Procedural Generation of Content for Online Role Playing Games
PROCEDURAL GENERATION OF CONTENT FOR ONLINE ROLE PLAYING GAMES Jonathon Doran Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2014 APPROVED: Ian Parberry, Major Professor Armin Mikler, Committee Member Robert Renka, Committee Member Robert Akl, Committee Member Barrett Bryant, Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering Costas Tsatsoulis, Dean of the College of Engineering Mark Wardell, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Doran, Jonathon. Procedural Generation of Content for Online Role Playing Games. Doctor of Philosophy (Computer Science and Engineering), August 2014, 132 pp., 10 tables, 33 figures, 92 numbered references. Video game players demand a volume of content far in excess of the ability of game designers to create it. For example, a single quest might take a week to develop and test, which means that companies such as Blizzard are spending millions of dollars each month on new content for their games. As a result, both players and developers are frustrated with the inability to meet the demand for new content. By generating content on-demand, it is possible to create custom content for each player based on player preferences. It is also possible to make use of the current world state during generation, something which cannot be done with current techniques. Using developers to create rules and assets for a content generator instead of creating content directly will lower development costs as well as reduce the development time for new game content to seconds rather than days. This work is part of the field of computational creativity, and involves the use of computers to create aesthetically pleasing game content, such as terrain, characters, and quests.
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