Learning from the Past: a Process Recommendation System for Video Game Projects using Postmortems Experiences

Context: The video game industry is a billion dollar industry that faces problems in the way games are developed. One method to address these problems is using developer aid tools, such as Recommendation Systems. These tools assist developers by generating recommendations to help them perform their tasks. Objective: This article describes a systematic approach to recommend development processes for video game projects, using postmortem knowledge extraction and a model of the context of the new project, in which “postmortems” are articles written by video game developers at the end of projects, summarizing the experience of their game development team. This approach aims to provide reflections about development processes used in the game industry as well as guidance to developers to choose the most adequate process according to the contexts they’re in. Method: Our approach is divided in three separate phases: in the the first phase, we manually extracted the processes from the postmortems analysis; in the second one, we created a video game context and algorithm rules for recommendation; and finally in the third phase, we evaluated the recommended processes by using quantitative and qualitative metrics, game developers feedback, and a case study by interviewing a video game development team. Contributions: This article brings three main contributions. The first describes a database of developers’ experiences extracted from postmortems in the form of development processes. The second defines the main attributes that a video game project contain, which it uses to define the contexts of the project. The third describes and evaluates a recommendation system for video game projects, which uses the contexts of the projects to identify similar projects and suggest a set of activities in the form of a process

Metallaboranes as Molecular Precursors to Thin Metal-boride Films. Conversion of HFe₃(CO)₉BH₄ to Amorphous Fe₇₅B₂₅

The thermal decomposition of HFe3(CO)9BH4 on glass or aluminum substrates at 175-200°C at pressures between 10-5 and 10-4 Torr results in the deposition of uniform, amorphous alloy films of approximate composition Fe75B25 with individual film thicknesses ranging from 1000 to 10000 Å. The glassy metal films have been characterized by Auger, X-ray, and Mössbauer spectroscopies. The Mössbauer spectra show that the local structure of the film is similar to that observed for films prepared by rapid quenching techniques. In contrast, magnetically ordered films prepared from HFe3(CO)9BH4 exhibit magnetic moments having a preferential orientation normal to rather than parallel with the film plane. Although the films are stable in air, oxidation during deposition readily takes place under poor vacuum conditions and leads to films containing oxidized boron. The stoichiometry of the oxide phase has been shown to be B2O3 (oxygen content 3-11%). The film resistivity increases with increasing oxygen content. © 1990 American Chemical Society

ASE4Games 2021 Workshop Summary

The first edition of the workshop on Automated Software Engineering For Games (ASE4Games 2021) was held virtually on November 14th, 2021, co-located with the 36v IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2021). Five papers from all over the world were submitted, two full-papers and two short-papers were accepted. The program also featured a keynote by Mathieu Nayrolles, researcher at Ubisoft, entitled Automated Software Engineering for AAA Games.</jats:p