The future of gaming may rise from it's ashes with forgotten technology!
The platonic Procedural Content Generation algorithm allows you to create entire universes by pressing a button:
We're not quite there yet, because it turns out to be a tough problem, but in this article, we wanted to offer a few thoughts that might bring us one step closer.
Procedural Content Generation (PCG) -- the algorithmic creation of anything from background scenery to symphonies to storylines -- is a compelling idea, right?
Manually creating gaming worlds takes time, and storing it all takes massive gobs of space. Since the days of Starflight and Elite, developers have worked towards getting computers to the point where they can be boundlessly creative.
Broadly, developers often lean on PCG for three reasons:
Procedural Content Generation (PCG) -- the algorithmic creation of anything from background scenery to symphonies to storylines -- is a compelling idea, right?
Manually creating gaming worlds takes time, and storing it all takes massive gobs of space. Since the days of Starflight and Elite, developers have worked towards getting computers to the point where they can be boundlessly creative.
Broadly, developers often lean on PCG for three reasons:
- It allows us to empower creators to produce content more quickly.
- It allows a game to react to players in real-time in ways otherwise impossible.
- It allows us to reduce the on-disk footprint of content.
- It allows us to become more creative through experimentation.
Successes in Games
First off, there's some evidence that PCG is actually viable/useful, despite sometimes seeming like the flying car -- forever in sight, but never (yet) practical.Rogue! It's still a great example of procedurally generated content in games. Created around 1980, the game empowered the computer, itself, to generate a fantasy world as you played, building subterranean rooms and twisty passages and populating them with (pre-created) potions, enemies, and weapons. This style of dungeon creation is successful (Hack, Moria, Larn, Nethack, Angband, Dungeon Siege, Dungeon Siege II, Diablo, Diablo II, and Diablo III, to name just a few), and relatively well-investigated, with many developers creating roguelikes and many resources for roguelike development.
We couldn't do an article on PCG without talking about Rogue, but we're using a screenshot from Temple of Apshai Trilogy for the ST instead, just to be different.
What was particularly amazing for the time was that you could land your planetary module on any number of these and explore winding coastlines and mountains, populated by mineral deposits (aluminum, molybdenum, and a dozen others) and living organisms (sessile and mobile), with density and type depending on elevation and planet type. The original could all fit on a double-sided 5.25" floppy. Braben/Bell's classic Elite (1984) is, perhaps, even better known for creating eight galaxies worth of planets you could fly and trade within.
Starflight 2 even included villages you could trade with.
David Braben talks about procedural generation and how it is being used in Elite: Dangerous
Help them fund this project and make it happen! http://kck.st/YN6rVC
Universe Generation
.kkrieger, which uses only 97,280 bytes on disk.
...right?
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