GoodGame
Red, White, & Blue, baby!
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2004
- Messages
- 13,725
Being a wannabe programmer and a gamer (and a former Spore fan boi), I thought to start a procedural generation thread to keep an eye on emerging use of Procedural Generation.
First, to give the mainstream definition: to generate game content by algorithm (procedure) rather than by hand.
Recent examples:
1. In the game Borderlands, the stats for guns are procedurally generated so each new enemy is a bit different.
2. Most of the Spore pre-release simulations were experiments to check the feasibility of making Spore more procedurally generated. Brian Eno's sound-track to Spore is actually mostly procedurally generated, btw.
3. Rogue-like games typically have randomally generated dungeon layouts per level, which use a procedure to construct the level on the fly. Similar to that is a game like Daggerfall, where NPCs and maps were made dynamically.
4. Instancing of names, like is done in the Revolutions mod for Civ4 (new random civs that spawn from a revolution get an instanced name, e.g. The Babylonian rebels of Stockholm).
5. Left 4 Dead "AI director", which supposedly enforcing pacing to the game by affecting the way the AI acts.
So my idea for this thread is just to list cool and upcoming uses of procedural generation, and some ideas for how it might be used in modding too (e.g. Civ4 modding). One use I would like to see would be narratives generated procedurally, especially applied to strategy games to give them more atmosphere and background story.
I think an important counter-point to using procedural generation haphazardly is that generating tons of content doesn't necessarily equal a fun game. E.g. think of a generic MMORPG that has tons of items in it, but you don't enjoy playing since the added content doesn't make it any more fun.
Here's a few articles/demos:
1. A commercial, cityscape and traffic generator (basically SimCity without the game):
http://pixelactive3d.com/Products/CityScape/
2. A wiki that is a good starting point for reading about Procedural generation of game content: http://pcg.wikidot.com/
First, to give the mainstream definition: to generate game content by algorithm (procedure) rather than by hand.
Recent examples:
1. In the game Borderlands, the stats for guns are procedurally generated so each new enemy is a bit different.
2. Most of the Spore pre-release simulations were experiments to check the feasibility of making Spore more procedurally generated. Brian Eno's sound-track to Spore is actually mostly procedurally generated, btw.
3. Rogue-like games typically have randomally generated dungeon layouts per level, which use a procedure to construct the level on the fly. Similar to that is a game like Daggerfall, where NPCs and maps were made dynamically.
4. Instancing of names, like is done in the Revolutions mod for Civ4 (new random civs that spawn from a revolution get an instanced name, e.g. The Babylonian rebels of Stockholm).
5. Left 4 Dead "AI director", which supposedly enforcing pacing to the game by affecting the way the AI acts.
So my idea for this thread is just to list cool and upcoming uses of procedural generation, and some ideas for how it might be used in modding too (e.g. Civ4 modding). One use I would like to see would be narratives generated procedurally, especially applied to strategy games to give them more atmosphere and background story.
I think an important counter-point to using procedural generation haphazardly is that generating tons of content doesn't necessarily equal a fun game. E.g. think of a generic MMORPG that has tons of items in it, but you don't enjoy playing since the added content doesn't make it any more fun.
Here's a few articles/demos:
1. A commercial, cityscape and traffic generator (basically SimCity without the game):
http://pixelactive3d.com/Products/CityScape/
2. A wiki that is a good starting point for reading about Procedural generation of game content: http://pcg.wikidot.com/
