IEEE Introduces Mario Level-Generation Competition

bgweber writes "Last year, the IEEE conference on Computational Intelligence and Games hosted a competition to determine who could write the best AI for playing Mario levels (YouTube video). This year, the conference has expanded the competition to include a track on level generation as well, where the goal is to generate new levels online procedurally. Submitting an entry is as easy as implementing a Java interface that performs procedural content generation. The implications of this competition are techniques for greatly increasing the replayability of games, since each gameplay session could present new levels to the player."

Comments

Done

[gpf2]

Congratulations adventurer! Your quest is at an end for you have reached the home of NetHack.

Re:Done

[bluesatin]

For some games randomly generated levels work, but for a lot of games it just means un-inspired bland levels most of the time.

It might work for some games like Mario; but even in the relatively simple genre of 2D scrollers there are some examples of where it wouldn't work, take Braid for example.

Re:Done

[game kid]

Diablo II (and possibly the original Diablo) does this as well in single player.

Quoth the 'pedia,

Diablo is highly re-playable due to its randomly generated level layouts, monsters, and items. In addition, in single-player mode there are only three core quests as the rest of them are drawn from several pools, making it impossible to complete every quest in one playthrough of the game. Either way, only the last two quests are compulsory. Given this arrangement, no two playthroughs of the game are ever exactly alike.

So it's possibly not "possibly". The quoted section is unsourced, though, so it possibly is "possibly". I'll possibly never know unless I play the game or study modal logic.

Re:Done

[twidarkling]

For some games randomly generated levels work, but for a lot of games it just means un-inspired bland levels most of the time.

I'd go so far as to say randomly generated levels don't work for *most* games. The problem with no level being human-crafted, and there being infinite variation is that, ironically, all the levels start feeling same-y. The big "watch it work" example is usually Diablo I/II. I admit, I probably played those for hundreds of hours *each.* But in doing so, basically developed a sixth sense in the basics of how levels were created. In any randomly generated area, I could, with about 80% accuracy, find both the exit and any waypoint straight away. No false turns, no fleshing out the mini-map, nothing. A procedurally generated environment in a platformer needs to play it even safer, so as to not create any areas that are literally beyond the capabilities of the player. With added limitations come fewer options, so how many times would you need to play in order to start recognizing "okay, two pipes is followed by a pit with an elevator I need to ride up to get on top of a block-cliff." Once you start recognizing individual elements, then it really doesn't matter how the level's put together, and it stops being fun any more, just like a human-designed level that was put together, only now if you run a course you really liked, you probably won't have an option to replay it.

Re:Done

[HungryHobo]

Dwarf fortress:
The geography/politics/history/characters and some of the creatures are all procedurally generated on the fly.

And that game regularly produces interesting worlds and stories of massive scale.

Asshole Mario

[cosm]

I fear the day when the singularity occurs and we peons are forced to play machine generated levels like this this for the amusement of our robotic overlords.

Re:Asshole Mario

[Peach Rings]

I think those japanese mario world hacks are just so cool. They're a triumph of hacker ingenuity.

In case you didn't know, the tools for making custom mario world levels were created by disassembling the data from the game ROM (ex this) and documenting exactly what offsets corresponded to which parts of the levels, and exactly which values correspond to which enemies, exactly how sprites are stored and animated, etc. People have contributed tools for encoding custom music into the machine code, making custom graphics palettes, and custom overworlds. A lot of this stuff is far from just documenting the data formats; from what I know about it, the overworld was particularly tricky since there are multiple sprite layers, lots of animation, lots of panning around to separately-stored areas, custom movement code, and different views depending on your progress (like butter bridge appearing), all in a completely opaque binary format!

It's a shame that this kind of thing would be totally impossible with current games. Lots of games do have excellent mod support (particularly Valve's games and the Unreal Tournament series), but some don't, and today's 50MB game executables would be impenetrable. :(

feel kind of dumb

[michaelbuddy]

As a non-programmer, this statement is a little intimidating:

"Submitting an entry is as easy as implementing a Java interface that performs procedural content generation."

WTF am I supposed to do with this? I only clicked to this post because I like mario.

Re:feel kind of dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

As a non-programmer . . . WTF am I supposed to do with this?

Wallow in your inadequacies and marvel in the brilliance of others with time, talent, (and possibly training).

That's what I'm planning on doing.

Re:feel kind of dumb

[oldhack]

Hehe, don't you wish you majored in EE? ;-) Pay sucks, lifestyle blows, but... actually, not much but there.

Re:feel kind of dumb

[b4k3d b34nz]

That's ok, nobody feels smart implementing a Java interface

Mod +5, Troll

Problems...

[Darkness404]

Randomly generated dungeons are fine and generally fun because the entire point is to explore. Randomly generated Mario levels are going to be more frustrating than anything else because the AI is going to have very little knowledge of difficulty let alone themes and re-playability.

The entire point of Mario is consistent levels with well timed jumps to reach secrets. I'm not sure if I want levels generated by computers. 50 quality levels are better than 100 AI generated levels.

Re:Problems...

[Anonymous Coward]

Randomly generated dungeons are fine and generally fun because the entire point is to explore. Randomly generated Mario levels are going to be more frustrating than anything else because the AI is going to have very little knowledge of difficulty let alone themes and re-playability.

Umm...I think you might be missing the point of this track of competition. It is a given that haphazard Mario levels would not be fun to plan. Developing algorithms that randomly create fun levels is a difficult problem. Test players will play these levels and rank them. Chances are, there will be some generators that consistently create fun levels, while others will consistently create boring levels. It may be difficult to anticipate the subjective tastes of the testers, but that just adds to the challenge.

Re:Problems...

[thegarbz]

So the point of this entire competition is to lower the quality of our titles for the simple reason of saving development money? That sounds like the typical crap that companies get grilled for here on slashdot. The point is that the fun in mario lies in it's very carefully designed levels. The ability to do all sorts of cool things if you get your timing right, and even more importantly these cool things are hidden in a way that players will often stumble upon them or discover them with very subtle visual queues which may be different for every level. This type of level development may work for many games where the point was never about careful level design (like the Worms series) however Mario is solely propped up by the level design. There's no decent story, no plot development, nothing but the fun of finding out every tiny quirk in the carefully designed level.

Random Levels

[LoudMusic]

I've been saying this for years! Random level generation in first person shooters, racers, and platformers doesn't seem terribly complex to me. Why hasn't anyone introduced this into a game yet?

To expand on it, random levels in first person shooters could also be changing during game play so that the 'round' never resets and the game continues endlessly. Any time a zone is unoccupied it could be redrawn. Or divide the map into a grid and randomly load the grid spaces with pre-designed sections, then when a section is free of players load a new section. The map will be constantly changing and the environment will be challenging. I believe this would effectively eliminate campers who memorize the best spots on maps and just hang out there the whole game.

Re:Random Levels

[Ark42]

1991, Sega - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_Jam_and_Earl

Re:Random Levels

[ultranova]

In the case of first person shooters and online gaming, people often gravitate to a select few maps.

When you're starting, you don't know any maps and will simply play what everyone else is playing. And once you've become familiar with these maps, you prefer them, because playing an unfamiliar one would put you at a disadvantage compared to playing a familiar one.

Switching up levels on the fly can be interesting for certain situations but disruptive in games that have high replay value with select few and well known maps.

Making every play happen in a different level is a great idea precisely because it disrupts tactics that take advantage of level bugs, such as camping next to respawn points. It also adds new gameplay elements, such as exploration, which in turn makes a fast but weak scout a viable character, and ambushes, because you can't just memorize every possible location.

Besides, changing the focus from route learning a coreography into quickly adapting to new situations is hardly going to make the game have less replay value. And, for that matter, why do you think that games like Mario have so many different levels, rather than just repeat a few with more enemies? It's precisely because it's fun to encounter something you haven't before. It's the premise such small franchises as Fallout, GTA and Elder Scrolls are built on. Seems to be working just fine for them.

River Raid does this

[Visoblast]

River Raid, the old Atari 2600 game from Activision, uses a pseudo random number generator to produce the game levels. It was a great way to avoid putting the levels in the game's limited ROM (2K?).

Old but good ideas just keep coming back.

Re:Actually no. That's completely wrong.

[drinkypoo]

I've played CIV and enjoyed it, but I can't play it more than once every six months or so. It's just not interesting to me to repeat the same fundamental operations over and over again.

I like story games like GTA IV (just started ballad of gay tony) but I also play Freeciv and AlphaC compulsively. I'm not super amazing, though, for example, I just beat a game of AlphaC on Librarian level (still a couple from the hardest) in the last ten turns of the game. Incidentally, while you can play these games on maps which represent real places, the scale of the games is totally unrealistic anyway, so why bother? The randomly generated maps add very much to the game. They teach us that your starting position on the globe is very important, as if we didn't know; but it teaches it at a visceral level, which I find to be one of the primary benefits of video gaming. For example, when I had my 1989 240SX I used to obsessively use it in every racing game in which it was available, and given that street racing games were fairly ubiquitous at the time, it was not difficult. When I took it to Fort Bragg (and environs) I was making a very easy turn in wet weather, with good rubber, but some leaf slime on the road caused me to begin fishtailing (this was before I got a limited slip.) This was before I got into performance driving of the vehicle and installed race suspension and what not, but I was able to instinctively correct for the slide because I had developed reflexes. It is said that visualization is as effective as practice, when an activity is visualized correctly, so this should come as no surprise.

So the idea that you'll get extra replayability out of random generation of levels is completely false. You'll get a random experience which has no information content behind it. It'll be valueless except as a reaction test.

I think it's most applicable to competitive games. Super Smash Bros. for example. Or, taking that to a logical conclusion, levels for FPS deathmatch. One of the great frustrations of a new player is that the old hands know the maps well, and you spend a lot of time getting ambushed. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to generate deathmatch maps procedurally?

Re:Actually no. That's completely wrong.

[grumbel]

Back in the 80's, there was an air-combat game. Think it might've been F15-Strike Eagle...which included the concept of random missions in which you were sent out to hit one random air target and one random ground target for each mission.

Back in the 90's there was EF2000, a flight sim that included a dynamic campaign that could simulate a complete war. All missions where automatically generated, but they weren't random, they matched the current state of the war. You could even see friend and foe flying around on their missions, while you are flying around on yours. The world was 'alive' and it was the most friggin amazing thing ever.

Random is boring when it has no logic behind it and thus no story to tell or play. When random on the other side means a dynamic evolving world that itself becomes the storyteller it can be the most fantastic thing ever, because the game will stop feeling like a serious of script triggers and instead feel like a real world. My problem with todays games is that they simply feel like a roller coaster ride, it looks fun and exciting, but if you have played games for a while it all just looks fake.