Aspect-oriented procedural content engineering for game design

ABSTRACT

Generally progressive procedural content in the context of 3D scene rendering is expressed as recursive functions where a finer level of detail gets computed on demand. Typical examples of content procedurally generated are fractal images and noise textures. Unfortunately, not always the content can be expressed in this way, developers and content creators need the data to have some peculiarity (like windows on a wall for a house 3D model) and a method to drive data simplification without losing relevant details.

In this paper we discuss how aspect oriented (AO) techniques can be used to drive the content creation process by mapping each data peculiarity to the code to generate it. Using aspects will let us to partially evaluate the code of the procedure improving the performance without losing the flow of the generation logic. We will also discuss how the use of AO can provide techniques to build simplified version of the data through code transformations.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.3 Coding Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: Object-oriented programming

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features

Keywords:
AO techniques, aspect-oriented programming, data engineering, meta-data