Developing Procedural Generation Tools for Video Game Audio Designers

<p>In video games, audio is often a vital element in the creation of immersive gaming experiences. One set of techniques that are particularly well suited to attaining this immersion are procedural audio techniques. These techniques enable enhanced immersion through supporting close synchronisation between player and game state in ways that are difficult to achieve with other game audio techniques. While this is the case, there is a lack of GUI and script-based tools that support the use of such techniques. This thesis explores this lack, and documents the development of two new video game tools for the creation of procedurally generated audio. The first of these tools is a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) library that supports the playback and real-time manipulation of MIDI files in the Unity game engine. The tool achieves real-time procedural audio, yet fails to meet required levels of time accuracy and is only a partial success. The second tool developed is a plugin hosting application that enables the use of the popular audio plugin format, VST2, in the Unity game engine. The tool succeeds in achieving VST2 effect plugin loading and, at the time of the completion of this thesis, is the only tool capable of embedding such plugins into applications developed in a major game engine. This will be of significant benefit to game developers who wish to achieve a high degree of immersivity in the music and sound design in their games.</p>

Developing Procedural Generation Tools for Video Game Audio Designers

<p>In video games, audio is often a vital element in the creation of immersive gaming experiences. One set of techniques that are particularly well suited to attaining this immersion are procedural audio techniques. These techniques enable enhanced immersion through supporting close synchronisation between player and game state in ways that are difficult to achieve with other game audio techniques. While this is the case, there is a lack of GUI and script-based tools that support the use of such techniques. This thesis explores this lack, and documents the development of two new video game tools for the creation of procedurally generated audio. The first of these tools is a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) library that supports the playback and real-time manipulation of MIDI files in the Unity game engine. The tool achieves real-time procedural audio, yet fails to meet required levels of time accuracy and is only a partial success. The second tool developed is a plugin hosting application that enables the use of the popular audio plugin format, VST2, in the Unity game engine. The tool succeeds in achieving VST2 effect plugin loading and, at the time of the completion of this thesis, is the only tool capable of embedding such plugins into applications developed in a major game engine. This will be of significant benefit to game developers who wish to achieve a high degree of immersivity in the music and sound design in their games.</p>

Determining Chess Game State from an Image

Identifying the configuration of chess pieces from an image of a chessboard is a problem in computer vision that has not yet been solved accurately. However, it is important for helping amateur chess players improve their games by facilitating automatic computer analysis without the overhead of manually entering the pieces. Current approaches are limited by the lack of large datasets and are not designed to adapt to unseen chess sets. This paper puts forth a new dataset synthesised from a 3D model that is an order of magnitude larger than existing ones. Trained on this dataset, a novel end-to-end chess recognition system is presented that combines traditional computer vision techniques with deep learning. It localises the chessboard using a RANSAC-based algorithm that computes a projective transformation of the board onto a regular grid. Using two convolutional neural networks, it then predicts an occupancy mask for the squares in the warped image and finally classifies the pieces. The described system achieves an error rate of 0.23% per square on the test set, 28 times better than the current state of the art. Further, a few-shot transfer learning approach is developed that is able to adapt the inference system to a previously unseen chess set using just two photos of the starting position, obtaining a per-square accuracy of 99.83% on images of that new chess set. The code, dataset, and trained models are made available online.

RESEARCH ON ATHLETES’ PSYCHOLOGICAL REGULATION ABILITY BASED ON BACK PROPAGATION (BP) NEURAL NETWORK ALGORITHM

ABSTRACT Athletes’ psychological control ability directly affects competitions. Therefore, it is necessary to supervise the athletes’ game psychology. Athletes’ game state supervision model is constructed through the facial information extraction algorithm. The homography matrix and the calculation method are introduced. Then, two methods are introduced to solve the rotation matrix from the homography matrix. After the rotation matrix is solved, the method of obtaining the facial rotation angle from the rotation matrix is introduced. The two methods are compared in the simulation data, and the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm are analyzed to determine the method used in this paper. The experimental results show that the model prediction accuracy reaches 70%, which can effectively supervise the psychological state of athletes. This research study is of great significance to improve the performance of athletes in competitions and improve the application of back propagation (BP) neural network algorithm.

Optimal guessing in ‘Guess Who’

Are you Richard? Are you Anne? We look at the strategic problem in the children’s guessing game Guess Who, which is a form of zero-sum symmetric game with perfect information. We discuss some preliminary strategic insights and formally derive an optimal strategy and win-probabilities for the game. We discuss the first-mover advantage in the game and other strategic aspects coming out of the optimal strategy. While the paper is based on the popular children’s game, our analysis generalises the actual game by allowing any initial game state with an arbitrarily large number of starting characters. With the aid of these mathematical results you can now comprehensively thrash your young children and be a terrible parent!

Strategic Interaction of State Institutions and Enterprises with Economic Security Positions in Digital Economy

The purpose of the study is to develop a model of the influence of state institutions on the enterpriseeconomic security system of using the provisions of game theory. For each of the two participants in the game -state institutions and enterprises - proposed indicators determine the strategy of the game participant and theirbehavior in such a game. The content of each of the proposed indicators is considered and it is shown how theirvalue can be obtained. The proposed indicators for both participants in the game are leveled to a single scale.The indicators of the model of the antagonistic game between the enterprise and state institutions aredetermined that became the basis for the construction of the game model, which is a tuple. The developedmodel of the influence of state institutions on the enterprise economic security system, represented by acombination of possible strategies for the behavior of both participants in the game in hyper cubic fivedimensional space, which are expressed by the values of indicators for each of these participants, as well as thecalculated “gain” for each of these combinations. Using this model allows to achieve different resultsdepending on the goal of the study. The main result of the model is the search for a balance of interests in the“enterprise-state” system. That is, the search for those points of stable choice that can be obtained using thedeveloped model, namely: search for a local or general extremum in the game field, which will determine themaximum win for one of the participants or the total win of two participants at the same time; research andquantitative estimation of the actual and maximum possible negative impact of state institutions on theeconomic security system of business entities; determining the expected change in the influence of stateinstitutions on the economic security system of business entities due to changes in its strategy; theestablishment of the best strategy for a business entity in existing conditions, which, according to the selectedcriterion, will ensure the stable functioning of the economic security system at an enterprise; determination ofthe limits of the negative impact of state institutions on the economic security system of an enterprise.