Going open-source gives Caldera a second shot at life, and lets researchers and developers take a peak under the hood of the battle royale map.
Activision Blizzard is making Call of Duty open-source with a free data set of its original Warzone map, Caldera.
Released in OpenUSD for non-commercial use, aspiring developers and educators have access to a near-complete version of the map's geometry. The data set also features random time samples that show how players moved around the map.
The Caldera map was retired last year so developers could focus on Warzone 2.0. Making it open-source "broadens access to production data," said chief tech officer Natalya Tatarchuk, and "gives back" to the game industry's research community.
As for why it was chosen, software engineer Michael Vance explained they wanted a map that showcased "the scale and complexity of our current design philosophy."
"One of our goals is to...let researchers test their approaches in real-world scenarios, which will help accelerate the development of new solutions," Tatarchuk continued. "We believe Caldera’s release will be an impactful and material benefit to that effort."
For a game's PC community, going open-source can keep it alive when its developer moves on to other projects. It can also be educational or just plain interesting to tinker with, which looks to be the driving force behind Activision's decision here.
Vance explained that Caldera can help evolve development tools and provide data for AI model training. He further reasoned the map can provide "more freedom and flexibility" for content teams of future Call of Duty games.
"We're excited about what the academic community will produce based on Caldera," he said. "Insights into object relationships, procedural approaches to our world data, and other ideas could lead to more compact data representations on both disk and in memory."
More insight into Caldera's open-source move from Vance and Tatarchuk can be read here.
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