Formal Verification for Node-Based Visual Scripts Using Symbolic Model Checking
This addresses productivity issues for video game developers by automating bug detection in visual scripts, though it is incremental as it applies existing verification techniques to a specific domain.
The authors tackled the problem of bugs in node-based visual scripts used in video game development by proposing an automatic verification method using symbolic model checking, which successfully detected bugs in scripts from FINAL FANTASY XV in reasonable time.
Visual script languages with a node-based interface have commonly been used in the video game industry. We examined the bug database obtained in the development of FINAL FANTASY XV (FFXV), and noticed that several types of bugs were caused by simple mis-descriptions of visual scripts and could therefore be mechanically detected. We propose a method for the automatic verification of visual scripts in order to improve productivity of video game development. Our method can automatically detect those bugs by using symbolic model checking. We show a translation algorithm which can automatically convert a visual script to an input model for NuSMV that is an implementation of symbolic model checking. For a preliminary evaluation, we applied our method to visual scripts used in the production for FFXV. The evaluation results demonstrate that our method can detect bugs of scripts and works well in a reasonable time.