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Galactic Arms Race: Automatic Game Content Generation
Hey all,
Someone in my lab has made a game using interactive evolution. It's an online, multiplayer space shooter where the weapons evolve on the server as people play. Survival of the fittest is used, where "fitness" is determined by how often a type of gun is used and by how many players. There are also other evolutionary forces at work like crossover and mutation, so new weapons are continuously being introduced into the server.
Currently, a lot of replayability in games is created by randomness. People like games like Diablo and roguelikes because of random dungeon/item generation. However, developers often have to constrain the randomness or the game becomes difficult to play. Imagine an FPS with completely random guns: half of the guns would shoot backwards. This would be a very frustrating game to play. In the same way that evolution weeds out unfit individuals, the same math can be used to provide players with random and open-ended content without inundating them with floods of garbage content.
If you are interested in being part of the experiment, check out the website here: GAR Website
Here's a video of the game:
QiBOk6ar1mg
What do you think?
Someone in my lab has made a game using interactive evolution. It's an online, multiplayer space shooter where the weapons evolve on the server as people play. Survival of the fittest is used, where "fitness" is determined by how often a type of gun is used and by how many players. There are also other evolutionary forces at work like crossover and mutation, so new weapons are continuously being introduced into the server.
Currently, a lot of replayability in games is created by randomness. People like games like Diablo and roguelikes because of random dungeon/item generation. However, developers often have to constrain the randomness or the game becomes difficult to play. Imagine an FPS with completely random guns: half of the guns would shoot backwards. This would be a very frustrating game to play. In the same way that evolution weeds out unfit individuals, the same math can be used to provide players with random and open-ended content without inundating them with floods of garbage content.
If you are interested in being part of the experiment, check out the website here: GAR Website
Here's a video of the game:
QiBOk6ar1mg
What do you think?
Comments
@DigiG: Please don't take this as a slur against your game, there was another person who showed up with a game that pretty much didn't work and also needed you to install XNA and .net.
I'm not a big fan of XNA either. Underworld Hockey Club and all the other games I've made use OGRE so you don't have to install a bunch of crap to run them. Erin wrote GAR in XNA because he has interest in putting it on Xbox Live Arcade. As opposed to UHC and other people's pet projects, this game is Erin's dissertation research, so it's been tested rigorously. I'd be surprised if the game didn't work on your computer.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/08/1419242
You heard it here first