Contrasting Approaches of Two Environment Generators: The Synthesizer Generator and Pan

The Synthesizer Generator and Pan are two popular environment generators. While having the same basic goal of assisting in the development of interactive environments, they use rather different mechanisms to reach this goal. This paper discusses the three basic descriptive components used in environment generation: syntactic, semantic, and user interface descriptions. The contrasting approaches of the Synthesizer Generator and Pan are presented, along with a discussion of the consequences resulting from their respective mechanisms.