Procedural content generation for platformers: designing and testing FUN PLEdGE

Video games are a peculiar medium, standing at the crossing point between art and software application, and characterized by an active involvement of its audience. The complexity of the product generates a huge challenge for the companies that develop video games. In the development process, level designers play a crucial role: they are in charge of declining the theoretical framework developed by the game designer into game levels, which contain the actual gameplay scenarios. Hence, the final goal of any level designer is to valorize the game design by creating enjoyable gaming experiences while, at the same time, respecting several constraints. To lighten the burden on level designers, several semi-automated approaches to level generation have appeared in time, but the majority of these tools suffer from several drawbacks. In the present work, we tackle the issue of designing, prototyping and testing FUN PLEdGE, a general-purpose automated levels generator and editor for platform video games. Its main goal is to shrink development time while producing – unassisted – levels that are both playable and fun. Moreover, our tool provides the maximum freedom to the level designer, by avoiding to impose unnecessary constraints on the structure of the levels and by guaranteeing the possibility to modify and personalize by hand the generated levels. During this process, the generator assists the designer by suggesting corrections functional to the quality of the player experience. To prove the effectiveness of our prototypal application we have also developed and tested with players a platform game. In the same vein, we asked to a group of game developers to test FUN PLEdGE.     

A detailed investigation of the effectiveness of <Emphasis Type="Italic">whole</Emphasis> test suite generation

A common application of search-based software testing is to generate test cases for all goals defined by a coverage criterion (e.g., lines, branches, mutants). Rather than generating one test case at a time for each of these goals individually, whole test suite generation optimizes entire test suites towards satisfying all goals at the same time. There is evidence that the overall coverage achieved with this approach is superior to that of targeting individual coverage goals. Nevertheless, there remains some uncertainty on (a) whether the results generalize beyond branch coverage, (b) whether the whole test suite approach might be inferior to a more focused search for some particular coverage goals, and (c) whether generating whole test suites could be optimized by only targeting coverage goals not already covered. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis to study these questions. An empirical study on 100 Java classes using three different coverage criteria reveals that indeed there are some testing goals that are only covered by the traditional approach, although their number is only very small in comparison with those which are exclusively covered by the whole test suite approach. We find that keeping an archive of already covered goals along with the tests covering them and focusing the search on uncovered goals overcomes this small drawback on larger classes, leading to an improved overall effectiveness of whole test suite generation.     

Heavy metal uptake in the enological food chain

The research presented here describes the assessment of a number of physiological and xenobiotic metal concentrations occurring throughout the enological production processes of two native wines from Irpinia, Aglianico and Fiano of Avellino. In order to evaluate the wines’ metal content throughout the entire wine-making process, samples of grapes and musts from both wines were taken at time intervals during the fermentation and maturation phases. Copper, chromium, nickel, iron, zinc, lead and cadmium levels were analysed by atomic absorption spectrophotometry. The concentration of metals obtained were compared to the limits fixed by the Organization Internationale de la Vigne et du Vin (O.I.V.) and in the Italian ad European legislation.