[blopker]

Link to the data is in a Github repo at the bottom: https://github.com/Activision/caldera

Reading the article, they don't seem to know what people should do with it. It feels like a recruiting tool more than anything, especially given the non-commercial license.

[AHTERIX5000]

It's useful to have AAA tier sample game level assets available for engine development or for apps like Blender.

[SkyPuncher]

As an avid CoD player, I literally have no idea why this would be useful. Map data isn’t really interesting.

The player data seems far too low of resolution to be meaningful.

[a_e_k]

These sorts of data sets can be useful for graphics research, particular as a data set to test ray tracing algorithms on.

See for example, the Moana Island data set. [1]

I definitely foresee papers on BVH construction using this scene.

For graphics research in academia, there's a dearth of real-world data sets like this, so the ones that do get released are gold. And for graphics research in industry, one may have access to good internal data sets for development and testing, but getting permission to publish anything with them tends to be a giant hassle. It's often easier to just use publicly available data sets. Plus, that makes it easier to compare results across papers.

[1] https://www.disneyanimation.com/resources/moana-island-scene...

[modeless]

The Moana island has complete material data though. This release seems to be only geometry. No materials or textures at all.

[a_e_k]

Yep. That's still fine for building BVHs and shooting some rays around.

[SkyPuncher]

Thank you for explaining that. Very helpful.

[minimaxir]

Since they provide player movement data, you can train a transformer to predict which player will win the BR given movement patterns. Or maybe create "player embeddings" to see if player behaviors can be clustered. That could be a fun project...but definitely not useful.

Extracting and converting the player data from the .usd files would not be fun, though.

[krowek]

> Since they provide player movement data, you can train a transformer to predict which player will win the BR given movement patterns.

You didn't consider the main factor for CoD - cheating. Which clearly seems to be an inside thing.

Not sure if anything meaningful can be obtained by analyzing anything that has player data on it considering every video game out there is prone to this.

[refulgentis]

Why would having player movement data help cheating?

Why is the cheating clearly an insider thing?

Why aren't you sure if anything meaningful can be derived from the movement data?

What do you mean by "prone to this"?

Are you sure they didn't consider "cheating" as a possible use of the movement data?

Could they have considered it but thrown it away as off-topic and implausible?

[minimaxir]

They are implying player teleporting, which is a common hack in BRs.

Player movement data that is too fast for normal players could be seen as cheating. An AI isn't strictly needed for that, just check displacement over time.

[artemisart]

Is it really a common hack? I would have guessed teleportation is the easiest to detect server-side, or impossible from the start as the server is authoritative (clients sends inputs, the server computes the positions and any important change, sends them back to clients, clients cannot hack their movement).

[SkyPuncher]

I’ve never seen it in CoD. Last time I was this was in like 2010 when MWII was hacked to death.

[highcountess]

Given all the other variables that introduce a bunch of noise to the player movement data, I doubt you could ever determine any useful predictive pattern.

If anything though, I could see how player behavior of match winners could be used to both identify varying level of cheaters and players that use various methods for providing an advantage (i.e., keyboard mouse, joystick extensions, etc) and automatically sequester or even handicap their accounts.

It appears to me that so much effort is placed on trying to identify and hamper cheaters in real time, when that both seems extremely resource intensive and unnecessary, considering you have all the digital evidence proof of cheating you need after the fact, you just have to understand what you are looking at.

[buran77]

> so much effort is placed on trying to identify and hamper cheaters in real time, when that both seems extremely resource intensive and unnecessary, considering you have all the digital evidence proof of cheating you need after the fact, you just have to understand what you are looking at

It's not resource intensive at all compared to the alternative of ahaving humans doing post match reviews. It's all "AI" and automated reviews because it's cheaper. Half of the "anti-cheat" tactic is anyway using your computer resources to run some anti cheat tool.

These games are optimized for revenue so every action is dictated by that. Including catching/banning cheaters. If it costs too much to do it properly, or (and this is actually plausible) cheaters are a significant enough portion of the already small chunk of players who create recurring revenue, then there's no incentive to take real action.

This data is probably useful for actual academic rather than practical purposes today. They're building the knowledge they might want to use in a few years.

[SkyPuncher]

> considering you have all the digital evidence proof of cheating you need after the fact,

It's actually getting increasingly hard to tell. Old cheating use to be snap-to-the head type of cheating.

The newer cheats work really hard to resemble natural players. Soft aim, intentionally missed shots, non-perfect recoil control.

[amonon]

>Given all the other variables that introduce a bunch of noise to the player movement data, I doubt you could ever determine any useful predictive pattern.

Predicting a winner will be difficult but I would not be surprised if you could loosely predict rank (does Warzone track player rank?) off of movement alone. You may be able to predict more accurately by looking at the associations between two players and their movement. From my prior experience in FPS games, positioning, awareness, and aim are the core pillars of success. Unfortunately as far as I can tell from the data set, only player position is tracked.

[Cthulhu_]

It sounds like this is simply not for you, then, and that's fine.

[bArray]

From an information theory perspective, it should be possible to define strategically important locations in terms of Empowerment [1]. As a map designer there are likely some rough rules you want to abide by, such as roughly equal highly empowered locations throughout the map to reduce location bias.

I remember an old game where they defined map rules in FPS CTF maps that there should be more than one path to each flag (usually three) and flag areas should be partially visible from one base to another. There were lots of rules like these, some more flexible than others.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1863

[aa_is_op]

Not really, they released it primarily for artist training and tutorials. Getting hold of XXL gaming maps of this high-quality from a super popular game is definitely something that most game design training courses will use 100%.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Is there anything particularly novel about this vs the game map of a different FPS?

[elabajaba]

Other fps game maps don't have licenses that let you use them to stress test your renderer or game engine. Existing freely available scenes are all too small and poorly made to be proper stress tests with modern hardware (eg. Old sponza is way too light, Intel sponza they just spammed the subdivision modifier to make it stupidly high poly, Bistro is small and really weirdly made, etc).

[bee_rider]

Not that it makes it novel, but this appears to be a “battle royale” map based on the picture shown in the post. So it is fairly large, for whatever that’s worth.

The assumption with this type of game is that player will play the same big map over an over for the season (or something like that, changing the map is very rare, might not happen at all over the lifespan of the game), and but they can pick which part of the map they start in and explore from there. So it is, I guess, more similar to having data from all of the maps, for classic first person shooters.

[minimaxir]

Specifically, during each play session, the map has a "storm" which converges on a random location over time: staying in the storm is lethal, so you are forced to eventually go to that location and points-of-interest along the way, which adds play variance.

[ackbar03]

Make killer robots on the island of caldera