Quote:

Original post by superpig Procedural content is the way to go. When arriving in a new region of space, generate a new alien race with new ships and new behaviors for you to get involved with.

I'd love to do this, but at the LOD I'm attempting, it would be impossible. It's not enough to generate new ships, which can be achieved (maybe) through an amalgam of ship parts and procedural textures.

What about their cities? What about the interiors of their vessels? What about their cultural quirks or stories? What inventory do they have? What about their walk cycles, their clothing, their movement animations? History? Motives?

I think you can see what I mean.

Quote:

Original post by superpig Sure, if you're being repeatedly attacked by the same guys no matter where you go, then yes, it'll get very boring. The same guys look the same and act the same, so you beat them the same way.

Doom 3 does a lot to make the enemy encounters more varied, not because the enemies themselves are different but because the player encounter them in different constellations, ambushes, varying light levels, etc. This is not generated though but a part of the level design, which is why it never gets tedious.

Quote:

Original post by superpig Procedural content is the way to go. When arriving in a new region of space, generate a new alien race with new ships and new behaviors for you to get involved with.

Perhaps this would work in a game (perhaps an FPS) where the number of questions the player is likely to ask about the enemies is limited. If all the player wants to know is how strong is it? , how will it attack me? and how can I counter it's tactics and defeat it? , then enemy generation of this sort could work fine. But if the player want to ask broader questions like those Wavinator stated, then what?

Quote:

Original post by Wavinator Imagine that you're exploring space and decide to head out into the icy gulf between stars. The game doesn't stop you, but after awhile you're bored, so you teleport home. Once back in civilized space, you attend to the various death threats, revolutions, save the universe missions and occassional marriage proposals that have made life interesting... Who's responsible for the player being bored, the game or the player? IOW, should a game either A) limit you only to the places where there's action B) let you go into places where there might be nothing of consequence B1) same as above, but always give you a quick way out C) make it so that every place always has action, no matter how contrived that may be Most games adopt A, which is why you get tempting views guarded by knee high barriers you can't jump over. Option C sounds best, but makes world-design arbitrary: For instance, in Freelancer, ships will always spawn that attack you, even if you're going to the corner store for some milk. It gets silly and repetitive after awhile. I would personally favor B1, with the idea that as long as the player can always get to the action, they should be allowed the freedom to discover the game's world at their own pace. This is provided that the player has some way of finding the action space (ie, not searching aimlessly).

You ommitted another place, a place where there is no 'action' but still something of intrest/constructive to do (to prepare for your next assault, rest, equip and/or train, gather intelligence, gather resources, marshal lackeys, etc...). A place where the player has control and something to gain (making it worthwhile to spend time there). Whether it is a base of operations or a supply stop, it would be a place where its less likely something will jump up and attack you -- offering some down time so the player doesnt have to be constantly on 'deaths ground'.

Remember Captain Blood? I believe it had millions of planets you could land on, but most of them had nothing of interest. You soon gave up looking for interesting planets at random and just followed the story.

Bloody difficult game, which I never completed. I wonder if you can still get it.

Paging Mr Wright.. will Mr Wright please come to the Design forum... Anyone who doesn't know what Spore is should go and find out immediately.

Yes, you're limited with the amount of variation you can achieve and the level of detail you can supply. But even then, it's better than none at all, right?

Consider it the 'Star Trek' principle of alien life. All aliens are humanoid. All aliens eat and drink. These ones are blue. These ones are green. These ones eat their own young. Most of the time it's achieved by taking an existing race (usually humans) and modifying them a bit.

Procedural content doesn't need to be generated from scratch - it can, as Wavinator suggested, just be a question of combining a random set of elements. Civilization 1 will have justice system X, architectural style Y, and entertainment priorities Z. Civilization 2 has justice system P, architecture style Q, and entertainment priorities R instead. It may seem impossible to combine them, but in the end all we're trying to come up with is a set of assets and behaviours to present to the player.

And personally, I didn't find Doom 3 to be particularly interesting, to the point that I gave up before finishing it.

Quote:

Original post by StaticVoid Remember Captain Blood? I believe it had millions of planets you could land on, but most of them had nothing of interest. You soon gave up looking for interesting planets at random and just followed the story.

Yeah... I could see this being a big problem even if you went as far as allowing the player to scan the planet before landing. I think the important thing is to make sure that there is a high enough concentration of interesting planets in the active area of the game, and only start filling with a large amount of empty planets in the areas that you can't design for.

Quote:

Original post by superpig Procedural content doesn't need to be generated from scratch - it can, as Wavinator suggested, just be a question of combining a random set of elements. Civilization 1 will have justice system X, architectural style Y, and entertainment priorities Z. Civilization 2 has justice system P, architecture style Q, and entertainment priorities R instead. It may seem impossible to combine them, but in the end all we're trying to come up with is a set of assets and behaviours to present to the player.

I think I would rather see empty planets than a huge amount of very similar ones. At least when the ones that do exist are unique and important, you know it, instead of having to hunt for the important one among hundreds of clones. I would rather see each race have a lot of thought and design behind it than have them be an agglomeration of attributes which might or might not make sense together.

Speaking of Spore, though, I do wonder how they handled the planets and concentrations of habitation in that, seeing as you have the ability to fly around space at the end.

Quote:

Original post by superpig Procedural content doesn't need to be generated from scratch - it can, as Wavinator suggested, just be a question of combining a random set of elements. Civilization 1 will have justice system X, architectural style Y, and entertainment priorities Z. Civilization 2 has justice system P, architecture style Q, and entertainment priorities R instead. It may seem impossible to combine them, but in the end all we're trying to come up with is a set of assets and behaviours to present to the player.

Well they had a kind of that system in the Master of Orion series and, although it might be fascinating the first ten planets you discover, it quickly becomes a matter of looking for certain key parameters. Parameter A means they are viable for argiculture, parameter B says you can gain that much research here. Soon you don't even look at the whole picture of it but just for some key parameters. I think it makes the "infinite variation" very flat and boring, once you grasp the bounds of the variation.

Quote:

Original post by SantaClaws I think I would rather see empty planets than a huge amount of very similar ones. At least when the ones that do exist are unique and important, you know it, instead of having to hunt for the important one among hundreds of clones. I would rather see each race have a lot of thought and design behind it than have them be an agglomeration of attributes which might or might not make sense together.

I couldn't agree more. If the designer puts some effort into making five very thought-through civilizations and cleverly define their relation and interaction with each other, then that's worth 50 randomly generated ones.

Quote:

Original post by staaf Quote: Original post by superpig Procedural content doesn't need to be generated from scratch - it can, as Wavinator suggested, just be a question of combining a random set of elements. Civilization 1 will have justice system X, architectural style Y, and entertainment priorities Z. Civilization 2 has justice system P, architecture style Q, and entertainment priorities R instead. It may seem impossible to combine them, but in the end all we're trying to come up with is a set of assets and behaviours to present to the player. Well they had a kind of that system in the Master of Orion series and, although it might be fascinating the first ten planets you discover, it quickly becomes a matter of looking for certain key parameters. Parameter A means they are viable for argiculture, parameter B says you can gain that much research here. Soon you don't even look at the whole picture of it but just for some key parameters. I think it makes the "infinite variation" very flat and boring, once you grasp the bounds of the variation.

But if you keep increasing the number of parameters, the system becomes complex enough to be pseudorandom. Sure, when you're dealing with that many parameters it becomes very difficult from a technical point of view, but that's just another problem to be solved.

Quote:

Original post by superpig But if you keep increasing the number of parameters, the system becomes complex enough to be pseudorandom. Sure, when you're dealing with that many parameters it becomes very difficult from a technical point of view, but that's just another problem to be solved.

Perhaps, as the number of parameters approach infinity you will get rid of the feeling that they have been generated from a finite number of parameters, with technical difficulties as you say.

Then if you want the civilizations to be more than equally isolated from each other, and have som means of relations and common history, then you arrive at an entire new level of technical difficulty (which without doubt can be overcome but at what cost?). I mean most civs would probably not have reached beyond their planet or system, but then some might have. Then you introduce time into the generation, addressing a civ's past, present and future.

Quote:

Original post by superpig Quote: Original post by staaf Well they had a kind of that system in the Master of Orion series and, although it might be fascinating the first ten planets you discover, it quickly becomes a matter of looking for certain key parameters. Parameter A means they are viable for argiculture, parameter B says you can gain that much research here. Soon you don't even look at the whole picture of it but just for some key parameters. I think it makes the "infinite variation" very flat and boring, once you grasp the bounds of the variation. But if you keep increasing the number of parameters, the system becomes complex enough to be pseudorandom. Sure, when you're dealing with that many parameters it becomes very difficult from a technical point of view, but that's just another problem to be solved.

I think that staaf really hit on an important point here.

Unless you had a HUGE amount of parameters, and each parameter had a very large number of possible values, I believe that a player would soon start noticing the patterns in it. The player would accept the content as something that was generated, and disregard it as something that could ever be a real culture. They would start only looking for the things about the culture that are directly effecting their gameplay.

I think this is bad because I believe that it's much better to make a small amount of excellent features than a huge amount of mediocre (or bad, even) features. In other words: rather than build a big game that is half as good, build a really good game that's half the size.

When dealing with procedurally generated content, I don't see a feasible way to give it the same thought out and authentic feel that custom content has. It's much harder to procedurally generate something that should have as much depth as the culture behind the inhabitants of a planet. Doing a great job procedurally generating things as superficial as terrain or the bodies of the inhabitants themselves is much more attainable.