Video game players will soon be able to defeat virtual enemies in outer space in a way that they never have.
The video game Galactic Arms Race is programmed by a new artificial intelligence technology invented by UCF Associate Professor Kenneth Stanley. The game will be released in about a month.
The game allows players to utilize an infinite supply of virtual weaponry to defeat other players in various galactic adventures.
The game is unique in that Stanley’s technology allows the server to track what weapons the player utilizes most and the ones they tend to ignore. The game then uses that information to eventually incorporate only weapons the user likes, and then it will continue to create different versions of them, Stanley said.
GAR game players will be able to battle aliens, pirates and other villains by discovering unique and more powerful weapon systems that are created by the game automatically, according to the GAR Web site.
Stanley said the method he developed is called NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT). NEAT is what allows technologies to be programmed to evolve.
Erin Hastings, a UCF graduate student, invented GAR. He thought of creating the game after he worked with Stanley’s NEAT technology, which was originally used on a Web site called PicBreeder.
Stanley supervised the PicBreeder project, which was developed by the Evolutionary Complexity Research Group at UCF a few years ago. He said the idea was to allow people on the Internet to breed pictures similar to the way people today breed horses. Users can upload two different images, and the Web site will morph them together to produce an image “offspring,” he said.
According to Stanley, PicBreeder was created primarily for experimental purposes. Hastings said he wanted to find a way to utilize the technology involved in PicBreeder to create a marketable product that a large group of people would be interested in buying.
“In the video-game industry, a big issue is that it costs a lot of money to produce the content that is in games,” Stanley said.
The term content refers to all of the things that companies usually have to pay designers and artists to come up with such as the characters’ clothing, buildings and weapons.
Hastings said the game will initially be available for free on the Internet, but he hopes that a big video game company such as EA Games will be interested in marketing GAR a few years from now.
According to the GAR Web site, this game will be more compelling to users because they will maintain the feeling of novelty and the drive for exploration by the game’s ability to continuously create new content.
Stanley said this feature of the game is groundbreaking because it is the first time that a technology can automatically generate content in a game.
“When you play GAR, you have an infinite amount of weapons to choose from,” Hastings said.
Jordan Toor, president of UCF’s PC gaming club called LANKnights, said he is looking forward to the release of the game.
“I think the evolutionary system of the weapons is an interesting idea, primarily because I haven’t seen it done in any other game yet,” he said.
Another LANKnights member Adrian Kostic said he thinks it’s great that UCF students are producing new technologies such as this one.
“Certainly, looking at the screenshots, the explanation of the graphics and the content within the game, I am fairly certain that I would be trying out this game when it comes out,” Kostic said. “Especially because it is a UCF game, and even more so being that it is free.”
The multiplayer game will be available on UCF’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Web site once it is released. Stanley said GAR will probably be listed on several popular free Internet gaming Web sites as well.
Student develops NEAT video game
Published: Thursday, February 19, 2009
Updated: Thursday, February 19, 2009
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