A Critical Evaluation of Procedural Content Generation Approaches for Digital Twins

Abstract

Procedural content generation (PCG) of terrains is one of the main building blocks for creating an automated and real-time virtual world. This study provides and in-depth review of the different tools, algorithms, and engines used for the PCG of terrains for the PCG of digital worlds; we focus especially on terrain generation but address also the main issues related to build structures and characters. It is important to know that the PCG of terrains can be implemented in a multidisciplinary scenario, for instance, modeling of games, simulating industrial maps, urban and rural planning of developments, government, and nongovernmental agency improvement plans. Many problems in current approaches were identified from the literature, where most of the researches studied were merely throwaway prototyping based, i.e., proof of concept-based systems, and were not tested in the real environment. Also, genetic algorithm-based PCG of terrains lack multiple features such as roads and buildings. The virtual cities generated through different engines were lacking a realistic look and feel. Terrain generation through multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) is investigated, and it is deemed the usage was restricted to the gaming domain and not extended to other fields. Findings suggest that the correctness of generated terrain is a big issue in the automatic generation of terrains. Thus, a focus on the automated correctness check is required. Other important content generation in video games such as structure generation and character generation has been extensively studied, and the techniques are analysed in the further sections of this research work.