Activision Blizzard is making call of Duty open source with a free dataset of its original War zone map, Caldera.
Published on OpenUSD for non-commercial use, aspiring developers and educators have access to a nearly complete version of the map geometry. The dataset also features random time samples showing how players moved around the map.
The Caldera map was retired last year so that developers could focus on War Zone 2.0Making it open source “expands access to production data,” said technical manager Natalya Tatarchuk, and “gives something back” to the video game industry research community.
As for the rationale behind the choice, software engineer Michael Vance explained that they wanted a map that showcased “the scale and complexity of our current design philosophy.”
“One of our goals is…to let researchers test their approaches in real-world scenarios, which will help accelerate the development of new solutions,” Tatarchuk continued. “We believe that the release of Caldera will be a significant and material benefit to that effort.”
All aboard for open source
For the PC gaming community, going open source can keep it alive when its developer moves on to other projects. It can also be educational or just interesting for tinker withwhich appears to be the driving force behind Activision's decision in this case.
Vance explained that Caldera can help evolve development tools and provide data for training AI models. He also reasoned that the map can provide “more freedom and flexibility” for content teams on future Call of Duty games.
“We are excited about what the academic community will produce based on Caldera,” he said. “Insights into object relationships, procedural approaches to our world data, and other ideas could lead to more compact data representations both on disk and in memory.”
For further insights into Caldera's open source move, Vance and Tatarchuk can be read Here.