Activision has announced the non-commercial availability of the Caldera dataset, one of Call of Duty: Warzone's largest and most complex maps. It is expected to help advance research in environmental geometry and AI learning.

Activision calls this the first "Call of Duty" dataset release. In a blog post, the company explained that the open-source Caldera map release contains "nearly complete geometry of the Caldera and a collection of randomly selected, anonymized time samples that show how players move around the map."

The geometry data uploaded to GitHub is 4 GB and contains 5 million meshes, 28 million primitives, and over 1 billion point instances, which primarily represent scene metadata such as volumes used by Activision for the lightning process The company's main focus is on the scene metadata, such as volumes, that Activision uses for lightning processing. The Call of Duty Data Set featuring Caldera represents the extensive, production-quality maps used for the Call of Duty: Warzone multiplayer game in terms of world size, scene graph depth, and geometric complexity," said Michaelson B. Baker, Ph. The maps are designed to be the best in the industry," said Michael Vance, Senior Technical Director.

The open-source dataset cannot be used for commercial purposes, but could be useful for academic research and AI training. Natalya Tatarchuk, CTO of Activision, said in a blog, "We at Activision believe it is important for the gaming industry to promote growth and innovation within the industry, advance authoring tools, and provide superior data for AI training and the evolution of content generation technology. We believe it is important to do so." We believe this dataset will uniquely benefit these goals."

Caldera is one of the most useful options for this idea because it is so large. There are a number of small multiplayer maps inside, as well as time samples showing the movement of characters in the game and the actions of the players. For example, one set shows the path a player takes during a game. While these specific visualizations are not included, the data is easily accessible and can be explored and visualized in a variety of ways."

However, this move is not only being made out of the goodness of Activision's heart, but also benefits the studio. 'Our gaming environment is already very complex. We constantly feel the need to improve the playing experience and provide something richer and more detailed," Vance explains.

"The innovation that will come from the release of this dataset will give our content teams more freedom and flexibility to find the most engaging scenarios for our players.

This is not the only calculated risk Activision has taken recently. Earlier this week, the studio set skill-based matchmaking lower for 50% of "Call of Duty" players and secretly experimented to see if people would actually notice and prefer the difference. The result was a 25-page report showing that players tend to have an unpleasant time when SBMM is low.