TrackGen: An interactive track generator for TORCS and Speed-Dreams

TrackGen is an online tool for the generation of tracks for two open-source 3D car racing games (TORCS and Speed Dreams). It integrates interactive evolution with procedural content generation and comprises two components: (i) a web frontend that maintains the database of all the evolved populations and manages the interaction with users (by collecting users evaluations and providing access to the evolved tracks) and( ii) an evolutionary/content-generation backend that runs both the evolutionary algorithm and generates the actual game content that is available through the web frontend. The first prototype of the tool was presented in July 2011 but advertised only to researchers; the first official version which generated tracks only for TORCS was released to the game community in September 2011; due to the many requests, we released a new version soon afterwards, in January 2012, with support for Speed Dreams (the fork of TORCS focused on visual realism and graphic quality) that has been online since then. From January 2012 until July 2014, TrackGen had more than 7600 unique visitors who visited the website around 11,500 times and viewed 85,500 pages; it was employed to evolve more than 8853 tracks, and it was used to download 12,218 tracks. Some of the tracks evolve by our system have been also included in the TORCS distribution. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.