I’d love for something like this to be used for games. But only as a start.

How could you create a rich atmosphere drenched in lore, history and tales when every time you start over, the mountains/cities/lakes/rivers/.. are all different?

Procedural content is great in that it’s quick and massive in scope, but it lacks immensely in character. It doesn’t really matter much whether you go south, north, east or west, as, yet again, it’s some random land.

Glad to see you are as excited about Shamus’ project as I am! I think I stumbled upon your blog when I was reading the comments in one of his posts.

My fascination with procedural content goes back to Fall of 2009, when I tried to make a procedural universe in XNA. It quickly fell apart, but I had a blast doing it.

Right now I’m teaching myself OpenGL in C++ to better my skill with that language and to REALLY learn the fundamentals of graphics programming.

I think if you need some kind of fixed installation (say: a tower for the evil mage) you could set a location for it into the terrain and on that location build the tower either as a whole or from building blocks.
Should work well enough – you have the travel to the tower through generated terrain that’ll be different every time you start the quest and then the pre-fab-tower to do the actual quest. That might become boring if every char encounters exactly the same tower (layout-wise) in a vastly different environment so the building-block-solution might be better.
And for the quest layout: why not use a block-system for quests? Go to [x], find and defeat [y], come back with [z]…

OK, since I’m pretty sure that’ll result in a programming monster better get some friends, designate one the GM and play some P&P!
But the idea still is nice :)

Actually, previous Bethesda games were having procedurally generated terrains. The problem to have an RPG game in this kind of terrain is that all the quests need fixed points to be activated. Having fixed quests in randomly generated terrains and city would be a nightmare to produce.

Fuel is an example that Shamus has mentioned of the procedually generated worlds. Spore also, apperently, relies on procedual tech to be able to handle all the player generated content. Spore also had some people from the demoscence on board if I remember.

jambarama wrote:

I think the problem is that you can’t play test generated content.

Diablo 2’s levels where randomly generated, yet the game is beloved. Also look at Minecraft. So, I would imagine that is possible to playtest it, by generating n worlds and see if they hold up for playing. Of course, this doesn’t lend itself well to highly structured stories like Half Life, but if you want to make exploration based games, it would be wonderful.

I think the problem is that you can’t play test generated content. For shooters, can you imagine if Half Life 2’s world was procedurally generated? It wouldn’t be as rich, you could get stuck, it wouldn’t be as intuitive, and you’d have pacing problems. You’d have problems even with a more open-ended shooter, like Far Cry. I think RPGs are a more realistic application.

Terrific demos though. Also, didn’t Spore use procedurally generated planets? I never played, but I thought that was part of the hype – sim city type terrain generation for a world. I also think I’ve read that L4D2 procedurally generates enemies, and I know Just Cause 2 & Elder Scrolls 2 generated their worlds.