Evan Hahn
Impenetrable doors are often quite common in virtual worlds. This is especially apparent in video games boasting large urban environments. Although there are often enterable buildings in these games, the vast majority of the buildings cannot be entered. Given limited development times and memory limitations, it is infeasible for developers to create such a large number of building interiors for the player to explore. Real-time building interior generation can provide a means of entry through every visible door in a virtual world.
This presentation describes an approach to generate building interiors during runtime. Although an interior in its entirety may be quite large, only the parts that are needed immediately are generated. This lazy generation scheme allows a seamless walk-through of a building interior and the use of only a fraction of the memory that a model of the entire interior would take. The generated interiors are always consistent regardless of the path travelled through the building. Moreover, a persistence scheme is also presented to allow dynamic runtime changes to persist even if the containing regions are deleted from our local cache.