A Survey on the Procedural Generation of Virtual Worlds

This survey presents algorithms for the automatic generation of content for virtual worlds, in particular for games. After a definition of the term procedural content generation, the algorithms to generate realistic objects such as landscapes and vegetation, road networks, buildings, living beings and stories are introduced in detail. In our discussion, we emphasize a good compromise between the realism of the objects and the performance of the algorithms. The survey also assesses each generated object type in terms of its applicability in games and simulations of virtual worlds.