Programmes and Preliminaries
Preliminary Programme.(Microsoft Word Document).
Research and Technical Papers
LP1 - A Novel Approach to Shadow Detection in Video-Based Virtual Reality Interaction
Cai Haipeng, Zhang Mingming, Zhigeng Pan
When detecting moving shadow for video-based virtual reality interaction (VBVRI), we need not concern the original moving object that casts the shadow. It is based on this speciality of application that a novel algorithm of moving shadow detection is proposed in this paper, which primarily introduces a two-step shadow discriminant and an improvement upon the classical Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). The new algorithm markedly enhances the real-time performance of shadow detection opposed to that of GMM, and exhibits an outstanding resistance against the disturbance that arises from abrupt lighting changes.
LP2 - A Testbed for P2P Gaming using Time Warp
Stefan Tolic, Helmut Hlavacs
Peer-to-peer based gaming is a new paradigm for distributed multiplayer online gaming that has attracted attention in the last years. It is known that P2P based topologies offer good scaling properties and mitigate unfairness otherwise observed for peers being far away and thus having large network lags. However, removing inconsistencies for high paced action games like FPS or tank battle games requires the implementation of a Time Warp-like mechanism, which itself may hinder gameplay for high lags. In this paper we present a tank battle game named Panzer Battalion. Created from scratch, this game follows the P2P approach and implements Time Warp for removing inconsistencies. Panzer Battalion is meant as a testbed for creating rollbacks and understanding, how Time Warp rollbacks depend on network lag, and how gameplay is altered by them.
LP3 - Familiars - Manipulating Social Networks with Mobile Gaming
Ben Kirman, Shaun Lawson, Duncan Rowland, Fabrizio Davide, Francesco Collovà, Stefano Puglia
This paper presents the mobile multiplayer gaming application Familiars. Familiars leverages social networking and locative technologies to create a reactive social experience for the game’s participants over extended periods of time. The game is based around the concept of each player owning a Familiar –a virtual sprite or creature somewhat similar in concept to Pullman’s dæmons - which has a visual appearance and a location in the real world. A player’s interactions with their own, and other players’, Familiars is used to directly inform the state of the game and status of the player – inviting them to become more aware of the impact of their social activity, and to discover novel strategies for becoming more socially effective in computer-mediated environments. We begin by explaining the design for the game and the unique challenges of the mobile medium as a platform for social gaming. We discuss the theoretical and technical background of the social and contextual analysis system used in the mobile mediated environment and go on to describe how this informed the implementation of the mobile and server applications that power the game. Finally we discuss the findings of the application test groups, lessons learnt during development and important design considerations for mediated mobile social gaming.
LP4 - Scheduling Issues in Broadcast-Enabled Multimedia Interactive Mobile Games
M. Mohsin Saleemi, Kristian Nybom, Jerker Björkqvist, Johan Lilius
In this paper, we study how to implement interactive multimedia services using a DVB-H broadcast channel combined with a point-to-point (PtP) channel, such as 3G or GPRS. We study the problem in the context of a location based game. The technical challenge is to schedule the sending of data over the broadcast channel to provide a seamless interactive experience. We explore design issues and problems related to the scheduling of content in the game, present a usecase to describe scheduling problems and propose a content scheduling algorithm to solve these problems. We conclude that most of the problems involved with our approach can be expressed as the problem of defining delivery deadlines for a scheduling algorithm.
LP5 -Coordinating Heterogeneous Game-based Learning Approaches in Online Learning Environments
Javier Torrente, Pablo Lavín Mera, Pablo Moreno-Ger, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón
Game-based learning is quickly becoming a popular trend in Technology-Enhanced Learning. However, the field is very broad with many different initiatives being classified as game-based learning. On the other hand, instructors are demanding effective ways to track the interaction of the students with the games and to assess the learning process. The diversity is a major issue in this regard, requiring the instructors to understand each game and to evaluate different kinds of games in different ways. In this work we present a unified mechanism to gather tracking and assessment information from different and varied games. All the information is stored in an online learning environment, where the instructor can consult it. The keystone of the approach is a tracking and assessment API that can be implemented by different games on the client-side and by diverse online learning environments on the server-side. This approach is illustrated with the <e-Adventure> family of educational platforms, which support this interoperable API.
LP6 - How Teaching and Learning Styles Affect the Adoption of Educational Games in Classroom?
Kowit Rapeepisarn, Kok Wai Wong, Chun Che Fung, Myint Swe Khine
Computer games have gained more attention to be use in educational purposes for the past years. Many countries have started to accept computer games as an effective tool for learning, and some use them in the classroom as well. At the moment, this kind of education technology is not yet widely acknowledged or used in schools and colleges in Thailand. Hence, this survey research is to investigate the needs and the intention to use this technology in the classrooms. The surveys are conducted in the School of Information Technology from four Thai Universities. The objective of the surveys is to gather results to answer these questions: “will students and lecturers with certain learning and teaching style prefer the games as part of the course content and intent to use them as a learning tool in classroom?” and “what are their perceptions toward education computer games if they are adopted?” The findings of this study will help to provide guidelines for the Thai educators and computer game developers on how they could prepare course content in educational computer games for use as part of their teaching curriculum.
LP7 - Towards a Domain Specific Modelling Language for Serious Game Design
Stephen Tang, Martin Hanneghan
Computer games are fun to play but the design and engineering tasks involved behind the scenes can be daunting to many. Model-Driven Engineering offers an approach to simplify the technical complexity of computer games development and tools that support model-driven development can help to reduce the barriers towards the adoption of games-based learning. This paper describes the process to define a Domain Specific Modelling Language (DSML) for serious game design modelling. Existing software modelling languages are analysed to determine suitability for use in serious games modelling. A modelling framework for serious games design is then proposed taking account into requirements of serious game design and findings from the analysis.
LP8 - Personalised Mobile Game Recommendation System
Worapat Paireekreng, Kok Wai Wong
The mobile games sector has seem to be one of the fast growing industries due to the rising of mobile market. Almost everyone has used a mobile device to communicate before. With the advancement of the mobile technology, mobile devices can now be used as a mobile media centre. One of the emerging areas is also using it for gaming just like a portable game console. However, players may have different preferences what genres of games will be more interested to the players at different time of the day. Furthermore, using mobile internet can sometime very difficult to find the interested games to download at different time of the day. In this paper, we proposed a personalised mobile game recommendation system which takes into consideration of the time-of-day and time-of-week is proposed. From the data collected, it can be seen that at different time periods users may download different games and from different game genres.
LP9 - Character-Driven Game Design: Characters, Conflict, and Gameplay
Petri Lankoski, Staffan Björk
Contemporary computer and video games utilize characters in large extent. However, game research literature says only little about how to design gameplay so that it reflects characters' personality; mainly focusing on the narration and graphical presentation of the characters. This paper presents a character-driven game design method, which uses ideas from dramatic character design to include gameplay into the design process. Based upon previous work on NPC design and a new analysis, several design choices regarding gameplay are identified. These choices are described as gameplay design patterns and related to how specific features in a character design can support gameplay. In conjunction with the patterns, the concepts of recognition, alliance, and alignment are used to introduce the method and provide examples. The paper concludes with a discussion on how the method can affect the overall gameplay in games.
LP10 - Autopoiesis and Sonic Immersion: Modelling Sound-Based Player Relationships as a Self-Organizing System
Mark Nicholas Grimshaw
In previous work I have provided a conceptual framework for the design and analysis of sound in First-Person Shooter games and have suggested that the relationship between player and soundscape in such games can be modelled as an acoustic ecology. This paper develops these ideas further in the context of multiplayer First-Person Shooter games. I suggest that individual acoustic ecologies within the game combine to create a virtual acoustic ecology, of which no player is wholly aware, and that this virtual acoustic ecology may be modelled as an autopoietic (sonopoietic) system that, in part, explains and enhances player immersion in the game.
LP11 - Moving Through Game Space: The Paths of the Videogame
Alison Gazzard
In the way that stories are constructed the screen space of film and of computer games are related but not identical. Games do not simply replicate cinematographic use of space or movement to construct the many interwoven strands of its narrative (story sequences, moral structures of cause, effect and consequences, the aesthetic and emotional trajectories of mis-en-scene, music and sound, code of colour, materiality, performance, and intertextual allusion), and to think they do is to misunderstand the historical relation of films and game which is less a line of direct descent so much as a co-evolution of similar forms. One fundamental difference between the screen of film and the screen of game is that in the latter the player is a director-of viewing within a fluid world, an interactive participant who purposefully constructs a syntagmatic instance through their actions that will vary between viewings. The videogame is a sequence of actions: events that generate the screen display, in a film there are only events. This suggests, perhaps that where the events of film follow ‘tracks’ like a train, the less determined action: events of game follow ‘paths’, and are often maze-like in their internal organisation of places, structures of choices, and the location of narrative and other significance. This paper aims to open up a discussion about the paths flowing through the game space we, as players, are experiencing. By constructing a vocabulary of different path structures inherent in the design of worldly mazes, this paper seeks to expand on these real world vocabularies and apply them to videogames. The terms most important to this discussion are that of the ‘dead-end’, ‘bridges’, and ‘warps’ and how their meanings have evolved through our experience of the videogame.
LP12 - User Powered Games for Research
Ben Kirman, Sean Casey, Shaun Lawson, Duncan Rowland
This paper describes how user-generated content can be harnessed to create compelling games for research purposes. We show that by entrusting the complicated processes of asset creation and management to the players themselves, research based games can still allow for rich, deep and unique experiences - experiences that would be impossible to create manually under the typical time and resource constraints found in research projects. It is contended that “user power” as a game design element is especially powerful for use by researchers who are most likely working on their own or in small groups with limited budgets, and for whom the research objectives may be more important than the design of the game itself. The paper explores the recent history of applications that take advantage of user-generated content and discusses how these principles have been used to develop two user-powered games: Gophers and Familiars. The worlds created by the users of these games are explored and the strengths and weaknesses of using user-generated content to power games are discussed.
SP1 - Context Based Variation of Character Animation by Physical Simulation
Gabriel Notman, Phillip Carlisle, Roger Jackson
Presented is a review of existing methods for creating physically based character animation. We argue that creating dynamic variation to defined motions is the main benefit of these methods. Additionally our proposed research in the area of dynamic stylization of the character animation based on physical methods is included here.
SP2 - Identifying the Skills Gap for Game Development Companies in Merseyside
Martin Hanneghan, Tony Hughes
Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) was commissioned by the Learning Skills Council in April 2007 to identify the skills gap of the Merseyside region of the UK in both the creative media and gaming industries. The School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences in conjunction with the International Centre for Digital Content at LJMU conducted a year-long study of these industries within the region and this paper presents a summary of the findings of our report concentrating on the gaming sector.
SP3 - A Flexible and Extensible Architecture for Visibility Culling
Miquel À. Rújula, Jeroen Dierckx, Tom Jehaes, Peter Quax, Wim Lamotte, Pere A. Palmer
In this paper, we present on-going work on the development of a generic visualization framework for 3D networked virtual environments, suitable for deployment on a variety of platforms and easily adaptable for a whole range of applications and scenarios. The proposed framework exhibits several important high-level characteristics, the main ones being flexibility and extensibility. The former is evidenced by the ability to perform rapid switching between a number of underlying visibility determination techniques, while the latter is demonstrated by the fact that new techniques can easily be integrated through a plug-in system. On a technical level, the software design allows for run-time integration of additional visibility processors and efficient selection mechanisms, based on user-defined parameters. The inclusion of a specific entity in the software architecture (dubbed the mediator), responsible for the communication between several visibility processors for various environments, eliminates the need for these processors to be aware of one another. At the same time, the software design allows for run-time integration of additional processors. The spatial database and the visibility algorithms are separated in their respective modules, in order to make the framework more maintainable and reusable.
SP4 - 3D Java Game Development with Homura
C. Dennett, S. Cooper, M. Ariff Sabri, C. Carter, A. El Rhalibi, M. Merabti, P. Fergus, Marc Price
The gaming industry now boasts revenues comparable to that of the filming industry and its progress over the last three decades has seen such advancements that games now provide a life-like immersive experience which is set to continue. Development has been dispersed across multiple toolsets requiring specialist gaming engineers to bring many aspects of game development together to create top titles. There is a need to simplify this process, not only for ease of development but to capture the imaginations or those outside the game development domain. We already see this through modding and more recently in virtual environments where the games or worlds are influenced by the content created by users. With this in mind we propose a novel integrated development environment called Homura. Homura is based on the Eclipse platform and extends the jME game engine, with new interfaces, content and libraries, thus, providing a software suite that integrates source editors, compilers, including spatial and positional editors to afford advanced graphical functionalities within the IDE.
SP5 - Runtime Evolution for Online Gaming: A Case Study using JBoss and Drools
Lei Zhu, Graham Morgan
In this paper we describe a rule based approach to online game development. Our goal is to ease the evolution of an online game by allowing far reaching change in gaming scenarios after game deployment has occurred and during game play. This is achieved by making use of a rules based engine (Drools) within the JBoss platform. We use a simple gaming scenario to demonstrate how far reaching change is possible without the difficulty of altering program code when rules are separated out from other application level logic.
SP6 - Dynamic Interactive Storytelling for Computer Games Using AI Techniques
S. Cooper, A. El Rhalibi, M. Merabti, Marc Price
In this paper, we investigate the design and implementation of an interactive storytelling engine and the artificial intelligence techniques that will enable novel approaches to procedurally generating digital interactive storytelling for computer games.
SP7 - How to Steer Characters in Group Games
Ilham Abiyasa Suhardi, Jörn Loviscach
Video games played by several persons using the same screen require specic user interfaces. In this work, we look at options to let players steer a number of on-screen characters. To this end, we have built a prototype system that employs a number of Nintendo Wii Remote devices for input. We have devised three types of control that are based on different sensors available in these devices. In addition, we propose a mode to enable teams of players to collaboratively control a single character. This paper closes with a preliminary evaluation based on a prototypical game.
SP8 - Koku: State Synchronization System for Networked Multiplayer Games
C. Dennett, A. El Rhalibi, M. Merabti, Marc Price
In this paper, we talk about the conception and development of a multiplayer state synchronisation system named Koku, a state-oriented framework developed for use with Java-based games that is intended to pave an easy route to multiplayer game creation. The system has been inspired by the classical server-pool model which is used in MMORPG games.
SP9 - Virtual Haj, Game via Experiential Design
Mohd Fazidin Jabar, Che Zulkhairi Abdullah, Abdul Halim Ahmad
Haj is a pilgrimage required for a muslim to perform once in a lifetime. Naturally, when a muslim prepared himself or herself to perfom Haj, he or she will take a course on the principles (rules and concept) and practices (tasks and incantations) of Haj. The concept and implementation is quite complex that Muslims took courses from different schools and went to Mecca to perform Umrah (a mini Haj) before executing the real one. Virtual Haj via Game Theory, aspires to bridge the need for better courseware by giving the users a new medium to learn and practice Haj at home.
SP10 - Networking Middleware and Online-Deployment Mechanisms for Java-based Games.
C. Carter, A. El Rhalibi, M. Merabti, Marc Price
Currently, web-based online gaming applications are predominately utilising Adobe Flash or Java Applets as their core technologies. These games are often casual, two-dimensional games and do not utilise the specialist graphics hardware which has proliferated across modern PCs and Consoles. Multi-user online game play in these titles is usually extremely limited, and in most cases non-existent. Modern computer games which grace the current consoles and personal computers are designed to utilise the increasingly impressive hardware power at their disposal. However, these are predominately distributed in a physical format or deployed through custom, proprietary networking mechanisms and use platform specific networking APIs to facilitate multi-user online game play. In order to unify the concepts of both disparate games types, this paper presents a set of two interconnected frameworks using Java Web Start and JXTA P2P technologies, providing a platform-independent framework capable of deploying hardware accelerated cross-platform, cross-browser online-enabled Java as part of the Homura Project.
