If you want to be a game developer or at least get some insight into making major AAA games, Microsoft-owned Activision just offered up a huge gift today. As posted on Activision's official blog, the company has released a data set that includes the map named Caldera, which was originally developed for the free-to-play shooter Call of Duty Warzone.
The blog post states:
This first-of-its-kind data set release for Call of Duty, now available in OpenUSD, contains the near-complete geometry of Caldera as well as a collection of randomly selected anonymized time samples showing how players move around the map. This initiative represents Activision’s commitment to innovation and growth in multiple fields, including AI learning, within the communities of academia and research, while propelling the advancement of game development.
The data set itself is 4 GB in size, and Activision says it also has over "five million meshes, 28 million primitives, and more than one-billion-point instances." The company added that the release represents one of the largest ever OpenUSD data sets that is now publicly available.
Developer Raven Software was the primary team behind the development of the Caldera map, but it received some help from other studios like Beenox, High Moon Studios, and other Call of Duty teams at Activision.
While budding game developers will certainly benefit from this open-source release of the Caldera map, Activision also hopes that computer researchers will be able to use the data set. The blog post states:
The tabular data and metadata include providing opportunities for richer understanding of how players interact with the game, which can potentially lead to new insights on what makes specific layouts compelling for users.
As we learn what the research and academic community finds useful in the set, we want to create an ongoing dialog with them so we can continuously make updates that are helpful.
The data set is now available to access and download at GitHub (also owned by Microsoft).
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