Data-Driven Games
Research | People | Publications | Funding
Demonstration of the SGL Scripting Language
Research
Computer games are becoming the next frontier for social interaction between humans. The Entertainment Software Association estimates that computer and video game software sales in 2005 were $7.0 billion. Game development is a particularly interesting design challenge because it requires the design team to have expertise in many different areas: art, music, engineering and so on.
Historically, game developers have solved this problem by separating game content from game code; games designed this way are called data-driven. While data-driven games may have different architectures depending on their genre, they all have roughly the same design; the following figure shows the architecture of a typical data-driven game.
Recently, the trend has been to move as much game content as possible out of the engine. The data used to define the characters or story-line is increasingly being stored in XML files. In this project we are working to further the development of data-driven games by adapting techniques from the data management community and applying them to game development. Databases have revolutionized the design of data-driven business applications because they separate the processing of data from its specification. The designer need only specify the type of data desired, using a query language, while the query processing engine processes this request automatically and efficiently. Our goal is develop a general framework that allows game designers to do much the same thing. This framework will allow them to create worlds with large numbers of NPCs, all capable of highly expressive behaviors. In this framework, the designers need only concentrate on the specification of character behavior, without having to worry about how to implement it efficiently.
People
Publications
Walker White, Benjamin Sowell, Johannes Gehrke, and Alan Demers,
Declarative Processing for Computer Games.
In Proc. of the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH Sandbox Symposium (Sandbox 2008).
-
Robert Albright, Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke, Nitin Gupta, Rick Keilty, Hooyeon Lee,
Gregory Sadowski, Benjamin Sowell, and Walker White,
SGL:
A Scalable Language for Data Driven Games (Demonstration Paper).
In Proc. of the 2008 ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2008).
See a video of the demonstration.
Note: Given the lead time of SIGMOD, this paper describes an early version of the SGL language. There have been many changes since then; see the Sandbox paper above for a more definitive version of SGL. - Nitin Gupta, Alan Demers, and Johannes Gehrke, SEMMO: A Scalable Engine for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (Demonstration Paper). In Proc. of the 2008 ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2008).
- Walker White, Christoph Koch, Nitin Gupta, Johannes Gehrke, and Alan Demers. Database Research Opportunities in Computer Games. In SIGMOD Record, September 2007.
- Walker White, Alan Demers, Christoph Koch, Johannes Gehrke, and Rajmohan Rajagopalan. Scaling Games to Epic Proportions. In Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2007).
Funding
This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant IIS-0725260, by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and by a grant from Microsoft. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.