Automatic Code Generation from a Colored Petri Net Specification for Game Development with Unity3D

Abstract: This thesis proposes an approach for automatic code generation from a Colored Petri net specification. Two tools were developed for the aforementioned purpose, a Colored Petri net editor to create and modify Colored Petri nets, and an automatic code generator to generate code from a Colored Petri net specification. Through the use of the editor four models were created, these models were used as input to the automatic code generator. The automatic code generator successfully generated code from the Colored Petri net specification, code in the form of component scripts for the Unity3D game engine. However, the approach used by the code generator had flaws such as introducing overhead in the generated code, failing to deal with concurrency, and restricting the types of Colored Petri nets which could be used as input. The aforementioned tools could be used in the future to research the benefits and disadvantages of modeling game systems with Colored Petri nets, and automatically generating code from Colored Petri nets.