Introducing Sceelix - A Procedural Content Generation Tool

[Pedro Silva]

Dear PCG community!

My name is Pedro Silva, I've been a member of this community for quite a while, although I think I've never properly introduced myself to everyone!

I did my PhD thesis on PCG: I focused on improving both the power and representation of rule-based systems (such as grammars) using visual, node-based graphs. The Procedural Content Graphs (described in this paper) can be seen as a general-purpose, extensible framework for procedural content generation. They provide the means to generate and integrate diverse types of content in a single pipeline, and can be used to express concepts, ideas and designs that otherwise would be difficult or even impossible with other alternatives. The implemented solution (back then called Construct) was built with the purpose of allowing other researchers and developers to create and share their solutions within in a unified system. This tool has already been used by several bachelor and master students in their academic projects and it would be great to keep it going!

Since the end of my PhD this year, I've decided to keep on improving this solution to reach something that could serve both academia and the industry. And today I am here to present it to you.

Meet Sceelix.

Sceelix is a general-purpose, Procedural Content Generation software, currently aimed at 3D developers and artists. It is based on the same visual, node-based approach and focuses on the generation of all and any kind of scene elements, from 3D models to game behaviors. It has a very modular architecture, meaning that it is very easy to introduce new types of data, algorithms, UI features and much more. It could ultimately be used to produce, for instance, 2D levels and designs, too! We believe this could be really interesting for the PCG community and its research!

Sceelix is going to be distributed through the Steam platform and the Greenlight campaign has just been launched. If you are interested in this software, please check it out and upvote Sceelix if you can!

Cheers, 
Pedro 

[Iulian Arcus]

Nice work. I've read your paper a couple of days ago and really appreciated the no-nonsense approach. I can't wait to see it out. I'm curious about the actual integration into games engines. Is it more of an offline process with importing or are you planning tighter integration?

[Pedro Silva]

Hi Iulian,

Great to know you liked it! Thank you! 

Regarding your question, we can actually do both offline and online generation :). This is possible because Sceelix is composed of 2 main parts: the engine and the designer. The engine is a set of programming libraries that contain the generation algorithms and the means to interpret and execute the graph files. For instance, if the game engine supports the language (C#), the libraries can be directly referenced and used, making it possible to produce new content during runtime. Of course, a "conversion" process, from Sceelix data structures to the ones used by the games, may be necessary.

The designer is the tool where you assemble and edit the visual graphs, as well as produce the content offline. Generated data can be exported to intermediate formats or sent directly into the target platform/game editor via direct socket communication ;)

Cheers,

Pedro

On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 8:59 PM, Iulian Arcus <arcus...@gmail.com> wrote:

Nice work. I've read your paper a couple of days ago and really appreciated the no-nonsense approach. I can't wait to see it out. I'm curious about the actual integration into games engines. Is it more of an offline process with importing or are you planning tighter integration?

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[Antonios Liapis]

Hi everyone,

Phil Lopes, myself and Georgios N. Yannakakis have been working on
Sonancia, a framework for blending level generation and soundscape
generation. For now, Sonancia focuses on generating levels and
soundscapes for horror games, as audio plays such an important role in
this genre. You can find more details on the current state of the
project in this paper:
http://antoniosliapis.com/papers/targeting_horror_via_level_and_soundscape_generation.pdf
and a (post-generation curated) video here: https://youtu.be/-90D65HqPDo

While we have a large database of (human-authored) sounds already, we
are currently collecting data on how these sounds affect the perceived
tension and emotional response of an audience. We are therefore running
a survey on ranking horror game sounds: it shouldn't take much time
(15-20 minutes). We would appreciate if you participate in the survey,
and don't hesitate to send me an e-mail or post in the mailing list if
you have any comments on this line of work.

You can take the survey (and read more about it) here:
http://sonancia.institutedigitalgames.com

We hope you enjoy it!

A. Liapis