Towards automatic personalised content creation for racing games

Evolutionary algorithms are commonly used to create high-performing strategies or agents for computer games. In this paper, we instead choose to evolve the racing tracks in a car racing game. An evolvable track representation is devised, and a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm maximises the entertainment value of the track relative to a particular human player. This requires a way to create accurate models of players' driving styles, as well as a tentative definition of when a racing track is fun, both of which are provided. We believe this approach opens up interesting new research questions and is potentially applicable to commercial racing games.

[1]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Making Racing Fun Through Player Modeling and Track Evolution , 2006 .

[2]  Georgios N. Yannakakis,et al.  Player Modeling Impact on Player's Entertainment in Computer Games , 2005, User Modeling.

[3]  David S. Ebert,et al.  Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach , 1994 .

[4]  Germund Hesslow,et al.  EXPLORING INTERNAL SIMULATION OF PERCEPTION IN MOBILE ROBOTS , 2001 .

[5]  Georgios N. Yannakakis,et al.  Towards Capturing and Enhancing Entertainment in Computer Games , 2006, SETN.

[6]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Evolving robust and specialized car racing skills , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation.

[7]  S. Laughlin,et al.  Computational neuroethology: a provisional manifesto , 1991 .

[8]  Daniel A. Ashlock,et al.  Evolving A Diverse Collection of Robot Path Planning Problems , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation.

[9]  Rob Knight,et al.  Two Simulation Tools for Biologically Inspired Virtual Robotics , 2006 .

[10]  Ivan Tanev,et al.  Evolution of the driving styles of anticipatory agent remotely operating a scaled model of racing car , 2005, 2005 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

[11]  Pieter Spronck,et al.  Adaptive game AI , 2005 .

[12]  Dario Floreano,et al.  Coevolution of active vision and feature selection , 2004, Biological Cybernetics.

[13]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Arms Races and Car Races , 2006, PPSN.

[14]  Colin Fyfe,et al.  Improving Artificial Intelligence In a Motocross Game , 2006, 2006 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[15]  Stefan Greuter,et al.  Real-time procedural generation of `pseudo infinite' cities , 2003, GRAPHITE '03.

[16]  V. Rich Personal communication , 1989, Nature.

[17]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Evolving controllers for simulated car racing , 2005, 2005 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

[18]  Dean A. Pomerleau,et al.  Neural Network Vision for Robot Driving , 1997 .

[19]  Peter J. Bentley,et al.  Optimising the Performance of a Formula One Car Using a Genetic Algorithm , 2004, PPSN.

[20]  Thomas W. Malone,et al.  What makes things fun to learn? heuristics for designing instructional computer games , 1980, SIGSMALL '80.

[21]  William V. Wright,et al.  A Theory of Fun for Game Design , 2004 .

[22]  Eric O. Postma,et al.  Adaptive game AI with dynamic scripting , 2006, Machine Learning.