Context. Procedural content generation (PCG) refers to algorithmical creation of game content (e.g. levels, maps, characters). Since PCG generators are able to produce huge amounts of game content, it becomes impractical for humans to evaluate them manually. Thus it is desirable to automate the process of evaluation. Objectives. This work presents an automatic method for evaluation of procedural level generators for 2D platform games. The method was used for comparative evaluation of four procedural level generators developed within the research community. Methods. The evaluation method relies on simulation of the human player's behaviour in a 2D platform game environment. It is made up of three components: (1) a 2D platform game Infinite Mario Bros with levels generated by the compared generators, (2) a human-like bot and (3) quantitative models of player experience. The bot plays the levels and collects the data which are input to the models. The generators are evaluated based on the values output by the models. A method based on the simple moving average (SMA) is suggested for testing if the number of performed simulations is sufficient. Results. The bot played all 6000 evaluated levels in less than ten minutes. The method based on the SMA showed that the number of simulations was sufficiently large. Conclusions. It has been shown that the automatic method is much more efficient than the traditional evaluation made by humans while being consistent with human assessments.

Orientador: Yvete Flávio da Costa / Resumo: A presente pesquisa tem a finalidade de analisar a Tutela da Evidência frente ao novo ordenamento processual civil. Tal instituto faz parte das Tutelas Provisórias, aquelas analisadas a partir de um juízo sumário a fim de se conceder maior eficiência ao processo durante o seu curso. Num primeiro momento necessário um estudo sobre o panorama geral das tutelas provisórias, dando um enfoque na de urgência, a qual demanda a presença dos requisitos da probabilidade do direito e do perigo de dano ou risco ao resultado útil do processo, de forma cumulativa. Feita essa abordagem, concentrar-se-á o estudo nos casos explícitos de tutela da evidência, presentes no rol do art. 311 do Código Processual Civil, estabelecendo-se, ainda, as premissas para a suas diferenças em relação à tutela de urgência, principalmente no tocante à ausência de demonstração do periculum in mora. Por fim, um estudo acerca de hipóteses de tutela evidente fora do rol do art. 311, e até mesmo do CPC/2015 necessita ser feito, pois a legislação processual preconiza algumas situações “especiais” de evidência, em que se concede tutelas, e até mesmo liminares, somente com o fumus boni iuris. Busca-se, portanto, um entendimento sobre o que é um direito evidente e como as novas ferramentas processuais podem contribuir para maior eficiência e celeridade processuais, garantindo-se um mais efetivo acesso à ordem jurídica justa. / Mestre

Games can be used to convey meaning and communicate messages. While there is ample research on games' expressive capacities, how players' backgrounds impact game interpretation has thus far been under-explored.  This study explores this gap by way of testing an expressive game and discerns if there is a relationship between how people experience a game and their personal background and current state of mind. To engage this question, we conducted a player study. We developed the abstract, metaphorical game “Lorn” intended for this purpose. The game together with an online survey, intended to assess players' background and state of mind, was distributed to potential participants. After having played the game, the participants shared their interpretation of the message in the game and their experiences and feelings they experienced while playing. 15 people participated in the player study. The result indicates there are differences in how people interpret a message depending on their personal background and their current state of mind. / Spel kan användas för att förmedla både budskap och mening. Trots att det finns omfattande forskning på hur man kan uttrycka sig med spel, så är forskning kring hur spelares bakgrund påverkar deras tolkning bristfällig. Den här studien utforskar detta genom att testa ett “expressivt spel” och urskilja om det finns någon koppling mellan hur människor upplever ett spel och deras personliga bakgrund och sinnesstämning. Vi utförde en spelarstudie för att undersöka den här frågan. För detta ändamål utvecklade vi det abstrakta, metaforiska spelet “Lorn”. Tillsammans med en online enkät, som ämnade att ta reda på spelarnas bakgrund och sinnesstämning, distribuerade vi spelet till potentiella deltagare. Efter att ha spelat spelet delgav deltagarna sina tolkningar av betydelsen, sina upplevelser av Lorn, och vilka känslor de kände när de spelade spelet. 15 personer deltog i studien. Våra resultat indikerar att det finns skillnader i hur människor tolkar budskap beroende på deras personliga bakgrund och sinnesstämning.

Cette thèse s’intéresse à la synthétisation de paysages naturels, et plus particulièrement, à leur portion céleste. L’aspect du ciel est gouverné par de nombreux phénomènes atmosphériques parmi lesquels les nuages jouent un rôle prépondérant car ils sont fréquemment présents et couvrent de grandes étendues. Même sans considérer directement le ciel, la densité des nuages leur permet de modifier intensément l’illumination globale d’un paysage. Les travaux de cette thèse se concentrent donc principalement sur l’édition, la modélisation et l’animation d’étendues nuageuses aux dimensions d’un paysage. Comme la simulation thermodynamique de la formation des nuages est difficilement contrôlable et que les détails du volume simulés sont rapidement limités, nous proposons plutôt une méthode par génération procédurale. Nous érigeons un modèle léger de paysage nuageux sous forme d’une hiérarchie de fonctions. Les détails les plus fins sont obtenus par composition de bruits procéduraux et reproduisent les formes de différents genres de nuages. La présence nuageuse à grande échelle est quant à elle décrite à haut niveau et à différents instants par des cartes dessinées par l’utilisateur. Ces cartes discrètes sont transformées en primitives implicites statiques ensuite interpolées par métamorphose en prenant en compte le relief et les vents pour produire des trajectoires cohérentes. Le champ implicite obtenu par mélange des primitives interpolantes constitue le champ spatiotemporel de densité nuageuse. Des images sont finalement synthétisées par rendu du milieu participatif atmosphérique selon notre propre implémentation exécutée en parallèle sur carte graphique / This thesis focusses on the synthetization of natural landscapes, and more particularly on their celestial part. The aspect of the sky is governed by plenty of atmospheric phenomena, among which clouds play a major role for they are recurrent and widespread. Even without directly considering the sky, the density of the clouds allows them to intensely modify the global illumination of a landscape. The work of this thesis thus focuses mainly on the editing, modelling and animation of cloud areas of landscape dimensions.Because the thermodynamic simulation of cloud formation is hard to control and its maximum resolution quickly limits the details of the simulated volume, we propose instead a procedural generation method. We build a lightweight cloudscape model as a hierarchy of functions. The finest details are obtained by composing procedural noises and reproduce the specific shapes of different kinds of clouds. The large-scale cloud presence is described at a high level and at different times by maps drawn by the user. These discrete maps are transformed into implicit static primitives and then interpolated by morphing, accounting for relief and winds in order to produce coherent trajectories. The implicit field obtained by mixing the interpolating primitives represents the spatiotemporal field of cloud density. Images are finally synthesized by rendering of the atmospheric participative medium according to our own implementation, executed in parallel on a graphic card

Procedural content generation for video games (PCGG) has seen a steep increase in the past decade, aiming to foster emergent gameplay as well as to address the challenge of producing large amounts of engaging content quickly. Most work in PCGG has been focused on generating art and assets such as levels, textures, and models, or on narrative design to generate storylines and progression paths. Given the difficulty of generating harmonically pleasing and interesting music, procedural music generation for games (PMGG) has not seen as much attention during this time. Music in video games is essential for establishing developers' intended mood and environment. Given the deficit of PMGG content, this paper aims to address the demand for high-quality PMGG. This paper describes the system developed to solve this problem, which generates thematic music for non-player characters (NPCs) based on developer-defined attributes in real time and responds to the dynamic relationship between the player and target NPC. The system was evaluated by means of user study: participants confront four NPC bosses each with their own uniquely generated dynamic track based on their varying attributes in relation to the player's. The survey gathered information on the perceived quality, dynamism, and helpfulness to gameplay of the generated music. Results showed that the generated music was generally pleasing and harmonious, and that while players could not detect the details of how, they were able to detect a general relationship between themselves and the NPCs as reflected by the music.

L’augmentation de la puissance graphique des ordinateurs grands publics entraîne avec elle une demande croissante de qualité et de complexité des scènes virtuelles. La gestion de cette complexité est particulièrement difficile pour les objets naturels tels les arbres et les champs d’herbe ou encore pour les animaux, pour lesquels de très nombreux petits objets très similaires viennent décorer les surfaces. La diversité de ces détails de surfaces, nécessaire à un rendu réaliste dans le cas des objets naturels, se traduit par une augmentation du temps de modélisation, du coût en stockage et de la complexité d’évaluation. Nous nous sommes intéressés aux différentes représentations et méthodes de génération à la volée pouvant être utilisées pour la création et le rendu temps réel de ces détails sur de vastes surfaces. Nous avons concentré notre étude sur le cas particulier des champs d’herbe et des fourrures : De nombreux brins quasi-similaires, distribués aléatoirement sur la surface, forment une apparence visuelle très proche d’un motif de bruit incluant des éléments de structure. Nous présentons dans un premier temps un bruit procédural axé sur la modélisation spatiale interactive d’éléments quasi-similaires et de leur distribution. L’utilisation de fonctions gaussiennes elliptiques comme primitive de modélisation, et la distribution non-uniforme contrôlée des éléments créés, permet de produire des motifs aléatoires ou quasi-réguliers incluant des caractéristiques structurelles. Une méthode d’analyse par décomposition en ellipses permet de préconfigurer ce bruit pour une reproduction rapide d’un motif donné. Nous présentons ensuite une extension de ce bruit pour la modélisation procédurale d’une surcouche volumique composée de détails de surfaces tels que des brins ou des objets volumiques plus complexes. Pour conserver une modélisation interactive du motif, une première méthode de rendu d’ordre image et une seconde méthode d’ordre objet sont proposées pour une évaluation optimisée du bruit par une carte graphique. Ces deux méthodes permettent une visualisation interactive et visuellement convaincante du résultat. / The growing power of graphics processing units (GPU) in mainstream computers creates a need for a higher quality and complexity of virtual scenes. Managing this complexity for natural objects such as trees or grass fields or even animals is painstaking, due to the large amount of small objects decorating their surface. The diversity of such details, mandatory for realistic rendering of natural objects, translates in a longer authoring time, a higher memory requirement and a more complex evaluation. We review in this thesis the related works on data representations and on-the-fly generation methods used for the creation and real-time rendering of details over large surfaces. We focus our study on the particular case of grass fields and fur : the fuzzy visual appearance of those surfaces is obtained by the distribution of many self-similar blades or strands, creating a pattern closely related to a noise with structural features. We first present a procedural noise that aims at spatial modeling of self-similar elements and their distribution. The elliptical Gaussian function used as a modeling primitive and the controlled non-uniform distribution of elements allows for various type of patterns to be modeled, from stochastic to near-regular one, while including structural features. The by-example analysis process based on an ellipse fitting method allows a fast configuration of the noise for patterns reproduction. We further introduce an extension of this noise model for the authoring of procedural shell textures of strand-based or more complex volumetric details. For interactive authoring of such volumetric pattern, an image-order and an object-order rendering methods are proposed, both methods being optimized for an implementation on the GPU. Our rendering methods allow for interactive visualization of a visually-convincing result.

This thesis explores the procedural generation of 3D buildings from the floor plan all the way to the fa¸cade and building’s details such as doors, windows, and roof. Through this, the study explores several techniques and approaches to create different layers of the building generation pipeline. The focus is on implementing a set of algorithms that, when running sequentially, are able to create complete 3D buildings in a short time (so they can be used in online generation), could be used in any open-world game, and with a limited count of triangles per building. Furthermore, the tool provides a clear and easy-to-use interface for designers in Unity, where they can interact with the multiple parameters of each building layer, giving designers a high degree of controllability. The tool is evaluated using the resulting buildings based on different metrics and how individual changes to different parameter starting from a template affect the output of the generator in terms of the metrics and the resulting building. The result from the analysis show that the polygon mathematics is well suited for generating 3D buildings for games.

Title: Application of hierarchical graph grammars in procedural 3D world gen- eration Author: Jakub Svoboda Abstract: Procedural content generation (PCG) is an often-used technique in video games. It allows us to generate large quantities and permutations of con- tent. A common problem in utilizing PCG in level design is that it is challenging to generate content close to what a human would create in overall quality and structure. One way of solving these problems is using graph grammars to rep- resent relations in the game world. Implementing a working graph generator using graph grammars and applying it to generate worlds is not very well docu- mented. This thesis will try to overcome this problem by implementing such a generator and extending it to use hierarchical graph grammars. The generator will be used to generate a 3D open world. The generator should be suitable for levels in other types of games. Keywords: procedural content generation, game development, hierarchical graphs, graph grammars, procedural level design

No description available.

Undervisningsmodellen bianshi med ursprung i Shanghai anses vara en möjlig förklaring till kinesiska elevers goda matematikprestationer. Variationsteorin, en annan undervisningsmodell med ursprung i väst beskrivs ha flera likheter med bianshi. I forskning benämns bianshi och variationsteorin även som teoretiska ramverk. I Learning Study, en studie för undervisningsutveckling är det vanligt förekommande att variationsteorin används som teoretiskt ramverk. Antaganden om att bianshi är en framgångsrik undervisningsmodell skapade ett intresse att undersöka möjligheterna att använda bianshi som teoretiskt ramverk i en interventionsstudie som hämtat komponenter från Learning Study.Syftet med denna studie är att utforska bianshi som teoretiskt ramverk i en interventionsstudie. Det gjordes i jämförelse med variationsteorin. Tal som bråk var studiens undervisningsinnehåll. Studien grundar sig i två interventionsstudier. En med bianshi och en med variationsteorin som teoretiskt ramverk. Genomförandet av respektive modell hämtade delar av processen för en Learning Study. Urvalet bestod av två klasser i årskurs 4 som delades i fyra mindre grupper. Förtest, eftertest och lektionsobservationer stod för datainsamlingen.Studiens resultat visar en förbättring av elevgruppernas förståelse för tal som bråk, oberoende av vilken modell som var det teoretiska ramverket. Lektionsinnehållet relaterat till begreppsförståelse resulterade i större utveckling för de elever som undervisades med bianshi. Elevgrupperna med variationsteorin som undervisningsmodell visade en större förbättring kopplat till metoder. Därmed visade bianshi i jämförelse med variationsteorin både högre och lägre utveckling av bråk som tal. Resultatet i vår studie antyder att bianshi går att använda som teoretiskt ramverk i en interventionsstudie. Antagandet styrks av den positiva lärandeutvecklingen och möjligheten att implementera bianshi i samtliga steg av processen. / The teaching model bianshi, originating from Shanghai, is considered as a possible explanation for the exceptional mathematical performances by Chinese students. Variation theory of learning, another teaching model originating from the Western tradition is assumed to share several similarities with bianshi. In research, bianshi and the variation theory of learning are also referred as theoretical frameworks. In a Learning Study, an intervention study focused on educational development, variation theory of learning is common to be used as a theoretical framework. The assumption that bianshi is a successful teaching model created an interest in exploring the possibilities of using bianshi as a theoretical framework in an intervention study that incorporates components from Learning Study.The aim of the study is to explore bianshi as a theoretical framework in an intervention study. This was done in comparison with the variation theory of learning. The teaching content of the study was numbers as fractions. The study is based on two intervention studies. One using bianshi and the other using the variation theory of learning as a theoretical framework. The implementation of each model incorporated elements from the Learning Study process. The sample consisted of two fourth-grade classes, which were divided into four smaller groups. Data collection included pre-tests, post-tests and lesson observations.The results of the study present an improvement of the students’ understanding of numbers as fractions, regardless of which model was used as a theoretical framework. The lesson content related to conceptual understanding resulted in greater development for the students taught by bianshi. Student groups taught with the variation theory of learning as the teaching model showed greater improvement related to methods. Thus, compared to the variation theory of learning, bianshi showed both higher and lower development of fractions as numbers. Our study suggests that bianshi can be used as a theoretical framework in an intervention study. This is supported by the positive learning development and the opportunity of implementing bianshi in all steps of the process.