Activision has announced that a data set from one of Call of Duty: Warzone: The largest and most complex map, Caldera, is now available for non-commercial use. The hope is that it can help advance research into environmental geometry and AI learning.
Activision calls it “the first dataset release of its kind for Call of Duty.” blog entryThe company explains that the open-source Caldera map release contains “nearly complete geometry of Caldera, as well as a collection of randomly selected anonymous time samples showing how players move around the map.”
Geometry data loaded into GitHub The dataset is 4GB in size and includes five million meshes, 28 million primitives, and over a billion point instances, mostly representing scene metadata such as volumes that Activision uses for ray tracing. “The Call of Duty dataset that includes Caldera represents an extensive production-quality map, in terms of world size, scene graph depth, and geometric complexity, used for multiplayer gameplay in Call of Duty: Warzone,” said senior technical director Michael Vance says.
While the open-source dataset cannot be used for commercial purposes, it will still be useful for academic research and AI training. “At Activision, we believe it is important for the gaming industry to foster growth and innovation within the industry, develop creation tools, and provide great data for AI training and the evolution of content generation techniques,” Activision CTO Natalya Tatarchuk says in the blog entry“We believe this dataset provides a unique benefit for these goals.”
Caldera is actually one of the most useful options for this idea because it's so large and has so much content. There are a number of smaller multiplayer maps, as well as examples of character paths and timings that show player behavior. “For example, one of the sets shows the paths players take throughout a match,” Vance says. “While we haven't included specific visualizations of these, the data is easily accessible, allowing for different ways to explore and visualize it.”
But this decision is not just due to Activision's good will, it will also benefit the studio. “Our game environments are already enormously complex; we feel a constant need to improve the gameplay experience and offer even more richness and detail,” explains Vance. “The innovations that emerge from this data release could give our content teams more freedom and flexibility to find the most engaging scenarios for our players.”
This isn't the only calculated risk Activision has taken recently. Earlier this week, the studio He secretly experimented on 50% of Call of Duty players By reducing skill-based matchmaking to see if people actually noticed a difference and preferred it. The end result was a 25-page report stating that players tend to have a worse time when there is less skill-based matchmaking. Who would have guessed?
