Introducing ourselves

[Julian Togelius]

So, all of us in this group work on procedural content generation in
one way or another. But who are we? I suggest we all post short
introductions of ourselves so that we get to know each other a bit. A
short paragraph about what we do in connection with PCG and links to
one or a few representative papers or theses. I'll start:

My name is Julian Togelius and I'm assistant professor at the IT
University of Copenhagen. Most of my research is about evolutionary
computation and games, and when it comes to PCG I've been using
evolutionary algorithms to design different types of content (racing
tracks, game rules, platform game levels). The tricky thing here is
the fitness function. I've used models of how players would experience
the new content, either direct models or based on a behavioural model
of how a player would play the new content. Some papers:

Towards automatic personalised content creation in racing games
http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2007Towards.pdf
We train neural networks to imitate the driving styles of human
players of a racing game. These networks are then used as part of a
fitness function when evolving new racing tracks, meant to be fun to
drive for the modelled human player.

An Experiment in Automatic Game Design
http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2008An.pdf
We evolve game rules for Pac-Man-like games based on their
learnability. Learnability is measured as the progress an RL algorithm
makes when trying to learn to play the game.

Modeling player experience in Super Mario Bros
http://julian.togelius.com/Pedersen2009Modeling.pdf
We create models of player experience based on playing style and level
design parameters. These parameters can then be optimized to yield
particular player experiences.

Please reply in this thread with your own introduction. It can of
course be shorter than mine!

Julian

[Jim Whitehead]

Julian, thanks for kicking this off!

Hi, I'm Jim Whitehead, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the
University of California, Santa Cruz (currently on sabbatical at Univ.
Rey Juan Carlos, near Madrid, Spain). These days I have two major
research fields, software engineering and computer games, though in the
90's I also performed research on hypertext systems and application
layer protocol design. Across many of these fields, I'm interested in
how people design. So for games, I have interest in level design, and
procedural level design.

"My" work to date in procedural level generation has been done in
cooperation with my PhD student Gillian Smith, which is to say she has
done the heavy lifting. I'll let her describe our procedural platformer
generation work in more detail.

What I find interesting about procedural level design is, first of all,
how hard it is to get right. I'm also fascinated by the kinds of
insights procedural level design algorithms provide us about the human
act of level design. Finally, I'm excited about the potential for
creativity inherent in humans artists working collaboratively with
procedural generators (of all kinds).

My favorite games are Civilization (III, though I should try IV at some
point), and Radiant Silvergun.

- Jim

[Cameron Browne]

Hi,

I'm Cameron Browne, a visiting researcher at the Computational
Creativity Group at Imperial College London. I have a strong interest
in procedural generation methods for combinatorial (board) game
design and computer artwork.

Last year I completed a PhD on automated game measurement and design.
This involved a general game player called Ludi that can estimate a
game's quality through self-play and create new games by evolving
existing rule sets. Here's a recent paper summaring this work:
http://www.cameronius.com/bio/publications/ciaig-browne-maire-13.pdf

Ludi has discovered some nice games, a couple of which have since
been published, notably Yavalath: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/33767

I think the Procedural Content Group is a great idea, and look
forward to future discussions with you all!

Regards,
Cameron

[E. Hastings]

Erin Hastings,

I just completed my Ph.D. at University of Central Florida. My main
interest is automated procedural content generation in multiplayer
games based on player preferences. More specifically, adding new
procedural content to the game in real-time based on characteristics
of content players have demonstrated to favor in the past.

Along with a team at UCF, we successfully demonstrated such technology
in a 32-player online shooter called Galactic Arms Race through an
evolutionary PCG algorithm called cgNEAT. Publications describing GAR
and procedural particle system evolution:

CIG09: http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/publications/2009/hastings.cig09.html
AIIDE09 demo: http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/publications/2009/hastings.aiide09.html
CIG07: http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/publications/2009/hastings.ieeetec09.html

Plans for the future are evolving other types of content further
demonstrating the potential of procedural content generation for
mainstream type games (eg. RPG, RTS, shooter, MMOG, etc.) and
especially for multiplayer games.

My current favorite multiplayer games are World of Warcraft, Call of
Duty 4, and Rock Band. My favorite single player games are Baldur's
Gate and Fallout series.

Erin Hastings
Evolutionary Complexity Research Group @ UCF
eplex.cs.ucf.edu

[Simon Lucas]

Hi all,

I'm Simon Lucas, Professor of Computer Science at the University
of Essex in Colchester (Britain's oldest recorded town!), UK.

My main research interests are in machine learning and games,
and I'm editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computational
Intelligence and AI in Games - where of course I encourage you
to submit all your best work in this area!

My current pet project (which is admittedly a bit of a sideline at
present)
related to this group is the creation of
new mazes for Ms Pac-Man - the original 4 were great (and I've
see the new XBox version of the game with more mazes) -
but I want to understand more about how to measure the
quality of each maze both using static metrics and agent-based
play metrics. I also think it's interesting to consider the best
representation for evolving mazes. I think it would be pretty cool
to evolve new maze designs that really add something to the
original 4 while working with the same constraints of maze size.

Favourite games: I used to love some of the classics, Asteroids,
Ms Pac-Man, Defender, Sheriff Nintendo. They were so well
implemented, with very precise collision detection unlike
many clones of them.

Favourite more recent games- Bioshock, Dead or Alive 4,
Blazing Angels - that's a fairly random selection.

Family games - Peggle, Singstar, Buzz the Big Quiz etc

cheers,

Simon

http://www.ieee-cis.org/pubs/tciaig/

http://csee.essex.ac.uk/staff/lucas/

[Ken Hullett]

Hi all,

My name is Ken Hullett and I'm a PhD student at UCSC. My current work
is on the relationship between level design and player models,
specifically in first-person shooters. This potentially ties into
level generation and adaptive games by providing a framework for how
to generate/adjust levels for challenge or to suit a player.

My master's thesis was on scenario generation for emergency rescue
training games. I presented a paper on it at FDG 2009. You can find
some info on it here:
http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~khullett/doku.php?id=scenario_generation

Ken

[Gillian]

Hi everyone,

I'm Gillian Smith, and I'm another PhD student at UCSC. My advisor is
Jim Whitehead, who introduced himself earlier.

My current work is on human-computer collaboration for level design,
focusing specifically on platformers. The idea is that a human could
guide a computer generator; for example a human defines an overall
structure for the level and some individual pieces of geometry, the
computer backfills with new geometry to create a playable level, and
then the human can go in and tweak that generated geometry, and so on.
The computer could also serve as a brainstorming tool to help get past
"designer's block", and can provide some metrics on the difficulty of
the level and the risk-reward ratio.

This idea was born out of our recent work in rhythm-based level
generation for platformers. In that project we took some designer-
specified goals such as the path that the level should be following
and the frequency of certain components showing up (e.g. a level with
lots of springs and few enemies). The generator would create a rhythm
where each beat in the rhythm corresponded to player actions (e.g.
three short jumps in a row), and then a grammar consumed those beats
and generated geometry tailored for that action. We had a paper on
this at FDG 09: https://eis.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/smith-fdg-09.pdf

My favorite computer games are Civilization IV and the LucasArts
adventure games. I also play lots of German-style board games and
longer strategy board games like Civilization or the Empire Builder-
type rails games.

-Gillian

[Adam Smith]

Hi All,

I'm Adam Smith, PhD candidate at UCSC's infamous Expressive
Intelligence Studio. For my recently proposed thesis research
(proposal slides: http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~amsmith/proposal/amsmith-proposal-talk.pdf
) I'm building an intelligent game design, a discovery system that
will work in the domain of fairly abstract real-time, single-player
video games -- its primary purpose is to produce new bits of game
design knowledge with game production as a side effect of experiments
in play. The way I see it, the rule systems at the core of a game are
just symbolic artifacts that can be plugged together the say way you
plug new legs into Spore creatures; the catch is that you have to see
your ruleset in action, in play, before you can say anything deep
about it.

Procedurally generating one thing or another has been a major hobby of
mine whether it is abstract shape compositions with ContextFree,
glitzy (demoscene) demos with Werkkzeug1, flowing animations of
iterated function systems in Processing (and recently on Android and
iPhone), or melodies and statistical-nonsense lyrics in generative
music with Impromptu/ChucK/PureData. A piece of my personal
perspective that doesn't seem to be the average case is that I don't
give much thought to evaluating the individual artifacts that come out
of my procedural systems in much detail. In general, I look at
properties of the space as a whole in terms of expressiveness and
consistency (things you can't judge from isolated artifacts) and often
a lot of time tweaking parameters or refactoring processes that have
no visible effect on the artifacts but instead trims or stretches the
space as a whole. This space-over-artifact bias has lead me away
genetic techniques where evaluation comes down to a single fitness
number. Nonetheless I find myself tweaking floats and swapping
subtrees all the time.

Looking forward, I'm really interesting in procedurally generating
kinds of things that haven't been generated before. My driving
motivation is the intense fun I have in making things. Making things
that make things (that make other things) seems like the next logical
step.

[Tarn Adams]

Hello!

I'm Tarn Adams, co-founder of Bay 12 Games. I'm interested in
procedural generation to enhance replay value and to increase the
breadth and depth of games more generally without having to handcraft
specific game objects. He he he, I suppose I want my games to gain
weight quickly and most importantly I want to be able to play them
myself! Our main project is Dwarf Fortress, which lives at
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves

The goal there is to generate (tacky fantasy) worlds which then
persist through several games as the (single) player controls
different actors in the world. It's a large umbrella and most topics
are of interest to me, though the default graphics use an extended
ASCII character set, so there are some limitations. In practice, I
guess I'm cobbling together a collection of fairly ratty content
generators, but it has been entertaining so far.

Tarn

[Julian Togelius]

That's a nice set of introductions... please keep 'em coming! There's
18 of you that haven't introduced yourself yet!

I forgot to mention my favorite games. My all-time favorite is
probably the Civilization series, with Civ 3 the best of the best. I'd
love to know how the maps are generated, but I suspect I'd be
disappointed - it's probably some rather simple algorithm.

Recently I've very much enjoyed Mass Effect and Fallout 3. I doubt
there's any online PCG going on in these titles, though it would
certainly be possible with the planets in Mass Effect. Maybe PCG was
used during game development for those? It would be an awful lot of
landscapes to create otherwise.

At the moment I'm completely observed by Drop7 for the iPhone, though
that has no "content" in the traditional sense of the word so PCG
would be hard for such a game. But I suppose the game mechanics could
be generated...

Julian

2009/10/22 Tarn Adams <tarn....@gmail.com>:

--
Julian Togelius
Assistant Professor
IT University of Copenhagen
Rued Langgaards Vej 7
2300 Copenhagen S
Denmark
jul...@togelius.com
http://julian.togelius.com
+46-705-192088

[Kenneth Stanley]

Hi, I'm Ken Stanley. I'm an assistant professor in computer science
at the University of Central Florida. My general research focus is on
evolving artificial neural networks (i.e. neuroevolution) in a broad
variety of domains. I invtented the NEAT neuroevolution algorithm
with Risto Miikkulainen and more recently HyperNEAT with my students
David D'Ambrosio and Jason Gauci. As I've been studying and
developing neuroevolution algorithms, one of my favorite application
areas has been video games. I started working on machine learning
in games early in grad school in some toy domains, eventually leading
to the NERO video game, in which a player can train robotic soldiers
that learn in real time:

http://nerogame.org/

More recently, my interest shifted from evolving NPC behaviors to
evolving content itself. Because content is in effect vying for the
interest and enjoyment of the player, who wants both quality and
novelty, it fits well within an evolutionary paradigm. I also believe
that the content bottlneck in the video game industry is a more
significant opportunity for major breakthroughs than the need for
better NPC AI (although that is still interesting).

So as my interests shifted towards evolving content, in collaboration
with my recently-graduated Ph.D. student Erin Hastings (who just
recently introduced himself here as well), we created the Galactic
Arms Race video game, in which the weapons evolve based on how much
the players use them. GAR has found a large variety of compelling and
original weapon designs that it created itself:

http://gar.eecs.ucf.edu

I try to implement research concepts within complete original games,
like NERO and GAR, because it helps to prove the concept's viability
and raise awareness of possibilities beyond the academic community.
So that's something I hope to continue doing with future games.

My favorite gaming experience was an online multiplayer text-based BBS
game called Galactic Empire that people were playing around the year
1990.

My homepage is here: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~kstanley/
And my research group: http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/

ken

[E. Hastings]

Cameron: Wow that is impressive you got Yavalath published and a
BoardGameGeek.com entry. I have two different regular board game
groups just about every week, so I will get them to try it. Currently
we do a lot of different games including Agricola, Puerto Rico, Race
for the Galaxy, Settlers, Ticket To Ride, Dominion, Power Grid, For
Sale, Modern Art, Bang!, Tigris Euphrates, Munchkin, and a bunch of
others.

[E. Hastings]

Tarn: Dwarf Fortress is a lot of fun. A few friends are really into it
as well. =)

[Craig Reynolds]

I'm Craig Reynolds and I work at an R&D group of Sony's PlayStation
company (SCE) in Foster City, California (near San Francisco). My
current project involves goal-oriented texture synthesis. It is
potentially useful for games, but the main connection is that I hope
to use a game-like activity (what von Ahn calls a "game with a
purpose") to drive the evolution of textures. Some of this is similar
to "genetic art" work by Ken Stanley who recently joined this group,
as well as to earlier work by Sims and Dawkins. I have been working
on the procedural texture synthesis aspect for about a year and just
recently got it hooked up to Open Beagle to evolve textures using
strongly typed genetic programming. There is a lab notebook about the
work at: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/texsyn/diary.html

Prior to that most of my work has related to AI for autonomous
characters, particularly related to "steering" their motion around the
world. I have worked some on individuals and small teams, but mostly
it has concerned large groups like crowds and flocks. There is open
source code for this topic in OpenSteer: http://opensteer.sourceforge.net/
My most recent work in this area was about collective construction by
self-organized crowds, inspired by social insects.

Does anyone know who runs the Procedural Content Generation wiki at
http://pcg.wikidot.com/ ? Is it related to this Google Group, or does
it exist in a parallel universe?

Craig Reynolds
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/

[Julian Togelius]

Hi Craig, nice to see you here!

The pcg wiki is run by Andrew Doull - I've invited him to the group
and hope to see him here soon. I'd recommend all of you to check his
wiki out and possibly contribute to it.

Julian

2009/10/25 Craig Reynolds <craig.w....@gmail.com>:

--

[Andrew Doull]

Hi all and much appreciated for the invite.

To answer Craig's question, the PCG wiki is not directly related to
this group, but since the PCG wiki forums appear to be primarily used
for housekeeping, and limited other discussion, I'm quite happy to
promote the group on the wiki and it looks like Julian is doing the
reverse already.

While we're in the introductions thread, I'm Andrew Doull - most of
the time an IT manager. I develop a roguelike, Unangband, which is a
variant of Angband, along with a corresponding blog, Ascii Dreams, at
http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com and an infrequent column at
GameSetWatch called the Amateur. I founded the PCG wiki to act
initially as a large link list of procedural generation articles
incorporating, with permission, an already existing bibliography of
articles about procedural content generation and it has slowly
expanded from there. Please do contribute to the wiki, as it currently
is a Frankenstein mix of an inferior TIGdb, link lists, and news -
while at the same time a much better resource than the corresponding
Wikipedia page.

I also wrote 'The Death of the Level Designer' - a somewhat
controversial and decidedly non-academic attempt to survey the
possibilities of procedural content generation for games which is in
dire need of updating and revision since Spore has been released. I'm
quite happy to defend the title now that Clink Hocking et al have been
interviewed by Edge in an article titled 'Death of the Author' about,
in part, procedural narrative.

I'm especially happy to see the large number of people here who are
studying the procedural generation of game rules, as I've also written
about specific game design patterns with a view to procedurally
varying the implementation of these patterns.

I've also immodestly coined Doull's Law as "Any time saved using
procedural content generation techniques will be lost staring at the
resulting screen saver."

Andrew

On Oct 26, 9:04 am, Julian Togelius <julian.togel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The pcg wiki is run by Andrew Doull - I've invited him to the group
> and hope to see him here soon. I'd recommend all of you to check his
> wiki out and possibly contribute to it.
>
> Julian
>

> 2009/10/25 Craig Reynolds <craig.w.reyno...@gmail.com>:

>
> > Does anyone know who runs the Procedural Content Generation wiki at

> >http://pcg.wikidot.com/? Is it related to this Google Group, or does

[Georgios N. Yannakakis]

Hi all,

Great initiative Julian!

I am Georgios Yannakakis, Associate Professor at the Center for Computer
games Research, IT University of Copenhagen
My research interests lie in the investigation of intelligent mechanisms
and cognitive/affective models for optimizing user experience within
human-machine interactive systems. More specifically, I like
investigating the relationship between computational user models of
different levels of human response (cognitive, affective) and adaptive
learning in real-time.

During the last few years I have established generic quantitative models
of player satisfaction in specific genres and platforms of games varying
from simple screen-based Pac-Man-like game to augmented reality games.
Fortunately, there have been quite a few people that liked the idea and
we formed an IEEE task force on Player Satisfaction Modeling which
correlates very well with this SIG. (By the way, let me know if you
would like to be part of the task force!)

IEEE Task Force webpage: http://gameai.itu.dk/psm/index.php/Main_Page

I have been using predictors of player experience as objective/fitness
functions for adjusting in-game controls in real-time. The result of
this is an adaptive game tailored to player characteristics/. An example
of a simple gradient-based adaptation mechanism that optimizes fun in a
physical interactive game can been found in the following paper:

http://www.itu.dk/people/yannakakis/TCIAIG_RealTimeAdaptation.pdf

Now, obviously, I view content as a game building block which can been
used to elicit the desired player experience. The Super Mario paper we
co-authored with Julian is one example of this viewpoint:

http://www.itu.dk/people/yannakakis/CIG09_marioV3.pdf

On top of game environment features and mechanics one might wish to
control camera parameters to emerge cinematographic feelings or force
the player in particular emotional states. A case-study showcasing this
potential was presented at last AIIDE:

http://www.itu.dk/people/yannakakis/AIIDE09_camera.pdf

In general, I believe that player experience should encapsulate fun,
frustration, fairness, drama, and so on, as long as those are
parameters/states set by the game designer herself. A successful
predictor of player experience should be able to evaluate the content to
be introduced/presented prior to introduction - ideally one would like
to design a closed-loop controller which is rather a utopia in games
dealing with humans. A successful adaptive mechanism should be able to
tell how often to introduce the content and how much of it.

My homepage is here: http://www.itu.dk/~yannakakis/
Game AI wiki of our group: http://gameai.itu.dk/
Our Center's page is here: http://game.itu.dk/

Cheers
Georgios

--
Georgios N. Yannakakis
Associate Professor
IT University of Copenhagen

Tel. +45 7218 5078
Fax. +45 7218 5001
Email: yanna...@itu.dk
Web: http://www.itu.dk/~yannakakis/
Addr. Room 4B05, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, DK-2300 Copenhagen S

[Rafael Bidarra]

Hi

My name is Rafael Bidarra, and I'm an associate professor in
Computer Science at Delft University of Technology, The
Netherlands, where I'm leading the Faculty's research group on
game technology, and supervising various MSc and PhD projects in
this area.

I'm also teaching and supervising several courses and projects on
video games, including the mythical (BSc) Games Project
(http://graphics.tudelft.nl/~mkt4/) and a pioneer (MSc) project
on Serious Games (more on that coming up soon...).

My current research interests include blending procedural and
semantic modelling techniques for the specification and
generation of both virtual worlds and game play.
Wondering what this is about? You might wish to take a look here:

http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Game_Technology

Basically, we're excited to develop and give designers the tools
that let them declaratively express and realize what they've in
mind (game levels, objects, gameplay,...).

Regards,

--
Rafa

................................................................
Rafael Bidarra http://graphics.tudelft.nl/~rafa

Delft University of Technology
Fac. of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
P.O.BOX 5031 NL-2600 GA Delft The Netherlands
Phone: +31 15 278 4564 Fax: +31 15 278 7141
.............................................. CARPE DIEM ......

[VRBones]

Hi

My name is Tony Bowes, although I go by the handle 'VRBones' in most
things online. This handle reflected my interests in Virtual Reality
back in my Uni days at the start of the 'net. I've always been a fan
of random terrain generation and based my final year project on
building an erosion model to cure some of the anomalies associated
with midpoint displacement techniques. I've also dabbled into AI in my
post grad studies (mostly centered on neural networks modelling the
hippocampus), but alas that was an eon ago in computer time.

While working as a contract programmer I've kept an eye on random
terrain generation techniques as a hobby and have dabbled into
creating procedural river basins by adapting the ROAM algorithm. That
work has led me to my current project that I'm attempting to float as
a PhD: Temporal ROAM ( http://www.vrbones.com/2008/11/vrworlds-procedural-world-generation.html
). The idea is to use historical events as the vertices of a mesh that
can be expanded or contracted depending on your current area of
interest akin to how Level of Detail techniques expand and contract
the vertices of near or far graphical objects. With events as the
basic building block, I'm hoping to build a living, dynamic world with
true cause and effect.

I play lots of games, probably on average 30 hours a week. I'll play
any genre' as long as the gameplay is there. Recent favourites include
Bejewelled Blitz, Majesty 2, Quake Live, Dominions 3, Tiger Woods
Golf, Depths of Peril over the last week. Special shoutout to
UnAngband and Dwarf Fortress that still have a happy home on my HDD.
I'll also join the Civilization bandwagon for all-time faves, but
would thoroughly recommend Civ4 for a sublime game experience. It
feels a little off after Civ3, but give it enough time to see how the
luxuries and strategic resources play out and you'll be hooked. For a
look into random map creation I'd recommend the new 'tectonics' map
type in Civ4 BtS as the best I've seen for natural map design (the
algorithm is a little disappointing though).

Now, back to lurking ...

Tony Bowes

[rabid cat]

Thanks Julian,
(and thanks Andrew Doull for pointing me to the sight)


My name is Hugh Smith. I am a Senior Software Engineer working in
the
Visual Computing group at Intel. My profession and passions are
graphics and gaming. I had the great priviledge of being the original
Technical Lead for the Intel Smoke Framework. A couple of the
components I produced as part of that framework was the Procedural
Trees and Procedual Fire systems. Two different pieces of procedural
content that I enjoyed developing very much. I haven't worked on the
content in a while but I remain very passionate about the topic of
procedural content. I also love to play video games. I'll be on my
way to pick up Forza 3 very shortly. I don't want to drag on but I'm
very happy to see forums dedicated to the topic. I look forward to
seeing the contributions of the group. I'll poke around on some of
the
links that the folks here have graciously shared. If anybody has
questions on the procedural content included in the framework I'll be
happy to discuss as my time permits.


Hugh


links for those interested:
http://pcg.wikidot.com/pcg-software:smoke
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP-xlGUKwzA

[Ian Parberry]

Hi, I'm Ian Parberry. Nice to meet you all! I'm an early adopter,
working on teaching and research in game programmign since 1993. See
http://www.eng.unt.edu/ian/ and http://larc.unt.edu/. I'm currently
working on papers on procedural terrain generation, procedural quest
generation, and procedural clutter generation with PhD students. One
thing that frustrates me is that reviewers seem not to get the concept
of "designer centric content generation" as opposed to "if you tweak
these obscure constants it will change the output in some
nonorthogonal way". Papers on the latter have been published, a paper
on the former is, indeed, progress.
Ian

[rabid cat]

Hi Ian,
I was wondering if you might expound a bit on what you mean exactly by
"Designer Centric". In reading your PCG Game Development overview on
the link you shared I'm going to make a leap and interpret it as
artistic content where by you have a procedural artist. That is to
say you put the attributes of what the artist is trying to accomplish
and procedurally produce this artwork in a way that meets the artists
intent. Art being a model, a texture, a behavioral intent. Just
curious if I'm interpreting you correctly. Also in poking around on
your sight I noticed a topic being studied by a student, Dhanyu
Amarasinghe, on procedural fire. I've done some detailed work on just
that topic. You might point him to some work that I worked on if he's
interested. You can point him to it from the links in my introduction
post (just above your post). I have a white paper on the topic
sheduled for publication any week now.
Hugh

On Nov 5, 12:02 pm, Ian Parberry <ian.parbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, I'm Ian Parberry. Nice to meet you all! I'm an early adopter,..."designer centric content generation" as opposed to "if you tweak

> these obscure constants it will change the output in some

> nonorthogonal way". ...
> Ian

[Mikael H. Christensen]

Hi All,

I'm Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen. I am a physicist, mainly working
with bio-molecules and data modeling, so procedural content generation
is a spare-time interest. I guess that makes me one of the few(?)
hobbyists in this group.

Currently, most of my generative efforts are focused on developing
Structure Synth (http://structuresynth.sf.net) - a context-free
grammar approach to generating structure. It is a 3D version of the
quite popular Context Free Art application.

I'm not very familiar with content generation for games - I mostly
follow discussions in the Generative Art community - but I've already
found some exciting paper references in the group posts (nicely
fitting my interests in evolutionary algorithms, jazz music, and
formal grammars).

Cheers,
Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen (Denmark).

My Syntopia blog on Generative Art:
http://blog.hvidtfeldts.net/

Oh, btw, the games I've enjoyed the most are probably the original
Doom I & II, Half-Life, and Gravity Force (Amiga).

[Craig Reynolds]

When I read Mikael's note the name "Structure Synth" sounded
familiar. I looked back in old bookmarks and found this wonderful
Flickr set of renderings of Structure Synth models:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/groovelock/sets/72157611660818278/ I
guess that makes me a fan of Structure Synth and Mikael! I think I
found groovelock's renderings via the Color Lovers blog. Thanks for
the link to http://blog.hvidtfeldts.net/ Along similar lines:
http://dataisnature.com/

Craig Reynolds
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/


On Nov 11, 7:02 am, "Mikael H. Christensen" <mikae...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Stephen Ware]

Hello group; I'm Stephen Ware, and I work in the Liquid Narrative
group at NCSU under Michael Young. My PhD research focuses on conflict
in computer-generated narrative, and it's part of a larger project
that also involves character intention revision and automatic camera
control.

I'm interested in story generation for both static and interactive
stories. I'm looking forward to collaborating with this group to
learn new methods for automatic content generation, especially as it
can be applied to stories written on the fly.

On Oct 21, 1:31 am, Julian Togelius <julian.togel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So, all of us in this group work on procedural content generation in
> one way or another. But who are we? I suggest we all post short
> introductions of ourselves so that we get to know each other a bit. A
> short paragraph about what we do in connection with PCG and links to
> one or a few representative papers or theses. I'll start:
>
> My name is Julian Togelius and I'm assistant professor at the IT
> University of Copenhagen. Most of my research is about evolutionary
> computation and games, and when it comes to PCG I've been using
> evolutionary algorithms to design different types of content (racing
> tracks, game rules, platform game levels). The tricky thing here is
> the fitness function. I've used models of how players would experience
> the new content, either direct models or based on a behavioural model
> of how a player would play the new content. Some papers:
>

> Towards automatic personalised content creation in racing gameshttp://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2007Towards.pdf

> We train neural networks to imitate the driving styles of human
> players of a racing game. These networks are then used as part of a
> fitness function when evolving new racing tracks, meant to be fun to
> drive for the modelled human player.
>

> An Experiment in Automatic Game Designhttp://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2008An.pdf

> We evolve game rules for Pac-Man-like games based on their
> learnability. Learnability is measured as the progress an RL algorithm
> makes when trying to learn to play the game.
>

> Modeling player experience in Super Mario Broshttp://julian.togelius.com/Pedersen2009Modeling.pdf

[Mike Dickheiser]

I'll follow Stephen as another member of the LN group at NC State also
working under Michael Young. My M.S.thesis (is homing in on a topic
that...) deals with camera motion and planning, with particular
interest in how information is revealed or hidden based on shots and
transitions, and how narrative structure can thus be manipulated from
a planning perspective. Professionally, I'm a Senior Scientist at
Applied Research Associates working on 3D technology for procedurally
generated buildings and other structures. Prior to this position, I
spent 13 years in the video games industry. I have general interest in
both procedural story generation as well as the geometry of the worlds
in which those stories unfold, with additional interest in data/
process encoding in both real and artificial brains.

[Magy Seif El-Nasr]

Hi all,

It is nice to see many familiar names :)
My name is Magy Seif El-Nasr. I am an assistant Professor at Simon
Fraser University.
I lead the Engage Me In Interactive Experiences (EMIIE) Lab at School
of Interactive
Arts and Technology, which now hosts around 15 students, 10 affiliate
students and a senior
research scientist.

I am primarily interested in adaptive expressive systems for game
design or interactive narratives.
In the past few years, we have been working on conducting several
studies to study users'
experience within different kinds of games and interactive narratives.
The goal is to
gain more understanding of the users' experience, their satisfaction,
emotional process and interpretation
of 3D scenes and reward systems. The idea is that our findings will
then feed into the design
of better adaptive systems.

Another direction of my research is experimenting with visual design
expressive adaptive
systems, including lighting, camera, and recently motion. We are
currently exploring
the development of expressive ambient motion, like winds, movement of
plants, etc. and how that can
affect the users' experience within 3D environments. We are looking
for a Post Doc to work with us on
this problem. This is how I got the invitation to this group, thanks
to Michael R. Young...

My work is all online at: http://www.sfu.ca/~magy/index.html

Julian: thanks for putting this group together. This is great!

On Oct 20, 10:31 pm, Julian Togelius <julian.togel...@gmail.com>

[Matt]

Hello, I'm Matthew Fendt, and also working with Stephen Ware in Liquid
Narrative at NSCU with Michael Young. I am working on my PhD on
intention revision in narrative in the context of a larger group
project. I am also interested in competitive and cooperative agent
planning in the context of narrative.

[jt]

Hello all. My name is Jim Thomas, a PhD student working under R.
Michael Young, also of the Liquid Narrative group at NC State
University. My dissertation topic concerns the automatic generation
of procedural content within educational games. Specifically, I use a
plan-based representation of the game environment as a basis for the
model of what the student knows about how the game world works. When
the student is having trouble making progress, or makes an obvious
error in attempting a particular action before all its preconditions
have been satisfied, my system kicks in to generate appropriate in-
game guidance.

My favorite games have included: ( Adventure, Dragon's Lair, Donkey
Kong, Q-Bert, SMB3, Zelda, rogue, hack, Doom, Ocarina of Time,
PilotWings 64, Monkey Island, KOTOR, HL2, Zuma, COD3, Wii Sports,
Plants vs. Zombies, Chess.com)

My contact info:

Web page: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jmthoma5/
Email: jmth...@ncsu.edu

[Julio Bahamon]

Hi everyone,

My name is Julio Bahamon. I am a new PhD student at NC State
University. I belong to the Liquid Narrative group led by Michael
Young.

I am new to the field so I don't yet have specific research that I am
focusing on; however, I am very interested in the application of
digital games technology to areas such as education and
reconstruction or modeling of real-life events. My previous research
was in the area of HCI with an emphasis on web-based georeferenced
search interfaces.

[Brad Cassell]

Hi,

My name is Brad Cassell and I am also a member of the Liquid
Narrative group at NC State under Michael Young.

I am a new PhD student and do not have very much research under
my belt yet. I am very interested in AI and PCG and look forward
to the discussions on this group. Right now I do not know which area
in specific I want to work in, but that should change quickly in the
coming
months.

[Michael Dominguez]

Hi everyone,

Just a quick introduction - I'm Mike Dominguez, another member of the
Liquid Narrative group at NC State. I'm a Master's student, and my
research is focused on automated cinematography and machinima
generation. Favorite games include GoldenEye, Wolfenstein: Enemy
Territory, and World of Goo.

Mike

[Stephen Roller]

Hi there,

My name is Stephen. I'm an undergraduate at NCSU and another member of
the Liquid Narrative group. I know very little about procedurally
generated content, but hopefully I'll learn a lot from this mailing
list.

As far as favorite video games go, I've got to go with Counter-Strike
and Earthbound. :-)

Looking forward to future discussions,
Stephen Roller

[Huseyin Sencan]

Hi everyone, I am Huseyin Sencan another NCSU Liquide Narrative member. I started my PhD this semester and I am interesting in AI applications, content generation, cognitive science, games especially for educational purposes. 

I hope to learn from the group members and to benefit from valuable discussions and posts. 

Keep in contact,

Huseyin.

[Michael Toy]

Hello, I'm Michael Toy.  I'm co-designed and wrote Rogue in the early 1980s, an early game based on computer generated content.  After failing to get rich from selling Rogue for home computers, I left the game industry ( mostly ), and since then have been a member of the floating gang of technical talent which makes interesting stuff in the Silicon Valley.  I'm currently working at OnLive as a sort of a one man special projects task force.

I've recently discovered that procedurally generated content is an active area of research in computer science.  I am looking forward to listening on your conversations and learning about what is happening.

[Jeremy Apthorp]

On 19/04/2011, at 17:57, Michael Toy <the.mic...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello, I'm Michael Toy. I'm co-designed and wrote Rogue in the early 1980s

Woah. Thanks!

j

[Pier Luca Lanzi]

Wow! :) I played Rogue so much :) You don't see it but I am kneeling in
sign of respect! :))))

[Andy Grzywacz]

Hello!

I'm Andy Grzywacz, and I must admit, I feel like I'm in the presence
of giants!
I'm a senior in the computer science program at university of
Colorado, and also a
software engineer in modelling and simulation. I've only just recently
become
interested in PCG and I look forward to learning as much as I can to
supplement
my game design and programming skills.

I've been an avid fan of the game industry and found some degree of
enjoyment from nearly
every genre of games.

I'ts great to find something like this group!
Thanks for having me!

[Rune Skovbo Johansen]

Hi all, I'm Rune Skovbo Johansen.

I'm interested in most things procedural and wrote my Master's a few years ago about Semi-Procedural Animation for Character Locomotion, which I also presented in a technical session at GDC in 2009. At my job at Unity Technologies I work on improving and expanding the interface of the Unity game authoring tool.

I have a fair amount of experience with generating mazes with various properties. For a start, this little hot-seat 2-player game from 2004 takes place inside random mazes.

In my spare time I'm developing a procedural 2.5D platform game EaS which I've been working on for years. Its focus is on non-linear exploration and it's set in a big, continuous world. For that reason I'm particularly interested in techniques for generating interesting 2D platform environments and game-play at the moment.

Cheers,
Rune

http://runevision.com

[John K]

Hi, my name is John Keyworth, I work as a gameplay programmer for Rebellion (Oxford) and I got my MSc in Computer Science from the University of Essex.

Sadly nothing I do at work relates to procedural content (not at the moment anyway) but I'm looking into it myself (obviously, otherwise I wouldn't be here). I've played around with the obligatory terrain generator (using Unity) before realising the graphics were a distraction from my true interest story/setting generation. With that in mind I'm in the process of writing a quick galaxy generator so I can get just enough physical world in which to create a setting and story without worrying about making things look pretty.

I'm particularly interested in seeing how procedural content could allow players more freedom in game (either to pursue existing goals or choose their own) and with that in mind will probably end up mixing procedural content with other AI techniques to make that happen. I guess we'll see but really I feel I've only just started down this road.

My favourite games tend to be RTSs (particularly Starcraft / Dawn of War) and stealth/shooters (i.e. Hitman / Deus Ex).

John,

[Tim Sally]

Hi, I'm Tim Sally. I recently finished up my undergrad in CS at the
University of Illinois, Urbana. I'm now working in the security field
in Cambridge, MA. I study and work on PCG for fun in my spare time!

Best,

Tim

[Arkady]

Hello:

I'm Arkady English, and will be an MSc. student in Game Software Development until August 2012 and still trying to sort out what I'll do after graduation (hopefully a job in the games industry - I've not really looked into PhD. positions). I expect to graduate with distinction - possibly top of the class. </blowing own trumpet>

My dissertation is titled "procedural generation of realistic racetrack maps", in which I will try to create race circuits with similar properties to those you might find on current FIA calendars. The plan is to try to incorporate relief, track width and some heuristic car handling properties in order to create a suitable track using b-splines between control points, as described by Julian et al. in "Towards automatic personalised content creation for racing games".

Hopefully my work will fit in neatly with this work. I got the feeling reading Julian et als' paper that the evolving algorithm didn't make big changes to the track, so a realistic track could be tweaked using the methods described there, and then the surrounds of the track, detailing of the road, etc... handled in a manner akin to Vodaphone Hometown GP by Roboduck.

I was inspired to look at procedural content generation by the blogger / writer / programmer Shamus Young - especially his series on Procedural City and Project Frontier.

Looking over the list I see many luminaries in the field, professors, creators of classic games. Hopefully I can usefully contribute to discussion.

Peace, love and penguins,

Arkady.

[Julian Togelius]

Hi Arkady, and welcome to the club!

Thanks for the links. Do you know anything about how Hometown GP
generates the surroundings of the tracks?

I'm not sure you're aware of Loiacono, Cardamone and Lanzi's TrackGen system:
http://trackgen.pierlucalanzi.net/
And the paper describing it:
http://trackgen.pierlucalanzi.net/trackgen2010.pdf
If not, you should definitely have a look at it.

Finally, I'm not sure I follow you when you say that the evolutionary
algorithm didn't make big changes to the track?

Julian

--
Julian Togelius
Associate Professor
IT University of Copenhagen
Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark
mail: jul...@togelius.com, web: http://julian.togelius.com
mobile: +46-705-192088, office: +45-7218-5277

[Arkady]

Hi Julian:

Thanks for the warm welcome and the link to TrackGen. Somehow I hadn't seen it, but I'll be sure to give the paper a careful reading - their results are very good looking.

There's a brief outline and demonstration video of Hometown GP here: http://robotduck.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/racing-game-sneak-peek/ Sadly Vodaphone canned the game after only a few months, which is a shame as it looks very interesting.

In essence, the track is built using a 3D spline curve, objects are added at random, as long they don't intersect, and then a heightmap is generated to match the spline and objects grounded on it.

As for "not making big changes" I mean on a macro "roughly describe the shape of the track" scale. For example: if it was asked to evolve a track like Monza it would not end up with a track like Autódromo José Carlos Pace (home to the Brazilian F1 Grand Prix) no matter how well that track fit the fitness function.

I was extrapolating from the results in your 2007 paper, specifically where it says "the basic shape of a rounded rectangle shines through rather more than it should" (describing straightforward tracks) and "there is some lack of variety in the end results in that they all look slightly like flowers, clear bias of the type of mutation used". Only the "random walk" tracks were described to "differ from each other in an interesting way", but I guess the pre-evolved tracks also were quite different from each other. Should I have misunderstood the results I would be happily corrected.

Arkady

[Phil Lopes]

Hello Everyone, my name is Phil Lopes I am a current MSc. Graduate and PhD Candidate in Computer Science at the Faculty of Science of the University of Lisbon and I am currently working on a research project at LabMAg-FCUL in optimization algorithms.

I have always been interested in evolutionary algorithms and swarm systems (anything to do with artificial life really!!). Procedural Content Generation has been an area that I have gained a lot of interest lately, especially when applied to gaming. When I started jumping into the literature I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of evolutionary and search based systems that are actually out there.

Phil

On Wednesday, October 21, 2009 7:31:21 AM UTC+1, Julian Togelius wrote:

So, all of us in this group work on procedural content generation in
one way or another. But who are we? I suggest we all post short
introductions of ourselves so that we get to know each other a bit. A
short paragraph about what we do in connection with PCG and links to
one or a few representative papers or theses. I'll start:

My name is Julian Togelius and I'm assistant professor at the IT
University of Copenhagen. Most of my research is about evolutionary
computation and games, and when it comes to PCG I've been using
evolutionary algorithms to design different types of content (racing
tracks, game rules, platform game levels). The tricky thing here is
the fitness function. I've used models of how players would experience
the new content, either direct models or based on a behavioural model
of how a player would play the new content. Some papers:

Towards automatic personalised content creation in racing games

[Charles Zheng]

Hi everybody.  While I would have preferred to make my entrance when (at some point in the future) I actually have some sort of game to demonstrate, I had a question to ask--and it would seem rude to ask without introducing myself.

I'm a PhD admit for Stanford's doctoral program in Statistics, starting fall.  In fact, I am finding statistical/machine learning techniques extremely relevant for procedural design of strategy games... so much, in fact, that I might be able to get away with claiming that statistics was my motivation for dabbling in game design in the first place!  Who knows? My interest in game design vastly predates my interest in statistics, of course... but on the other hand, the first time I ever applied statistics to a "real world" problem was in developing speed run strategies for Kingdom of Loathing.

My question is: is anyone familiar with the operations research literature?  If so, please take a look at the post on "resource conversion problems" I wrote here: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/626729-starship-an-experiment-in-ai-procedural-design/.  Summary: a role-playing game is can be viewed as a number of buttons which give you resources every time you press the button... but some buttons require you to possess a prerequisite total number of resources.  How to optimize the order in which to press the buttons?

[Mark Riedl]

Hi Charles,

Procedural Content Generation is an extremely active area of Game AI research at the moment. One of my students is also very interested in applying statistical machine learning techniques to PCG in games, although we are only starting to publish on the topic.

You may be interested in the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, which will be held at Stanford in October 2012 (http://aiide.org). It is the premiere Game AI conference in the US, and may be a good way to learn more about what is going on in Game AI and PCG and to meet industry game developers. We don't have any PCG-specific workshops or events planned, but it is very likely that there will be people there that share your interests.

Best,
Mark

--------------------------------
Mark Riedl
Asst. Professor, School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/

[Lucas, Simon M]

Hi Charles,

 

I read your gamedev post: interesting.

 

IEEE CIG often has some PCG papers:

  http://www.ieee-cig.org/

 

Also, IEEE TCIAIG recently had a special issue on PCG:

 

  http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=6017217&punumber=4804728

 

(plus also many other interesting papers on PCG in other issues)

 

Best wishes,

 

  Simon Lucas

[Chris Burt]

Hi, I'm Chris Burt, and I'll be starting a MASc in Human Computer Interaction at Carleton in the Fall. I was prompted by my supervisor to survey the PCG literature because procedural graphics is a good potential area for my thesis, but since I started looking into it I've also been fascinated by experience modelling and other concepts that let us think more formally about game design and players.

For novelty, my survey will be structured to use existing studies to imagine what a total game generator would be like. Studies are generally limited by a certain scope of development, often using simple visualizations or hooking into non-generative game engines. My "what-if" discussion in the survey will be on how the methods in these studies could be hooked into each other instead. For instance, combining Liu's MakeBelieve generator of formalized stories with Hartsook et al's Game Forge project, which creates game worlds based on formalized stories, and augmenting that output with any of the more high-fidelity world generators such as Bevilacqua et al's Charack.

I'll be reading as much as I can stand over the next few weeks, so I'm open to any suggestions! Thanks for this awesome group.

[Rafael Bidarra]

Hi Chris

You might find Ricardo's survey

http://graphics.tudelft.nl/~rval/papers/lopes.tciaig11.pdf

kind of handy for your goals.
I didn't ask him, but I'm almost sure he's also in this group...
All the best!

Rafa

On 28-Jun-12 12:58 Chris Burt wrote:
> Hi, I'm Chris Burt, and I'll be starting a MASc in Human Computer
> Interaction at Carleton in the Fall. I was prompted by my supervisor to
> survey the PCG literature because procedural graphics is a good potential
> area for my thesis, but since I started looking into it I've also been
> fascinated by experience modelling and other concepts that let us think
> more formally about game design and players.
>
> For novelty, my survey will be structured to use existing studies to
> imagine what a total game generator would be like. Studies are generally
> limited by a certain scope of development, often using simple
> visualizations or hooking into non-generative game engines. My "what-if"
> discussion in the survey will be on how the methods in these studies could
> be hooked into each other instead. For instance, combining Liu's
> MakeBelieve generator of formalized stories with Hartsook et al's Game
> Forge project, which creates game worlds based on formalized stories, and
> augmenting that output with any of the more high-fidelity world generators
> such as Bevilacqua et al's Charack.
>
> I'll be reading as much as I can stand over the next few weeks, so I'm open
> to any suggestions! Thanks for this awesome group.

--

................................................................
Rafael Bidarra http://graphics.tudelft.nl/~rafa

Delft University of Technology
Fac. of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
P.O.BOX 5031 NL-2600 GA Delft The Netherlands
Phone: +31 15 278 4564 Fax: +31 15 278 7141
.............................................. CARPE DIEM ......

[Julian Togelius]

Chris,

If you'fe looking for more surveys of the field, I'd like to point you to two surveys that I've been involved in writing. The first, "Search-based procedural content generation", discusses PCG from the perspective of search processes, and gives an overview of attempts to use artificial evolution and similar techniques to generate content:

http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2011Searchbased.pdf

The second, "Experience-driven procedural content generation", discusses how PCG can be combined with player modelling to create adaptive games that optimise aspects of player experience for particular players:

http://julian.togelius.com/Yannakakis2011Experiencedriven.pdf

It would be great if you posted your report to this group when you're done with it - or perhaps earlier, to get feedback on it!

Julian

[Mark Nelson]

Hi Chris,

There is a bunch of interesting stuff in there, and several of those
directions sound like good ideas.

As far as hooking everything together, I think a lot of projects start
out with that ambition, but lots of stuff just ends up being
difficult: not everything plugs together nicely, and individual
research problems turn out to have a lot of subtlety and complexity in
themselves. It's still worth thinking about how everything would fit
together, so I don't mean to discourage you from doing that, as long
as you don't expect to be able to *actually* integrate it all in any
reasonable amount of time.

On the procedural graphics side, one useful (to me, at least) survey
would be understanding to what extent the past 20-30 years of work on
procedural graphics in the graphics community (e.g. SIGGRAPH and
related venues) is applicable to games. My impression of why it isn't
used directly more often is that there are some impedance mismatches
in both the computational and design assumptions: a lot of procedural
graphics is intended for offline film rendering, rather than use in a
real-time game engine; and in addition the kind of control game
designers/arts, and other parts of the engine (e.g. scripts) would
need over procedural-graphics elements may not be the same as the kind
of input that's needed in the film setting. On the other hand, there
may actually be more directly usable stuff than what's been mined so
far, so that'd be helpful to identify.

I've made a tentative proposal that the "big picture" problem can be
broken down into four areas of game-design knowledge and their
interrelations: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/factoring_game_design.html
(web version, links to some more formal papers)


Some miscellaneous other suggestions, skewed towards my corner of the world:

* For generating game worlds from stories, you might find something
interesting in this bachelors thesis, especially in its literature
review: http://research.ict.ru.ac.za/g06b0610/CSHnsThesis.pdf

* I did some work on auto-skinning games in a "common-sense" way,
using some techniques similar to what Liu uses in MakeBelieve
(including the same ConceptNet database). It produces little
WarioWare-like games with plotlines such as "you're a duck avoiding
bullets" and "you're a monkey chasing bananas", just by swapping out
sprites and mapping to slots in a set of 5 stock mechanics:
http://www.kmjn.org/notes/auto_skinning_videogames.html

* The Game-O-Matic project generates mini games that are "about" some
news event, given a concept map as input, which it then maps to a
fairly involved system that recombines arcade-y game elements:
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2282338.2282347

* I wrote a bit about modeling game mechanics formally, as little
snippets of templated/recombinable logic, which can then be put
together in various ways, and queried with theorem-proving to ensure
desired properties:
http://aaaipress.org/Papers/AIIDE/2008/AIIDE08-014.pdf

* As far as your interest in tying in formal models of game mechanics
into PCG, some work in that vein that comes to mind is Adam Smith &
Michael Mateas's work on modeling design spaces in answer set
programming (several papers at:
http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~amsmith/#publications), Joris Dormans's
work on "level design as model transformation"
<http://www.jorisdormans.nl/pdf/dormans_modeltransformation.pdf>, and
work in Rafael Bidarra's group on semantic modeling of game worlds
<http://graphics.tudelft.nl/~rafa/pub_e.html>. Quite a bit of
level-generation work, in RTSs and platformer games, also does this as
least implicitly (the surveys Julian linked point to some of that).

I think I'll stop listing references there; hope that helps somewhat.
I'd be interested to know what you come up with.

-Mark

--
Mark J. Nelson
ITU Copenhagen
http://www.kmjn.org

[Gillian Smith]

Hi Chris,

I have also written a survey of PCG systems; mine is with the
perspective of controllability, which may be relevant to you. Right
now it's hanging out in Chapter 2 of my dissertation:

http://www.sokath.com/main/dissertation/

</shameless plug>

-Gillian

[Daniel Wolf]

Hello all, I am Daniel Wolf, a Senior at Arlington High School in Arlington, Massachusetts. I have been fascinated by procedural generation (pg) ever since I saw a city generator for the popular online video game "Minecraft" back in 2009. Initially, I thought it must be fake, too complex to be possible, and I dismissed it. I went back and looked at it again a few days later and realized that the city generator was, in fact, real.

Anyways, fast forward to 2011, I had learned how to program and had a very basic city generator: 

As of now, my biggest accomplishment in pg is this (newer) city generator:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rby1_MzDbxA (demonstration of my [newest] city generator)

Of course, I could not do this without the help of this document here, authored by Yoav I H Parish and Pascal Müller: http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/documents/procedural_modeling_of_cities__siggraph2001.pdf

These two authors have done things I would never have thought possible sans their work, from them I have learned that pretty much anything is possible with pg.

I am currently working on a building generator for the aforementioned city generator.

In the future, I hope to work with pg professionally. I see many problems with game development that can be solved with varying amounts of pg. Specifically, using pg to fill in the details "between the lines." I hope to help hybridize traditional design with procedural generation, accelerating CADD for game development or possibly even civil engineering.

If anyone knows a college that specializes in pg, let me know, I'd love to learn from experts.

Also, if anyone here is a Reddit user and would like to join a pg subreddit, be sure to join /r/proceduralgeneration! It is a small but rapidly growing community of pg enthusiasts.

Thanks for reading

[Tomnullpointer]

Hi All,

Tom Betts here (tomnullpointer)
Im a (currently suspended Phd) student from the UK.
Ive worked with procedural and generative systems for at least 10 years I guess,
mostly in the digital arts field, but also in games.
Most of my stuff is vaguely documented at www.nullpointer.co.uk
My phd is concerned with notions of the sublime and its relationship with procedural games and infinity.
Im currently working for www.big-robot.com as lead coder, writing a procedural english countryside engine (along with other gameplay code)
But I've been tinkering with a lot of PCG code over the years (some of it available on my site).
Ive attended a few academic conferences and gave a paper at DIGRA2011 on gestalt.
Nice to meet you all!

[Daniel Wolf]

Hi Tom,

I love your work on Sir, You Are Being Hunted! The landscapes that come out of your engine are very beautiful. I look forward to seeing the finished product.

[Alex Pantaleev]

Hi, I'm Alex Pantaleev, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at SUNY Oswego. I discovered the PCG community only this spring, but my experience has been extremely positive so far.

I built the first Bulgarian MMOG (Imperia, a web strategy game) as an undergrad student back in 2003. As a grad student I did research in program analysis and abductive inference at Ohio State, got my Ph.D., and was immediately lured to Oswego, where I could afford to get back to games. Here I spent my first years creating a Game Development concentration in the CS major, and I teach or co-teach all of the required courses.

These days I am primarily interested in building real games (as opposed to research code) that generate non-graphical content to improve the user's experience. I presented a project along these lines at this summer's PCG workshop, during which I also volunteered to co-organize PCG'13 together with more experienced people.

My favorite games are the X-COM series (up to and including Apocalypse, and certainly excluding this year's one) and Civilization 4. I also spent far too much time as a student on a MUD called Multi Users in Middle Earth (MUME).

My home page is at http://cs.oswego.edu/~alex/ .

Best regards,
Alex

[Christoffer Krogslund]

Hi,

Im Christoffer, currently a Master student in the Games Technology field. I've been reading some blog post on PCG, and am currently taking a class at IT University of Denmark which Julian is Teaching.

I got into the idea that i could make something very cool using PGC techniques for my master thesis while reading a blog post about the generating landscapes that looked like the English countryside (thanks to Tom Betts who is also here i see).

Currently i am working on a small arcade game that i now want to improve by generating some (hopefully) interesting levels procedurally.

I am very much looking forward to discussing PGC subjects with you all!

/Christoffer

[Michael Cook]

Hi all,

Tom (Betts) did tell me this group existed months back but I completely forgot until a friend of mine (who is just starting a final year project on PCG) pointed it out to me. So here I am finally! 

I'm Michael Cook, I work at Imperial College's Computational Creativity Group at a PhD student (the same place as Cameron Browne and Robin Baumgarten). I'm researching techniques for automated game design through the development of ANGELINA (A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat I've Named ANGELINA). You can read more about the project here, or play games made (or made in part) by the system here. You can also find papers here.

Currently I'm working on an Android and Desktop platforms game called A Puzzling Present that will incorporate work I'm doing on mechanic generation into a (hopefully) fun little game to be released in December. I'm also writing a paper and some blog posts about the work so that should be up soon.

I also made a game about exam invigilation in two hours. That sentence describes the entire joke; the game is not worth downloading!

Looking forward to talking with you all,

Mike

[David McClure]

Hey everyone, 

I'm David McClure, an undergrad in my final year at Edinburgh. I'm going to be doing my final year project on PCG. 

I have a great deal of interest in game design. However, I'm a beginner at PCG, but I've been doing a lot of reading on the subject lately.  

Looking forward to getting involved in the group and talking with you all,

Dave

[Mark]

Hey everyone,

I'm Mark Wonnacott, I'm an undergraduate student in Computer Science at the University of Bristol. I have only lightly dabbled with PCG but I'm looking to do my Masters project in it this year (if anyone has any suggestions for interesting problems to look at, they'd be greatly appreciated :p). I'm also a hobbyist games developer, which is where my interest in PCG comes from. As you can see I have no great experience in PCG only a developing interest; hopefully it is still fine for me to participate in the group!

Thanks,

Mark

[Adam Harwood]

Hi all,

My name is Adam Harwood and I'm in pretty much the exact same situation as Mark, I also happen to live with him. I'm interested in the various ways that machine learning can be combined with or applied to PCG and will likely be doing my Masters project in that area.

Cheers,

Adam

[Mythics]

Hello, my name is Timothy Winter. I currently work full time and a half as a server administrator for an ISP. I'm a primarily self-taught programmer in my spare time, started with gw-basic and worked my way up to C#. I mostly work on game 'toys' as more or less a hobby, never quite finishing them but always having a blast figuring out new and interesting algorithms. I've tinkered with most of the more well known Artificial Neural Network algorithms (self-organizing maps, back-prop, variety of recurrent networks, etc) and a number of basic PCG algorithms for map building in games. I've only recently started delving into PCG, but I am seeing a LOT of things I know I'm going to enjoy thoroughly.

As nothing more than a hobbyist programmer with a strong opinion, I don't know just how much I might provide to this community, but I'm definitely looking forward to learning all that I can. 

My current project for myself is a first person 3D Roguelike with PCG sprinkled on most every aspect. It'll be focusing like most roguelikes primarily on combat. For simplicity and tactical benefits it will be very deterministic and quite reminiscent of old school dungeon crawlers. Even if I don't make it past combat mechanics, I'm looking quite forward to how I might apply ANNs to the dungeon design (anyone with opinions/suggestions, PLEASE feel free to contact me directly).

Thanks for accepting me and I do hope to be of some small benefit to the group.

-Tim

[Rafael Pinto]

Hi! My name is Rafael and I've been lurking here for some time, and just now realized I should introduce myself. I'm a Ph.D. student working with neural networks and reinforcement learning and very interested in PCG and game dev. But until now, I made only some simple toy algorithms to play with PCG (http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~rcpinto/cellular/ , http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~rcpinto/doku/doku.php?id=matlab_terrain and http://netfighters.org/experimentos/multiverse/intergalactic.php) and only some small games for the Ludum Dare competition. I hope to, someday, have the time and skills to make a decent game that uses decent PCG.

Rafael C.P.
http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~rcpinto

[Joshua Woodward-Clarke]

Hi, my name is Joshua Woodward-Clarke.

I am currently studying a Bachelor of Science in Games Development at UTS in Sydney.
During my studies I realised how interested I am in procedural Content Generation and this group looks like a great way to keep up with and discuss what is happening.

Joshua

[Hristo Petev]

Hello everyone,

My name is Hristo Petev and I am a master student in Malmö University, Sweden.My master thesis is related to PCG and I will generate missions for Grand Theft Auto.
However, I am interested in procedural generation of everything. This scientific area is very interesting.

Best Regards,
Hristo

[Maurilio Silva]

Hello,

my name is Maurílio Silva and I'm a master degree student in Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG), Brazil. My master's work is related to Augmented Reality, but I'm working in mobile games with (Search-Based) Procedural Content Generation and Adaptative Game Content.

I'm interested in PCG especially focused in games.

Best Regards,
Maurílio

--
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Procedural Content Generation" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to proceduralcont...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

--
Best regards,

Maurílio Silva

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Master's candidate in Computer Science at UFCG
Mobile/Game Developer
Nokia Developer Champion
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Join us at  http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community

[George Koutsikos]

Hi, I'm George Koutsikos, undergraduate student at Technological Educational Institute of Larisa, Greece in the Computer Science and Telecommunications department. I'm very fond of games and graphics programming so the interest in PCG came to me naturally. Also I'm seeking a PCG-related subject for my undregraduate dissertation.

[Joris Dormans]

Hi everyone,
From a quick glance I already seem to know quite a few of you guys. Sorry for arriving this late. For those that don't know me. I am Joris Dormans, senior researcher at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and game designer at Ludomotion. My main research interests are formal models of game mechanics and procedural content generation. Both interest led to the development of generic design tools using the research results. The first tool is Machinations which is publicly available, The PCG tool is Ludoscope, which is still very much in development. In short, Ludoscope is a transformation grammar based design tool that helps you create string, graph, tile and shape grammars and organize complex transformations in recipes executing multiple grammars to produce game content. Obviously I am also applying these techniques at Ludomotion.

At the university we recently secured a research grant for developing automated design tools, we're currently looking for an extra researcher to grow the team.
Best,
Joris

[Lucas Ferreira]

Hey everybody,

My name is Lucas Ferreira and just started a M.Sc in Computer Science at

University of São Paulo (Brazil). I also work (home office) as a game developer 

for an australian company called Jaki Entertainment.

I started this year a research on procedural content generation, currently I'm 

doing a systematic review in the area to find the topic I can contribute most. 

My topics of interest are search-based procedural content generation, automated 

game design and procedural map generation.

Best Regards,

Lucas Ferreira

[Alia]

Hi All!

I'm Alia, a game developer in Vancouver (Canada), currently I am working on a title called Don't Starve, it uses PCG in the form of lock'n'keys / force directed layout / voronoi / simplex noise etc for its world and player progression. 

I have been poking around at procedural gen every now and then for years, but this is the first time someone will actually pay me to do it. 

Cheers,

A.

[Michele Pirovano]

Hello everybody,

My name is Michele Pirovano, PhD student in Computer Science at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. My main research interests are game design, artificial intelligence and its application to the different aspects of game development.
I currently work for the REWIRE at-home rehabilitation European project where I am in charge of designing the exergames and the architecture of the rehabilitation station for the patient, for which, among other things, I focus on various AI techniques that can be used to ehnance the patient/player's experience.

In my spare time, I create videogames trying to explore novel game designs and to leverage what I've learnt about AI. I love to try and come up with game ideas that highlight AI techniques.

Currently, I am looking at PCG in the context of generating textures and meshes procedurally to be used in a social-network context. I recognize in this group the names of many researchers whose works I have gladly read previously and it's a great honor to be able to talk (write?) to you all.

I am really interested in learning more about PCG and hope to learn a lot from this group. I would also like to contribute to the current research with my own work.

My favourite game is Heroes of Might & Magic III, followed by the Civilization series.

Oh, I also really like cats.

Michele

[Samuel Roberts]

Hi all,

My name is Samuel Roberts and I am currently a PhD student within the Game Intelligence Group headed by Simon Lucas at the University of Essex. My research has mostly been relating to the generation of vehicles within a two-dimensional context through evolution strategies, usually with simple algorithmic controllers, in order to examine what sorts of compositions produce effective or otherwise interesting behaviours in conjunction with simpler controllers. Previously this has involved spaceship generation within scenarios with Asteroids or Lunar Lander inspired physics. More recently, this focus has lead me to research involving generation of spaceships for what I hope to be something more of a XPilot inspired scenario, where the composition and behaviour of spaceships includes elements such as survival and destruction of other spaceships.

Having had a fair amount of experience with a wide variety of games that use PCG as a main feature, I feel like I will never cease to be amazed by the results of research and application within this field, academic, hobbyist or commercial. I've been interested in the topic for a very, very long time. I also have ambitions to take what I've learned and studied and use it in my own personal development projects, but that's far off in the distance.

- Sam

[Zachary Hutchinson]

Heya,

Zachary here. Undergrad CS student (2nd degree) @ Hunter College in NYC. As a hobby project to improve my skills and knowledge I am working on a simulation/game that is very nearly (well...entirely to this point) procedurally generated. It's a galaxy sim wherein I hope to see what kind of fiction I can create from a spiraling collection of things bumping into one another. And not just planets. Civilizations and people and ships and whatever else I throw in the blender. My main interest lies in storytelling, and that is at the heart of this. There is always control in a program, but I hope to create a large enough vacuum where it will be interesting enough for the user to watch rather than play. No interaction. Just see what stories come out of the soup. Underway since spring.

Inspiration comes from SimCity (the original), PureSim Baseball (love how he used html pages to cut the data and give the player persistent history of the league), IL-2 (campaign games where the player can dip in and out of computer dog fights), Crusader Kings 2 (all those marriages), Space Empires, Ultima 7 (and other RPGs where NPCs do things other than wait for the player to ask them questions). Basically any game that has room enough in its world-space for objects with AI to interact without the player.

Sum up: no research, lots of pcg, no achievable goals, no end in sight...situation perfect: coding! 

And I started a wordpress blog. Dev diary stuff: http://secondclassmatter.wordpress.com/

zax

[Martin Vilar]

Oh! My turn! (?) xD

Well, I'm Martín, 20 years old, student of Engineering in Information Systems in Argentina (At the UTN). Programming since thirteen, I always loved the idea of the infinite or progressing in the computer and games. I usually get bored of games when I discovered the usual "tricks", so I'm looking to help in developing games with enough dynamism to beat my sense of "Booooorinnnnngggg".

I'm just stepping into the world of PCG, so, let's see what it can offer to me, and, with luck, what can I offer to it :3

Read you! ;-)

PD: I'm not a native speaker of English, so some of my phrases may sound better in my head than in yours... Sorry for that xD

[Ian Badcoe]

Hi,

Another newcomer here...

I am Ian Badcoe, I'm a 46 year old who has been programming for > 30 years and software engineering for > 20...

I have a long-standing interest in procedural content, probably stemming from my long interest in rogue-like games.

I used to work in the games industry, and helped run a couple of graduate research projects in this area (with limited success, we really needed a follow-up project but we never did one...)

Nowadays I work for Autodesk on Navisworks, which is a popular "design review" product (meaning: reads a lot of different CAD file formats, aggregate the models together, save views, add mark-up, detect where a ventilation duct is passing through a structural support, etc...)

I just recently started work on a rogue-like project (consisting of (1) a c++ rogue-like library, (2) a game using that).  It is very early days (last night I was 1/2 way through file-saving; tonight, if I am lucky, I may get as far as starting on loading...) but I eventually want to get back to my ideas for grammar-based dungeon generation (which some of you may have seen discussed long ago on the rogue-like newsgroup...)

More than happy to discuss theory right now...

Implementation may take a little longer :-)

Regards,

Ian

[Linbo Luo]

Hi Everyone!

My name is Linbo Luo and I’m currently a research fellow at Nanyang Tech University in Singapore. My research background is on agent-based modeling for crowd simulation and simulation-based training.  As for PCG, I am interested to apply AI/CI techniques for generating training scenarios (i.e., flow of events) in virtual training systems.  When evaluating a scenario, one aspect I considered is how the timing of the events can impact the training process. I have started to work along this direction for designing a scenario generation system. A recent paper in AIIDE 13:

Mission-based Scenario Modeling and Generation for Virtual Training

https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AIIDE/AIIDE13/paper/viewFile/7390/7587

We design a mission-based scenario generation system using GA algorithm. To consider the impact of timing of events in a scenario, we model the propagated effect of an event and its influence to other events. We use a simple food distribution game to evaluate the designed system.

I am also a newcomer in this area. I am so excited to learn more about PCG from this group!  

Cheers,

Linbo

[Aysegul Yayimli]

Hi, I am Aysegul Yayimli, associate professor at the Istanbul Technical University Computer Engineering Department. Until recently my only interest was computer networks, especially optical networks, routing and survivability issues. During my research studies and academic career I have developed a background on optimization and nature inspired heuristics.

However, recently I got interested in computer games and learning experiences, so I started to read and try to get involved. Since I am very new to the field I have no publications or projects to refer in this area. Currently I am only an excited newcomer!

My favourite games by the way, are "freeciv", and good old "Pharoah" (if you remember it at all!)

[Bedrich Benes]

Hi,

this is Bedrich Benes. I am associate professor of Computer Graphics Technology at Purdue University. 

http://hpcg.purdue.edu/bbenes/

best regards

Bedrich

[Andy Nealen]

Hi all,

I'm Andy Nealen, an assistant professor of computer science at NYU, working predominantly with the Game Innovation Lab (http://gil.poly.edu/) and the Game Center (http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/). My core research in the past decade has been in discrete differential geometry and geometric shape modeling, but I am (slowly but surely) moving my focus to Game (Design) research, perceptual science, player and system modeling, and PCG. I have some work on automatic camera viewpoints (http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Secord_2011_PMO/) and am looking into extending these perceptual models to models of human decision making under uncertainty, time pressure, audiovisual modulation/obfuscation etc.. As such, I am most interested in PCG as a means to create rulesets and audiovisuals that can be tested and compared formally and through user studies.

My research site with papers etc. is http://www.nealen.net

Thanks for having me!

Andy

[Aaron Isaksen]

Hello All! 

I'm a new PhD Student studying at the NYU Game Innovation Lab with Prof. Andy Nealen (see previous poster).  I've been in the indie game and entertainment product world since 1999, and currently IndieCade East 2014 Festival Chair (http://indiecade.com/east), one of the founding partners of Indie Fund (http://indie-fund.com), co-president of AppAbove Games (http://appabovegames.com) where we've designed and published over 10 games, and helping out with a game gallery art collective here in NYC called Babycastles (http://babycastles.com).  Before that, I was a grad student at MIT working with Prof. Leonard McMillan on Computer Graphics research, culminating in a SIGGRAPH 2000 paper entitled Dynamically Reparameterized Light Fields (http://www.cs.harvard.edu/~sjg/papers/drlf.pdf)

I'm currently interested in understanding game complexity and the procedural generation of games, especially as applied to better understanding how people enjoy and learn new games, and improving our understanding of the scoring metrics we use to generate, rank, simplify, and tune games.

I hope my academic, industry and professional game design experience will be of some use and insight to this community.

Looking forward to meeting you all online and at conferences in the years to come.

-Aaron

[Boris Neubert]

Hi,

I stumbled upon this mailing list a while ago and want to introduce myself

I am currently postdoc at EPFL and mainly interested in procedural content generation in the context of geometric models. 

Some of my work dealt with creation of natural scenes and models, and currently my research focus is on investigating symmetry relations in this process.

In very general terms I am mostly interested in exploring the relation of concepts such as symmetry, chaos, self similarity, self organization, emergence, and complexity. 

 

If you are interested here is my webpage with a summary of different research topics: http://lgg.epfl.ch/~neubert/

I am always looking for collaborations in this field and I am glad I found this group to exchange ideas and thoughts. 

Best, Boris

[ColonelSandersLite]

Wow, so many phds here.

Well, I'm no phd.  My main interest as far as this stuff goes is pgc in the direction of gaming with a definite tilt towards level design.

Interests here:
video games
programming
making things

[Boris Sivko]

Hi!

I'm Boris Sivko. I'm a software engineer (by training), and I have 8+ years of experience in high-load systems of e-commerce, and also about 5 years of experience in safety-critical systems (railway, SIL4). I spent significant part of my life for formal methods, and nowadays I have M.S. (Belarus, BelSUT) at this field and currently I work on my PhD.

Nonetheless, I always been interested in procedural generation. When I was a teenager in the middle of 90s, I created several game prototypes with PCG, and afterwards all of PCG was on my background and in my mind and I partly are involved in. I think that one day my circumstances can be changed to the PCG-way.

Regards,

Boris.

[Joerg Zdarsky]

Hi, I am Joerg Zdarsky, 37 years old from germany. I work as business analyst for bank, however I have a developer background. I’ve studied computer sciences in in early 2002 and afterwards continued working as developer and project manager.

 

My core development languages during my studies have been JAVA (using an uncounted number of known frameworks like Spring or Hibernate etc.) besides C++ and Assembler to develop low-level applications. Anyway, due to the situation at these times where web applications were the big hype, I ended in most often using JAVA which I more and more focused on. I did what most developers did, designing application layers, databases, interfaces, coding. During the following years until tosay I began to switch in my profession from working as developer and project manager into doing IT requirement and business analysis, in my case for financial companies.

Today I am in charge for the online banking platform within a very large German bank in Frankfurt am Main, providing customer access channels Internet online banking and FinTS, performing both the IT domain management and business analysis role.

Anyway I continue coding in my free time. Most often I currently use C# besides JAVA. For graphical stuff I love to use Unity3D.

My interest in developing procedural content is: You define a few rules, and then you "let it go"... I like that there is always something generated that was not intentionally created before. So there is always something to be explored.

In my case I am trying to develop a procedural universe with Unity3D and for the Oculus Rift. In my case I want to use procedural coding for

- prodecuraly made planets (with cubespheres / simplex noise / quadtrees)

- procedural distribution of planets and asteroids

- procedural nebula (using strange attractors)

[Sean O'Halloran]

Hi everyone.

I finished my MSc in Digital Investigation last year and am now working as a forensic investigator for a large consulting firm.

I love programming, and I'm looking for an interesting project to spend my spare time on.

I also take the storytelling craft really seriously, and I've been contemplating for a while now how I might overlap those two passions (game development is an obvious choice).

Procedural generation has always fascinated me. Particularly, I've always wanted to see if you could take a game like XCOM or Civilization (probably my two favourites), and give them a far deeper sense of narrative cohesion without compromising the quasi-random, unpredictable nature of those games.

Contrary to popular belief, good stories tightly follow a well-defined system. There is a degree of flexibility, but ultimately all a writer does is copy and manipulate patterns (tropes, plot arcs, tension, etc). I believe a computer could be trained to generate similar patterns, given a sufficiently detailed dataset to learn from. Then it's just a matter of translating these patterns into a structured game.

Natural language generation is another area of interest. Together with decent text-to-speech synthesis, I think you've got all the necessary components to have true procedural story generation.

I've still only just begun to properly learn about all of this stuff though.

[redblo...@gmail.com]

Hi everyone! I can't believe I only now found this group.

I'm Amit Patel. I've had a hobbyist-level interest in procedural generation for ~20 years. I'm interested in procedural generation primarily for world generation (cities, maps, names, dungeons, motivations, flora, fauna, stories, civilizations, relationships, religions, histories, economies, etc.), but also have some interest in art and music generation. My game interests are mostly city builders, god games, transportation games, tycoon games, and role-playing adventure games. My procedural generation inspirations at the moment are Dwarf Fortress and Ultima Ratio Regnum. I'm not writing my own games at the moment though. I'm writing game algorithm tutorials (such as this island map generator), and helping other game developers make their games. I'm always on the lookout for techniques that have a high impact-to-code ratio.

- Amit

[Antonios Liapis]

Welcome to the group Amit,

I have enjoyed your island map generator tutorial, and was quite impressed by the level of detail of both the generated results and the documentation. I look forward to more tutorials and of course your input to the discussions in this group. Just in case this has (also) slipped under your radar, several of us are also contributing to a PCG handbook with several techniques including constructive methods (such as those used in your tutorials) as well as search-based and logic programming approaches. The current version of the book (a new version is in the works) is freely available at http://pcgbook.com/

A. Liapis

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Procedural Content Generation" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to proceduralcont...@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Kate Compton]

Welcome indeed!  I really liked your island generator, too, and cited it in a paper I wrote generating similar islands with a constraint solver.

[Robert Zubek]

Hi everybody! I'm Rob Zubek, and I'm a game developer. :)  I'm a cofounder of a game studio called SomaSim (http://www.somasim.com) that focuses on simulation games. Our first game is a Gold-Rush-themed city builder sim called "1849", which was released just earlier this year.

In my previous lives I also made console games at EA, casual MMOs at Three Rings, and social games at Zynga. Going back even further, I did robotics and games research at Northwestern, and a PhD on AI for conversation and social interaction in games. You can find all sorts of sordid details here: http://robert.zubek.net/publications 

In terms of procgen, I'm currently especially interested in PCG for generating worlds (physical, as well as ecosystems or societies) - and really anything that enables interesting large-scale systems simulations. 

Like Amit, I can't believe I haven't found this mailing list sooner! Glad to be here. :)

Cheers,

Rob

[João Costa]

Hello there,

My name is João Costa and i'm currently a student starting my Masters 

in Computer Science at ISCTE - Portugal by night and by day a full time

software developer, can't actually say I have done anything at PCG.

Only started reading about it a few months ago mostly by finding out through 

a thread from the developers of TinyKeep explained how they generated their

dungeons.   

Found this group on www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/ and joined 

cause it seemed the best place to find the most information and news. :) 

First time using google groups so lets hope i'm not screwing everything

up.

[Todd Furmanski]

Greetings,

I'm Todd Furmanski, a PhD student in the Media Arts and Practice program at USC.  I've an MFA from the Interactive Media division at the USC Cinema school, and work at the Game Innovation Lab. 

My research focuses on procedural content generation, artificial creativity, and algorithmic art in general.  I've also worked on a number of environmental-based interactive works, acting as lead programmer for Bill Viola's "The Night Journey" as well as the lead coder for "Walden, A Game."

Another related hobby of mine is Non-Photoreal Rendering, especially when combined with Virtual Reality - a practice that can be hazardous to the unwary...

My portfolio is at toddfurmanski.com, where I'm currently trying to consolidate the work I've done over the years into a public space.  The catalyst for joining this group came from the various talks happening during the Procedural Game Jam - I'm coding various systems for a submission this week. 

[Marissa du Bois]

I'm Marissa, I'm 33 and I live in Portland Oregon. I'm just a hobbyist, I like to experiment with procedural generation in my spare time. In my day job I create business process management and accounting software for the wine industry. I have a demo project here: http://galacticsoft.github.io/Azmyth/

My homepage is http://www.galacticsoft.net/ if you're interested in checking it out.

[Lucas, Simon M]

10 fully-funded studentships are available for 2015/16 entry (covering fees at Home/EU rate and a stipend for four years) in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (IGGI), to conduct cutting-edge research and train the next generation of researchers, designers, developers and entrepreneurs in digital games.

IGGI is a collaboration between three UK Universities: the University of York, the University of Essex and Goldsmiths College, University of London. IGGI PhDs will be based at their principal supervisor’s University site with travel to the other sites for team and training activities.

IGGI brings together 60 industrial partners from the UK games industry and related organisations (including Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, The Creative Assembly, Codemasters, Rebellion, TIGA, and many more – see www.iggi.org.uk/our-industrial-partners/). IGGI PhDs will have the opportunity to engage in placements at these partner organisations, as well as international research labs, during their PhD research.

In addition to conducting research with world-leading academics and industry partners, you will participate in global game jams, co-organise and participate in an annual games symposium, and engage with industry-led seminars. You will receive training from experts in Games Development, Games Design, Research Skills and a range of optional modules including AI, computer vision, human-computer interaction, storytelling, graphics, sound and robotics.

You can contact potential supervisors directly (see http://www.iggi.org.uk/supervisors/ for a list), or we can help you to choose a principal supervisor from York, Essex or Goldsmiths based on your interests and background.

We expect substantial competition for IGGI studentships, and we encourage good students to submit applications as early as possible. The deadline for applications is 5pm on Friday 30th January 2015. Shortlisting will take place on Tuesday 10th February and successful candidates will be contacted within 24 hours. Interviews will be held at the University of York on Friday 20th February, 2015.

For further information and details of how to apply go to www.iggi.org.uk.

Best wishes,

  Simon

Professor Simon Lucas

School of CS&EE

University of Essex

http://dces.essex.ac.uk/staff/lucas/

[Tyler]

My name is Tyler Coleman, and my interest in procedural generation came from my interest in Algorithmic/Generative Art. I've been doing Fractal Art for about half a decade, so when I began my game dev career, it was second nature to want to do PG. I've been running my own studio for about 3 years, and now I'm attending the DSGA program, taught by Warren Spector. My goals in the realm of PGC are primarily in creating procedural story and narrative, which is the 'holy grail' of PGC in my humble opinion. I've also toyed with creating games that can't be 'guided' (no GameFAQs, etc) by using PCG to create formulas and systems that can't be directly explained to players through a guide. I'd love to discuss some of these concepts and theories I have with other members of the group. 

I also gave a talk on Procedural Generation at the IGDA in 2014, which you can watch here- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jvbieuiyrk 

[Jeremy Engman]

Hello everyone, my name is Jeremy Engman and I am in my final semester of my computer science degree at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee. I have been interested in this topic for a while, and decided to write a research paper on procedural content generation, specifically cities, for my last class. I am currently living in Oregon and finishing my degree online, looking to get a job in and move to Seattle when I graduate. I'm excited to learn more, and hopefully contribute if I can.

Thanks,

Jeremy

[Jon Palmer]

Hello everyone!

I'm Jonathan Palmer.

I'm a graduate student at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. I'm working on a M.S. in Game Design and Development and already completed my B.S. in GDD.

I'm working on a project currently which involves procedurally created floating islands. The player fights a variety of enemies while navigating the islands and collecting weapons.

Additionally, the enemies the player fights will have a myriad of different buffs, which they will give to other enemies in certain circumstances. More on that later.

It has a ways to go but it is shaping up nicely.

Nice to make acquaintances,

-Jon

[Elina Keränen]

Hi everyone,

I'm Elina Keränen from Jyväskylä, Finland, and I'm writing my Bachelor Thesis about PCG. In Finland's universities it has been a few courses about PCG (I think Togelius was in Tampere) but not so much research (at least I didn't found anything). So, I guess this would be the best place to discuss about PCG and maybe find some networking possibilities.

With games, I've been doing mostly project management and programming, but in game industry I'm still in entry level. But, there is a new Master's Program in Jyväskylä focusing on games, and I think PCG can be very useful for me with it.

I see almost everyone are PhD:s or something, so I guess I'm little bit early with my academic interests :)

Elina Keränen

Student of Computer Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä

Jyväskylä, Finland