Physics-Based Mesh Snapping Technique For Game Map Generation
Mankyu Sung · Journal of Korea Multimedia Society · 2025
Map plays a core part in playing video games. Not only providing environment, it gives a virtual space for players to explore and interact, with various game elements appropriately placed. This paper proposes a physics-based mesh tile snapping algorithm for generating three-dimensional maps for games. In order to overcome the limitations of both automatic map generation techniques and manual map creation, this algorithm employs a physics-based spring–mass system to facilitate the alignment of the three-dimensional tiles that consists the map. In order to detect two target tiles to be snapped quickly, we applied the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) tree technique. Then, the spring force between two tiles makes them connected together smoothly. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed algorithm generates maps at least twice faster than manual tile placement and that alignment errors are almost negligible regardless of the number of tiles, which is not for the case of manual alignment.