| Galactic Arms Race | |
|---|---|
 Galactic Arms Race logo. | |
| Developer(s) | Evolutionary Games |
| Platform(s) | Windows |
| Release | 2010,2012 |
| Genre(s) | Shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single player Multiplayer Co-op PVP |
Galactic Arms Race (GAR) is a space shooter video game first released in 2010 by American studio Evolutionary Games in association with the Evolutionary Complexity Research Group at UCF (EPlex).
GAR is a hybrid space shooter and Action RPG with single player, co-op, and PVP on dedicated servers for up to 32 players. Players fly a space ship, destroy enemies, earn money and experience, gain levels, find items, and upgrade their ships. The main feature that differentiates GAR from other space shooters is a procedural content generation (PCG) system that produces unique particle system weapons. The game attempts to create weapons that players will like based on usage statistics of existing weapons using a custom version of the NEAT evolutionary algorithm. [1] GAR is one of the earliest video games to incorporate procedural content generation that is automatically and implicitly driven by player choice. [2]
The game runs on Windows only because it uses the Microsoft XNA framework for graphics and sound. Initial versions were released for free in 2010. A commercial version became available via Steam and Desura in 2012. [3] Currently the developers are redoing their UI as the Microsoft XNA platform was killed off by Microsoft. The developers will likely change over to MonoGame which is an open source implementation of XNA. [4] [5]
Galactic Arms Race was a finalist in the 2010 Indie Game Challenge. [6] A paper detailing the game's weapon evolution algorithm won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games. [7] An early version of the game won an Editor's Choice Award on AiGameDev.com. [8]
NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) is a genetic algorithm (GA) for the generation of evolving artificial neural networks developed by Kenneth Stanley and Risto Miikkulainen in 2002 while at The University of Texas at Austin. It alters both the weighting parameters and structures of networks, attempting to find a balance between the fitness of evolved solutions and their diversity. It is based on applying three key techniques: tracking genes with history markers to allow crossover among topologies, applying speciation to preserve innovations, and developing topologies incrementally from simple initial structures ("complexifying").
Microsoft XNA is a freeware set of tools with a managed runtime environment that Microsoft developed to facilitate video game development. XNA is based on .NET Framework, with versions that run on Windows and Xbox 360. XNA Game Studio can help develop XNA games. The XNA toolset was announced on March 24, 2004, at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California. A first Community Technology Preview of XNA Build was released on March 14, 2006.
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In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually, typically through a combination of human-generated assets and algorithms coupled with computer-generated randomness and processing power. In computer graphics, it is commonly used to create textures and 3D models. In video games, it is used to automatically create large amounts of content in a game. Depending on the implementation, advantages of procedural generation can include smaller file sizes, larger amounts of content, and randomness for less predictable gameplay. Procedural generation is a branch of media synthesis.
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Space Pirates and Zombies (S.P.A.Z.) is a real-time strategy video game released on August 15, 2011, on the Steam distribution platform. with a top-down perspective based around space combat. The game was developed by a two-man team under the studio MinMax Games using the Torque engine. The game was later ported for Mac OS X and Linux systems.
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