Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017) är ett spel som berättar en hel berättelse genom miljö och indexikalt berättande. De tekniker som spelet använder för detta har i denna analys identifierats och analyserats för att förstå hur och när de används. Analysen ären fallstudie av en teorikonsumerande karaktär som fokuserar på definitionerna av indexikalt berättande och miljöberättande men den har sin grund i semiotisk analys. I analysen hittades tre olika kategorier av indexer eller miljöer som används i spelet för att förmedla olika viktig information. Analysen kom även fram till att spelet använde sig av en struktur som liknade detektivberättelser i hur de levererade information till spelaren. Då detta är den enda analysen av denna karaktär så behövs det nu bara fler studier som gör liknande analyser av andra spel för att bekräfta de resultat som hittades i denna analys.

Despite the advancements in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs), there are still numerous complex situations in which AVs may encounter challenges. In recent years, the concept of teleoperation, which entails establishing a connection between a remote operator and the AV, has garnered substantial attention from both AV companies and governmental bodies as a viable safety backup method. However, a research gap is apparent when it comes to the remote manipulation of AVs positioned at a considerable distance. This gap involves a) AV with a temporal delay through real-time direct control within the constraints of current wireless communication technology in an unpredictable road environment, and b) enhancing the AV's inherent detection capabilities to augment its autonomous control abilities, thereby reducing the operator's workload. To address this research gap, this dissertation introduces an innovative teleoperation system. Initially, we devise a control system utilizing the wave variable approach as a communication method to alleviate the impact of signal latency. And Radial Basis Function Networks (RBFN) are employed to effectively manage the uncertain nonlinear dynamics of the vehicle. Subsequently, a saliency-based object detection (OD) algorithm, named SalienDet, is proposed to identify objects not present in the training sample set. SalienDet incorporates saliency maps generated without prior information into the neural network, enhancing image features for unfamiliar objects. This augmentation significantly aids the OD algorithm in detecting previously unknown objects, thereby empowering the AV to possess an improved perception ability. This advancement is particularly valuable when the operator imparts driving advice to the AV instead of exercising direct control. In conclusion, this dissertation makes a noteworthy contribution to AV teleoperation by furnishing a comprehensive solution that spans various aspects of AV teleoperation. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation revolves around the teleoperation of autonomous vehicles (AVs), with the objective of formulating a comprehensive teleoperation system that encompasses two critical aspects: direct control and indirect control. In the initial segment of the dissertation, we introduce a real-time teleoperation direct control system based on neural networks. This framework plays a pivotal role in assisting operators in navigating AVs efficiently, especially in the face of challenges such as communication delays and complex external environments. Following this, we present a novel saliency-based object detection (OD) algorithm. This algorithm empowers the AV to recognize potential objects beyond its prior knowledge, thereby enhancing its level of autonomous control, particularly when operators opt not to exercise direct control over the remote AV. Our research findings delve into the essential facets of AV teleoperation. The developed teleoperation system serves as a valuable reference for future researchers and engineers dedicated to advancing autonomous vehicle technology.

In Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA), user queries are evaluated over a set of facts under the open world assumption, while taking into account background knowledge given in the form of a Description Logic (DL) ontology. Motivated by situation awareness applications, temporal conjunctive queries (TCQs) have recently been proposed as a useful extension of traditional OBDA to support the processing of temporal information. This paper extends the existing complexity analysis of TCQ entailment to very expressive DLs underlying the OWL 2 standard, and in contrast to previous work also allows for queries containing transitive roles. / This is an extended version of the paper “Temporal Conjunctive Queries in Expressive Description Logics with Transitive Roles”, published in the Proceedings of the 28th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI’15).

Open-world videogames inherently allow players a significant amount of freedomwhen traversing the in-game world. Due to this fact, level designers for such games are taskedwith the challenge of maintaining engagement and motivating exploration without drasticallyinfringing on their player agency. With this study, the authors analyzed three popular open-world games via a comparative formal analysis to determine the presence and validity of thePOI Diversity Rule, a conceptual rule for effective open-world level design proposed bySkobelev (2023), which recommends having at least three points of interests on the player’sline of horizon, offering different gameplay experiences. The authors performed this study byplotting out a route known as a “critical path”, taking panoramic screenshots within 30 secondintervals and analyzing them. The results showed that the rule is largely prevalent in all threegames. However, the conditions of fulfillment differ in terms of what categories are mostcommon, and whether static or dynamic POI are most prevalent. / Open world-datorspel ger spelare en hög grad av frihet att resa runt i spelvärlden. Pågrund av detta står leveldesigners för sådana spel inför utmaningen att upprätthållaengagemang och motivera utforskning inom spelvärlden utan att allvarligt begränsa spelarnashandlingsfrihet. I denna studie analyserades tre populära open world-spel via en jämförandeformell analys för att avgöra närvaron och giltigheten av POI Diversity Rule, en konceptuellregel för effektiv open world-leveldesign föreslagen av Skobelev (2023). Regelnrekommenderar att det bör finnas minst tre intressepunkter inom spelarens synligahorisontlinje, som erbjuder olika spelupplevelser. Författarna genomförde denna studiegenom att plotta in en rutt kallad "critical path", ta panoramabilder med 30 sekundersintervaller och analysera dem. Resultaten visade att regeln är till stor del närvarande i alla trespel. Men de specifika villkoren gällande dess uppfyllelse skiljer sig åt när det kommer tillvilka kategorier som är vanligast, och huruvida statiska eller dynamiska intressepunkter ärmest framträdande. / <p></p><p></p>

Dans cette thèse, nous nous sommes intéressés au problème de la ré-identification de personnes dans le cadre de bases d'identités ouvertes. Ré-identifier une personne suppose qu'elle a déjà été identifiée auparavant. La galerie fait référence aux identités connues. Dans le cas de bases d'identités ouvertes, la galerie ne contient pas toutes les identités possibles. Ainsi une personne requête peut être une des personnes de la galerie, mais peut aussi ne pas être présente dans la galerie. Ré-identifier en base ouverte consiste donc non seulement à ranger par ordre de similarité les identités galeries les plus semblables à la personne requête mais également à rejeter les personnes requêtes si elles ne correspondent à aucune personne de la galerie. Une de nos contributions, COPReV, s'appuie exclusivement sur des contraintes de vérification afin d'apprendre une projection des descripteurs telle que la distance entre les descripteurs d'une même personne soit inférieure à un seuil et que la distance entre les descripteurs de deux personnes distinctes soit supérieure au même seuil. Nos autres contributions se basent sur des méthodes parcimonieuses collaboratives qui sont performantes pour résoudre des tâches de classement. Nous proposons d'améliorer ces méthodes en introduisant un aspect vérification grâce à une collaboration élargie. De plus, une variante bidirectionnelle de cette approche la rend encore plus robuste et donne des résultats meilleurs que les autres approches actuelles de l'état de l'art dans le cadre de la ré-identification de personne en base d'identités ouverte. / In this thesis we tackle the open world person re-identification task in which the people we want to re-identify (probe) might not appear in the database of known identities (gallery). For a given probe person, the goal is to find out whether he is present in the gallery or not and if so, who he is. Our first contribution is based on a verification formulation of the problem. A linear transformation of the features is learnt so that the distance between features of the same person are below a threshold and that of distinct people are above that same threshold so that it is easy to determine whether two sets of images represent the same person or not. Our other contributions are based on collaborative sparse representations. A usual way to use collaborative sparse representation for re-identification is to approximate the feature of a probe image by a sparse linear combination of gallery elements, where all the known identities collaborate but only the most similar elements are selected. Gallery identities are then ranked according to how much they contributed to the approximation. We propose to enhance the collaborative aspect so that collaborative sparse representations can be used not only as a ranking tool but also as a detection tool which rejects wrong matches. A bidirectional variant gives even more robust results by taking into account the fact that a good match is a match where there is a reciprocal relation in which both the probe and the gallery identities consider the other one as a good match. COPReV shows average performances but bidirectional collaboration enhanced sparse representation method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for open world scenarios.

This thesis deals with procedural generation techniques and its use in the creation of voxel models. The techniques that have been used are Perlin Noise, Voronoi diagram, L-systems etc. This knowledge is then used to create a world generator for computer game with open world. This game provides players with the ability to modify this world and use its creativity, for example, in building construction. The game, however, will not give to the player all options for free, but for example for build, he or she will first have to find and mine the material. The game has been written in programming language C++ with the use of libraries Boost, SDL and OpenGL.

This master's thesis aims to investigate the narrative components inherent in open-world games. In this thesis, we will extract the narrative part of a game,analyze it, and compare the narrative part with other game design elements. The focus will be on the game "The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt," with specific portions of the game studied using AutoCAD and in-game playthroughs to extract data relating to narrative components such as items, characters, and locales. Data such as buildings, cities and objects referring to main-quest, sidequest, random interaction, cutscenes-storytelling, object interaction, and recurring characters are generated from the open-world game The Witcher III:The Wild Hunt using AutoCAD. Objects are used to mark narrative components during gameplay, and these elements will be exported into Excel for analysis using Tableau. The results of the research will be coupled with other parts of the level design. The collected data will be evaluated with Tableau, and a comparative study between the narrative part and the game-level design part has been conducted to uncover patterns and trends in the open-world game. This study investigates the narrative components found in the game world, examining their importance on various scales and their relationships with other game mechanics. According to the research, item interactions become more significant on the third floor and in larger cities, whereas cut scenes and narration are more common in big cities and on the first floor of buildings. The study also emphasizes the connection between main quests and side quests, indicating their strong relationship to the game's overarching story. The use of side missions, which frequently entail interacting with city objects, becomes increasingly important for encouraging player exploration. The study emphasizes the need for game designers to tailor their use of narrative components to the scale and context of each gaming setting, ultimately helping them to possibly create more immersive and engaging game worlds.

There has been a noticeable increase in people’s interest in open-world games, especially those that incorporate emergent gameplay. Emergent gameplay refers to activities performed by players to create properties that cannot be created without the interaction of multiple game components. While it is evident that emergent gameplay can arise from the interaction between multiple game components, the role of the environment in influencing its occurrence remains unclear. Therefore, this study aims to identify the role of the environment by utilizing the concept of affordance, which explains the relationship between how an actor interacts with an environment. To gather insights, a small open-world game prototype was developed to collect gameplay data from players, who were interviewed upon testing the prototype. A thematic analysis was conducted to gain insights from the interview data, which was complemented by visualizing the players’ gameplay data. The analysis results indicate that the occurrence of emergent gameplay can be enhanced by concealing the affordance and signifiers of the environment. Additionally, the environment acts as an extension of the players’ interaction space when the players can only interact with the environment through other game mechanics. / Det har varit ett märkbart ökat intresse för spel med öppna världar, särskilt de som inkluderar emergent gameplay. Emergent gameplay avser aktiviteter som spelare utför för att skapa egenskaper som inte kan skapas utan interaktion mellan flera olika spelkomponenter. Även om det är tydligt att emergent gameplay kan uppstå genom interaktionen mellan flera spelkomponenter, så är rollen som miljön spelar för att påverka dess förekomst fortfarande oklar. Därför syftar denna studie till att identifiera miljöns roll genom att utnyttja begreppet "affordance", vilket förklarar förhållandet mellan hur en aktör interagerar med en miljö. För att samla insikter utvecklades en liten prototyp av ett spel med en öppen värld för att samla in gameplay-data från spelare som intervjuades efter att ha testat prototypen. En tematisk analys genomfördes för att få insikter från intervjumaterialet, som kompletterades med en visualisering av spelarnas gameplay-data. Analysresultaten indikerar att förekomsten av emergent gameplay kan förbättras genom att dölja affordance och tecken i miljön. Dessutom fungerar miljön som en förlängning av spelarnas interaktionsutrymme när spelarna endast kan interagera med miljön genom annan spelmekanik.

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Over the last years, Web services have become increasingly popular. It is because they allow businesses to share data and business process (BP) logic through a programmatic interface across networks. In order to reach the full potential of Web services, they can be combined to achieve specifi c functionalities. Web services run in complex contexts where arising events may compromise the quality of the system (e.g. a sudden security attack). As a result, it is desirable to count on mechanisms to adapt Web service compositions (or simply called service compositions) according to problematic events in the context. Since critical systems may require prompt responses, manual adaptations are unfeasible in large and intricate service compositions. Thus, it is suitable to have autonomic mechanisms to guide their self-adaptation. One way to achieve this is by implementing variability constructs at the language level. However, this approach may become tedious, difficult to manage, and error-prone as the number of con figurations for the service composition grows. The goal of this thesis is to provide a model-driven framework to guide autonomic adjustments of context-aware service compositions. This framework spans over design time and runtime to face arising known and unknown context events (i.e., foreseen and unforeseen at design time) in the close and open worlds respectively. At design time, we propose a methodology for creating the models that guide autonomic changes. Since Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) lacks support for systematic reuse of service operations, we represent service operations as Software Product Line (SPL) features in a variability model. As a result, our approach can support the construction of service composition families in mass production-environments. In order to reach optimum adaptations, the variability model and its possible con figurations are verifi ed at design time using Constraint Programming (CP). At runtime, when problematic events arise in the context, the variability model is leveraged for guiding autonomic changes of the service composition. The activation and deactivation of features in the variability model result in changes in a composition model that abstracts the underlying service composition. Changes in the variability model are refl ected into the service composition by adding or removing fragments of Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) code, which are deployed at runtime. Model-driven strategies guide the safe migration of running service composition instances. Under the closed-world assumption, the possible context events are fully known at design time. These events will eventually trigger the dynamic adaptation of the service composition. Nevertheless, it is diffi cult to foresee all the possible situations arising in uncertain contexts where service compositions run. Therefore, we extend our framework to cover the dynamic evolution of service compositions to deal with unexpected events in the open world. If model adaptations cannot solve uncertainty, the supporting models self-evolve according to abstract tactics that preserve expected requirements. / Alférez Salinas, GH. (2013). Achieving Autonomic Web Service Compositions with Models at Runtime [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/34672 / TESIS