Evolving aesthetic maps for a real time strategy game

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This study presents a procedural content generator method that have been able to generate aesthetic maps for a real-time strategy game. The maps has been characterized based on several of their properties in order to define a similarity function between scenarios. This function has guided a multi-objective evolution strategy during the process of generating and evolving scenarios that are similar to other aesthetic maps while being different to a set of non-aesthetic scenarios. The solutions have been checked using a support-vector machine classifier and a self-organizing map obtaining successful results (generated maps have been classified as aesthetic maps).

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Evolving Aesthetic

Maps for a Real-Time

Strategy Game

Raúl Lara-Cabrera, Carlos Cotta and Antonio J. Fernández-Leiva

Dpto. Lenguajes y ciencias de la computación

Universidad de Málaga

Procedural Content

Generation (PCG)

Automated production of game content by pseudo-random

process

Maps and levels Weapons, ítems, … Music and effects

Procedural Content

Generation (PCG)

The game: Planet Wars

Automatic map generator

EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM

Self-adaptive evolutionary

strategy (ES)

(µ+λ) generational scheme

with µ=10 y λ=100

Binary tournament selection

Individual’s evaluation is

based on game statistics

gathered by the

tournament system

TOURNAMENT SYSTEM

It executes games that take

place on generated maps

and gathers statistics

3 artificial players (bots)

ranked in the AI Challenge

Top 10 (Planet Wars)

Evolutionary algorithm:

representation

Evolutionary algorithm:

operators

Cut & splice recombination:

Gaussian mutation (for real-valued parameters) and

geometric mutation (for integer parameters):

Parents

Children

Improving maps’ aesthetics

Although we get balanced and dynamic maps, they have

bad aesthetics

The idea: use an evaluation function that measures how

aesthetic a map is

Measuring aesthetics

Evaluation and results

Two sets of maps labeled by

an expert:

Aesthetic

Non-aesthetic

Evolutionary multi-objective

algorithm:

Minimize the euclidean

distance to the aesthetic

maps set

Maximize the euclidean

distance to the non-

aesthetic maps set

Validation

SVM

Aesthetic/non-aesthetic

clasiffier

Training set: maps included

in aesthetic and non-

aesthetic sets

Every non-dominated

solution (4289) is classified

as: aesthetic

SELF-ORGANIZED NETWORK

Some examples

Conclusions

Initial approach towards the procedural aesthetic map

generation

We have defined a method of map characterization based on

several of its maps’ geometric and morphologic properties

Two set of maps (aesthetics and non-aesthetics) as a baseline

to compare generated maps with

Evolution strategy whose objectives are minimize and

maximize the distance of the generated maps to the aesthetic

and non-aesthetics maps of the baseline

The solutions have been tested with a SVM (solutions classified

as aesthetic) and a SOM (solutions share the same region as

aesthetic-maps)

ANYSELFTIN2011-28627-C04-01(Spanish MICINN)

DNEMESISTIC-6083 (Junta deAndalucía)

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