Frontier

The client is Matt Johnson (mjohnson@frontier.co.uk).

Project proposals for 2015:

Planet Builder

Original suggestion:

Magrathea

Synopsis

As the project name suggests, this project asks students to create custom planet building tools using procedural techniques to produce visible and inspectable results.

There is an excitement in this area in the games industry at the moment with a number of competing products in the market each using some differing solution to this problem to create game assets for players to explore and interact with in some way (one of those being our own Elite:Dangerous project).

We’ve found this is a very open area with no definite available tools or written or accepted and well documented techniques and is very much open to new ideas.

Those students with an interest in graphics and geometry, or games generally may like the opportunity to spread their wings a little and try to find their own solutions to this problem.

Requirements

The students will be expected to create a tool to manufacture the planets (or data to provide views of such), and a corresponding viewer to allow a user to inspect its results, visually.

Brief

Students are required to devise and build a solution to build and view planets made using procedural algorithms, taking a number of control inputs and using these to produce the results. It is up to students how to distribute their efforts on this. There are a number of approaches which may be taken either separately, or in layers, ranging from creating 'maps' of various surface attributes from data and combining them to produce a view of the planet, to focusing on more physical aspects like creating height maps, and devising algorithms to work on these and propose placements for settlements of various sizes, or even the presence of natural life and features, and then some means of how represent these visually.

With the current interest in procedural planet creation, as seen in such projects as our own 'Elite:Dangerous', and also 'No Man's Sky' and 'Star Citizen', we ask students to use their creativity and initiative to see what they can do in this very much open area of automatically creating alien worlds, albeit with limited time and resources. Results are not expected to be comparable with larger scale industrial projects, and realism is not the focus, but this is definitely a field where the application of creativity and innovation can produce surprising results.

Students are free to invent their own types of attributes, layers of detail, and means of inspection of the results.

Deliverables will be a generator taking a set of tunable inputs, and a viewer to see the results.

Project proposals in 2014:

• Rent-A-Mob

• Set Builder

• Multi Chat

Project proposals in 2013:

Contact: Ben Nicholson bnicholson@frontier.co.uk

Realtime 2D Networked Sandbox Game (Working Title) - Matt Johnson, Frontier Developments

We would like to create a simple and social space where friends can get together to enjoy creating something or simply trying out other people's creations. A persistent networked 2D grid-based game where all the content is user created. From the logic to the artwork, all from a few simple pre-defined building blocks like switches, walls, floors, signs, wires, lights and more. The project will require the students to focus on aspects of a number of areas such as networking, live world management and interaction, session control, and bring these together with a little imagination, overcoming real world games development issues. Creativity in design, good cooperation and effective division of labour will be paramount.

Alternative proposal

A platform for live online modding

In sandbox games like Minecraft, the only way to define more interesting game scenarios is to write and install Java mods. It is possible to make automatic behaviours in the Minecraft world, but only using the cumbersome "redstone" logic blocks. The goal of this project is to make a new multi-player sandbox game, based on a 2D grid, where users can define more complex behaviours by clicking on a grid element to embed pieces of code written in a scripting language like Lua. You are welcome to use a commercial or open source rendering engine, but maintaining a shared persistent world will still involve solving problems of persistence, networking, live world management and session control.