments. Each 3D model in a 3D game environment is associated with an agent with simple rules and this system allows users to introduce new 3D models and associate them with agent types. The main input for the proposed system is a parameterized description of an imaginary 3D environment. Output of the system is a 3D game environment with self organized 3D models positioned and oriented in most suitable places. The proposed approach has been evaluated by implementing a prototype and comparing the proposed approach with traditional 3D game environment design approaches.