Wave Function Collapse Tool

Summary

The Wave Function Collapse (WFC) Tool is an advanced procedural content generation system rooted in constraint satisfaction and quantum superposition analogies.

Developed as part of ongoing PhD research at Universitat Jaume I (UJI / INIT) and tailored for practical game engine workflows, the tool empowers level designers to define tile adjacency sockets and synthesize non-repeating, topologically consistent 2D and 3D environment layouts in real time.

Responsibilities

• Bitwise Constraint Propagation: Formulated tile socket compatibility as 64-bit integer bitmasks, reducing neighbor constraint validation to rapid bitwise AND operations and removing runtime hash map lookups.
• Shannon Entropy Solver: Designed a high-performance cell observation loop utilizing an indexed binary min-heap to locate the lowest-entropy cell in $O(1)$ time across large 3D grids.
• Interactive Editor Integration: Built a custom viewport brush tool enabling designers to lock or “pin” specific anchor tiles (e.g., entrances, landmarks, boss rooms), with the solver dynamically collapsing the remaining grid around designer constraints.
• Contradiction Handling & Backtracking: Implemented bounded rollback checkpoints and localized cluster relaxation algorithms to resolve contradiction deadlocks without freezing the editor viewport.

Current Status & Reception

• Bachelor’s Thesis (Honors): The tool was engineered as part of Álvaro’s Bachelor’s Thesis at Universitat Jaume I, earning the highest evaluation grade and top honors (Matrícula de Honor). You can read the complete Bachelor’s Thesis.
• Academic Presentation: Research and algorithmic results presented at academic forums and conferences (including SECIVI), focusing on real-time procedural constraint satisfaction for production pipelines.
• Google Scholar Citation: Core findings and methodologies documented in academic publications indexed on Google Scholar.
• Production Impact: Reduced dungeon and environment layout blockout times from hours of manual placement to seconds of guided generation, with mathematical guarantees of topological connectivity.