4086

Okay, so I will concede that Infinity Battlescape isn’t procedurally generated. Or is. I’m not even sure how we got into this discussion spiral.

The point is that most people understand “procedural generation” in a game to mean it’s being done live. As that Battlescape thread you linked shows, even the devs use of the phrase confused people.

4087

Exactly. And that’s the distinction here as well.

4088

The difference is, IMHO, whether a planet is generated on the fly from a series of very partial assets (textures, models and procedural code) or whether the content is baked in before going into the engine. That is, created using procedural tools outside of the engine with no procedural assembly in engine.

But I doubt you can bake-in assets the size of those moons. Most likely some stuff is baked in (height maps?) and some is procedurally generated (assigning geometry and detail to those heightmaps).

Infinity, iirc, was fully done in engine, with no bake in except for the more granular assets (textures and building modules).

4089

Yes, exactly. I will just use my games as an example.

Battlecruiser (which evolved to…) and Universal Combat, have a massive universe consisting of space, planets, moons.

There is no concept of “levels”

The entire world is generated using a script (which you can download and see if you have my scripting tools which I released on Steam for UCCE a few months back)

That script determines where everything in the “world” is. And there is one that is specifically for moon and planet positions and generation.

It runs at startup.

When a moon or planet needs to be “entered” from space, the script builds the surface from another script, creates the terrain from a height map, and then places objects (e.g. buildings) on it at positions defined by…again, scripts.

I developed that tech back in the mid to late eighties because I knew that procedural methods were going to be the only way for me - a sole developer - to build the world I envisioned. That, and the AI language I developed, contributed to the delays of BC3K because I was out of my league, having to invent everything on-the-fly.

Over the years, as tech improved, across various games, I continued to improve on it, ending up with Universal Combat which became the combined arms game with space, planet, vehicles, naval, fps etc. I was the FIRST to do it.

In Line Of Defense, I opted for level based world because it is a smaller game in which only the terrain benefits from procedural techniques. And that is exactly what Star Citizen is currently doing. Except that whereby my artists have spent the better part of 5 years handcrafting 13 (4 space, 4 stations, 4 planetary, 1 carrier) scenes/levels in a level editor, CIG has the arduous task of creating 110 star systems and 500+ planets and moons - in a level editor. By hand. And six yrs later, they don’t even have 1% of that world built. With the upcoming 3.0 due in July/Aug, they will have 3 moons. It’s hilarious.

4090

What’s interesting about random or procedural generation of levels, planets, whatever is that if its totally random with no parameters for generation that helps it “make sense”, it’s usually dull and pointless. You have to salt in various other elements at strategic points to keep it interesting for the player.

I was working on generating a random level inside of a ship (for my now-stalled game project) with various stairs, corridors, height variations, doors, rooms, pipes, computer banks, etc. that was truly different every game. As I went along, salting the generation with some pre-made elements that were then randomized made for much more interesting gameplay and stuff to look at. Quasi-random is a good term for it. It eventually worked quite nicely, but it took a lot of time and tweaking to get it right.

4091

Yeah. It’s a massive time sink, and a bunch of things will all go wrong - usually at the same time.

I had fun back in the day, with water textures ending up being plastered over land mass. Then the AI aircraft, using the incorrect height-above-ground info (which is different between land and water based on elevation), ended up crashing into the ground. Or that time when there would be a mountain right behind a building, and there’s an AI aircraft attacking the building, pre-calculating the terrain behind, seeing a steep incline - then deciding to go vertical in order to climb the crest of the mountain - completely forgetting about the bombing run on the building. Time to move that building and put somewhere else.

Fun times.

4092

I think that folks are forgetting what procedural generation is, and why it was initially used in the first place.

It was not there to create an infinite amount of interesting worlds, each with their own unique motif.

It is there to fit a universe into 64K. Instead of a planet consisting of 1GB of unique assets, it can consist of some pre-built assets and the controlling string; e.g. #55EF12A2CA3 with that hex number being generated by some low-cost Fibbonaci algorithm.

I see “procedurally generated” and I do not think “oh cool, a universe full of unique wonderful surprises”, I think “Elite Dangerous’ twisty maze of beige planets, all alike”. It’s the 2010’s panacea and buzzword, just like “paradigm” was when I was in my 20’s.

4093

Yup, pretty much.

4094

Yep, this is why I didn’t want to use procedural generation. It actually would have been easier, but more dull to actually play. Strategic randomization is the better way to go, IMO…even though its very time-intensive and difficult to get right, as the other Derek pointed out above. :)

One good thing is that the engines are better and smarter than they’ve ever been, in my case using Unreal Engine 4, so that made it a bit easier.

4095

For the record, I really like the procedural generation in No Man’s Sky, especially after the latest updates tweaked it to be more “meaningful”.

4096

That’s good. You could’ve been stuck using CryEngine :)

4097

Yeah, me too. It’s a marvel of engineering. Too bad it’s also the bane of the game’s existence, in some regard. It just goes to show the limitations, and how you really have to think these things through. I mean, look at Minecraft. It’s as basic and boring as you can get. $2b sold to MS.

4098

About 9 bazillion happy users might disagree with you there, Big D. Minecraft both established and perfected the “crafting in a randomized world” Skinner Box game-play loop. I mean, who doesn’t like going in and punching a tree every now and then, even knowing that you’ll end up abandoning the game (again) after building that first little hut and an iron sword?

4099

Well, maybe part of my appreciation for the game comes from my background as a programmer. I’m probably more accepting of the limitations of the technology because I have an idea of the limits of our current tech. It helps that I really like exploration, and the No Man’s Sky algorithm (despite its limitations) does produce outstanding vistas.

4100

Sorry, I wasn’t clear there. I was talking in terms of technology (which is what we’re talking about) vs gameplay.

4101

Minecraft isn’t really my cup of tea either, but sandbox games like that strike a chord with a ton of folks.

One of the big differences between my limited experience with minecraft, and say, No Man’s Sky, is that in minecraft I started digging down into the dirt and found crazy cave complexes and lava and stuff.

In No Man’s Sky, I dug down and quickly hit a layer of white material that you couldn’t dig through. It was a disappointing effect that kind of jarred you out of the immersion.

That being said, I still enjoyed NMS for a while, for what it was.

4102

I agree completely. That’s why guys like us will tinker forever and a day, never actually releasing anything if we don’t have to :D

4103

Yeah, I agree. That’s why Minecraft just grew crazy quick. You just never know what you’re going to discover next. And the fun part is, none of that shit is documented. Like anywhere.

For the record, I like NMS, both from an engineering and “exploration” gameplay aspect.

4104

This might be better suited for the Minecraft thread, but I wonder how much of its success was because of the randomized exploration and limitless world vs. the building and crafting gameplay, allowing the player to bestow their own meaning onto an otherwise meaningless world.

When the Dual Universe creator was asked how his game will avoid the repetition found in other procedurally generated titles, he explained that the game’s universe will be designed to only expand as fast as players can colonize it. This way, the players themselves will be responsible for the universe’s meaning (which I think serves as a decent philosophical message too).

Of course, you’re probably going to end up with the players building colossal penises and swastikas, although that too probably serves as a decent philosophical message.

4105

Minecraft succeeded because it unintentionally tapped into pre-teen kids. I mean, lot’s of people off all ages play it, like lots of people off all ages still make Lego sets. But the gameplay, the aesthetic, the “do anything-ness”, the time-investment/payoff, the modability, all of these things are very pro-kid. I mean i more or less promise “we” here at Qt3 don’t play it.