My name disappeared in the post about pseudo-random generators.

At one point I wanted to generate everything. Cars, cities, houses, people, even tables, chairs and glasses. Everything. But then I realized how much time it would take to make all those generators work fine, when you could easily model a couple of cars in a week. Even generating a city is a bit stupid, because you can model a cool city in few weeks anyway, and making a good generator would take *lots* of more time. And what about the players that want to create their own cities and model their own cars? You''ve gotta have a good editor for them in any case.

You also don''t want to have different world every time you start a new game. That would be odd for players (there was a good article about this in Gamasutra, why not to make new map every playtime). And it would be harder to make a good storyline because it should be totally dynamic/generated then.

Few good places to use a generator:
1) Nethack/Diablo-games with dull endless dungeons that would probably look the same even if they were hand-drawn. And in nethack you can''t reborn/load a savegame, so it''s quite necessary to have a new dungeon every playtime. This kind of generator is very easy to make.

2) Star-systems. These are very easy to generate and there must be millions of these. Endless amount. Of course these don''t have to be physically & astronomically that correct because the players won''t notice it anyway.

3) Making a huge terrain for a CRPG. Because terrain-generating is very easy to do. But then again, you''ll need to use the generator only once, so this may be also pointless. Why not just draw the height-map with Photoshop using "render clouds" or other similar filters? If you distribute your game on a CD or DVD, disk space isn''t a problem.

4) For finer details in world that would take ages to place by hand. I can''t think of a good example right now..


-Hans {home page} {e-mail}

>>>
The generators must of course be interconnected, but in a hierarchical sense.
>>>

Hierarchical: That''s a possible method that should be easier to debug and vary.

For a SF universe you''d have
Universe generation - just generates galaxies
==== Spiral
==== Oval
==== Spherical
==== Isolated
Galaxy generation - given the type of Galaxy && the balances between red:blue:yellow:white suns, generate a list of stars and their x,y,z locations
Planet Generation - given the type of sun, generate the different types of systems: blue will have a weighting of more gas giants and dirtballs, yellow will have more earth-type planets.
Resource Generation - given the atmosphere of a planet generate the resources

ZoomBoy
Developing a 2D RPG with skills, weapons, and adventure.
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I used to think that randomly crafted levels were a poor idea, because I thought that they wouldn''t be able to stand up to the level of graphic design & expression, and gameplay / experience that professional level design can give.

But recently I have begun to doubt that it MATTERS as much as it seems. WHY? Because when playing X-Com, which uses a bunch of pregenerated buildings / fields etc. but seems to meld them together in a semi-random way. Even if there is? a preselected range of environments that they have chosen, the placement of the Aliens, Ie. Gameplay tokens, has a random element to it.

I realised, as I hunted down aliens and blew holes in walls to gain strategic advantages, was that GAMEPLAY MATTERED MORE THAN "CRAFTED" SEMI-LINEAR LEVELS. More gameplay could be given by giving a decent range of weapons, allowing for different strategies and giving each encounter semi-random starting positions. AND the X-Com is also a very atmospheric game.

So I think that it is possible to get the best of both worlds, by combining atmosphere and some good characters + situations, with random elements which affect gameplay and give interest to exploration.


If the generators for the terrain & token placement are well programmed, and they have a large enough list of interesting content that can be seamlessly integrated, then games can be both interesting places to explore & provide excellent gameplay.

The other thing that interested me was an innocuous comment about combining Ultima Underworld (witty characterisation -Trolls that want to have Wormy Stew like their mothers used to make - warring Goblin tribes, clever puzzles, most objects have a reason for existing, a history for the action which extends into the level design etc.) with Nethack ( random content with interesting things that you haven''t seen before appearing in many games).