Controllable Procedural Generation of Race Track Surroundings for Iterative Level Design

Modern racing games often take place on race tracks with huge surroundings, including forests, fields, cities, or mountains. While not being important to the racing itself, the surroundings must be present, dense, and detailed to enhance the gameplay feel, and must be performance-optimized for a smooth gaming experience. Creating these surroundings manually is a very laborious task, even for a skilled level designer. Also, manual design makes it prohibitively expensive to modify the track layout later. This makes the surroundings an ideal candidate for procedural content generation, which is nowadays extensively used in many areas of video game level design. In this paper, we present a method for controllable track surroundings generation. It generates a one square kilometer map in a matter of minutes, orders of magnitude faster than the manual process. It features several different biomes, various types of assets and vegetation, and can be further extended using custom assets. The generated race tracks and their surroundings are easily adjustable, making the level design iterative and easier to perfect.