6 ms·

> remix boredom A sentiment captured perfectly by: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/08/17/infinite-and-infinitesimal https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/

by s_kilk 10y ago

> remix boredom A sentiment captured perfectly by: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/08/17/infinite-and-infinitesimal https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/08/17/infinite-and-i...

stcredzero 10y ago
Right, but if that gooey puke colored special snowflake was the only source of a power coupling compatible with a laser amplifier that could work with your rare Blatovian power generator that only has the 0.025 inertial penalty and enables your new fighter's super hit and run tactic, then you would totally give a bunch of !@$%&#. EDIT: That sounds snide but I'm actually being sincere. I'm planning on including items in my game from a procedurally generated tech tree with location-dependent item availability.
- reddytowns 10y ago
  So, how do you create benefits that stack like that, without making the game too easy? With a procedural generator, it's difficult to determine what accomplishments will be hard and what will be easy. All those components you mentioned could appear right near the users spawn point, or they could all be impossibly hard to gather, due to procedural randomness.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    So, how do you create benefits that stack like that, without making the game too easy? With a procedural generator, it's difficult to determine what accomplishments will be hard and what will be easy. There are geometrical properties that let me tune how hard certain combinations will be to find, statistically. EDIT: Also, almost all benefits will come with some kind of penalty or incompatibility. It will be impossible to build a perfect ship that does everything well. Instead, you will be able to easily build a ship that does one very narrow thing rather well, one thing badly, but generally sucks otherwise. Also, you should be able to make something that does 2 things above average, one thing non-sucky, but otherwise sucks.
    - dr_zoidberg 10y ago
      I was going to suggest some form of automated testing during development and monte-carlo simulation of games to run a batch of "10,000 playthroughs a night", paired with a cost-function to "evaluate" the strength of a character-build (it can be as simple as "total damage" or "total DPS") and see if some outlier(s?) appear.
      - vidarh 10y ago
        That's probably a good idea. But you can also pre-empt a lot of problems by designing the system around physical limitations. Many games have done that for a long time. E.g. I believe Terminus included things like mass for components, so adding all kinds of extras had a cost in fuel usage and maneuverability. So if you did build a ship loaded with the most powerful weapons, you could, but it'd also be a slow, hard to control, big target. Mass, volume, energy expenditure, waste heat - there are lots of factors you can add to make it hard to exploit. Of course, you need to tune those factors, but it makes it less likely for really extreme effects.
        stcredzero 10y ago
        I totally want players to have extremely powerful effects -- but coupled with really big penalties.
        vidarh 10y ago
        Yeah, that makes sense. Powerful is fun, but not if it becomes unbeatable.
        dr_zoidberg 10y ago
        Yes, but even well designed games (from a gameplay pov) can have unexpectedly powerfull builds, like what happened with Starcraft 2 and the genetic-algorithm build order[0]. So simulating builds/gameplays can give you another edge at detecting strange/powerful scenarios. I also think you should rely on player feedback and community to spot this kind of things, but that could become time consuming if you're a lone developer. [0] http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/11/using-genetic-algorithms-to-find-starcraft-2-build-orders/ http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/11/using-genetic-algorithms-to-...
- chongli 10y ago
  Right, but if that gooey puke colored special snowflake was the only source of a power coupling compatible with a laser amplifier that could work with your rare Blatovian power generator that only has the 0.025 inertial penalty and enables your new fighter's super hit and run tactic, then you would totally give a bunch of !@$%&#. No, I still don't. Games to me are about interesting choices. I don't care about rare "loot", or about finding yet another key to open this lock, or about improving some score by 0.35 angstroms. I care about "do I castle kingside or queenside? Because if I castle queenside then my rook will be opposite his queen and blah blah blah but if I castle kingside then I won't have to worry about a quick a5 strike with the potential to undermine my b pawn." These choices (with chess only as an example) are interesting because they have serious consequences that can be reasonably foreseen but are not totally obvious. It's sometimes the case that the space between reasonably foreseeable and totally obvious is a very fine narrow one, but then your game might be lacking in depth. Adding procedural puke special snowflake enemies doesn't add any more depth than "rare Blatovian power generators" does, unless the tradeoff over using a "Snargglemoofian power generator" is that your ship can no longer turn left or something.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    No, I still don't. Games to me are about interesting choices. I don't care about rare "loot", or about finding yet another key to open this lock, or about improving some score by 0.35 angstroms. That's totally not what I was getting at. It's more like, "do I castle kingside or queenside? Because if I castle queenside then my rook will be opposite his queen...?" The low inertial penalty is probably the rare (actually statistically, as opposed to "rare") quality of that particular item -- and it would still come with some other form of penalty. (Like a really PITA set of compatibility requirements and high fragility.) unless the tradeoff over using a "Snargglemoofian power generator" is that your ship can no longer turn left or something. I hadn't thought of "your ship can't turn left." It might be a great tradeoff for something that would otherwise be an overpowered weapon, combined with another kind of movement penalty. I have thought of things like a shield upgrade that gives you really high resists across 120 degrees of arc, but which isn't configurable. "Your ship can't turn left" might be a really good penalty for a high resist/partial arc shield augment that mostly covers your right side. EDIT: An even better idea: you get high resists over a 120 degree arc, but then you also get a susceptibility penalty over the rest!
- scotty79 10y ago
  You are right sir. Playing in procedurally generated world is like going for a walk in the forest. Trees you see are unique and rich in detail but since they have no use for you you don't care about how different they are. If you ware a primitive man from long ago when those different kinds of trees were unique resources to craft the specific things that your existence depends on then you'd notice the difference between them and you'd care.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    Joerg Sprave of the "Slingshot Channel" might be interested in how the grain is formed in the crooks of certain branches, because those might make for good slingshots. Most of us wouldn't even notice.
  - vanderreeah 10y ago
    That kind of assumes that trees can't be resources for other kinds of value than tooling. For example, aesthetic appreciation, healing contact with nature, etc. These things are subjective - I certainly don't necessarily seek forests for those exact reasons, but they, and others, do exist. Pretty much none of these values is extractable from a fecking random polygon.
- jwatte 10y ago
  Even random lock/key puzzles become boring quickly. Procedural tools is a great way of amplifying artist creativity, but don't generate fun games on their own. Not until we solve "hard" AI, at least. Once we do, I expect that will be what they do to keep us pets happy.
  - Splines 10y ago
    Borderlands is another good example of this. Procedurally generated guns, but they fall into buckets of terrible->ok->good->amazing, and the particular uniqueness of that weapon becomes stale after a few minutes. I enjoyed about the game until about halfway through until it started turning into a slog. (Although this is probably a matter of MMO mechanics not meshing well with FPS).
- imtringued 10y ago
  Remember randomness doesn't add content. It just spreads it out. You still have to create good base content yourself. A lot of games basically have useless 2%-5% modifiers. Nobody cares about the difference between 0.025 and 0.027 inertial penalty. It just wastes the time of the player checking their loot. In the real world a weapon or armor is either effective or useless. Nobody takes down tanks with a glock. I would recommend you to have several types of items even if that means the items have fixed statistics instead of having one item type with flexible statistics.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    Nobody cares about the difference between 0.025 and 0.027 inertial penalty. I was thinking more along the lines of the difference between 0.025 and 2.5. There's also stacking. I would recommend you to have several types of items even if that means the items have fixed statistics instead of having one item type with flexible statistics. Darn. I was going to have just one type of item, called "Object." Everything would be a variation on that, and inherit behavior from it. But seriously, I am going to have very specific functions for a set catalogue of items. The procedural generation is all about their potential for interaction when incorporated into a crafted item.

by s_kilk 10y ago

> remix boredom A sentiment captured perfectly by: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/08/17/infinite-and-infinitesimal https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/08/17/infinite-and-i...

stcredzero 10y ago

Right, but if that gooey puke colored special snowflake was the only source of a power coupling compatible with a laser amplifier that could work with your rare Blatovian power generator that only has the 0.025 inertial penalty and enables your new fighter's super hit and run tactic, then you would totally give a bunch of !@$%&#. EDIT: That sounds snide but I'm actually being sincere. I'm planning on including items in my game from a procedurally generated tech tree with location-dependent item availability.

reddytowns 10y ago
So, how do you create benefits that stack like that, without making the game too easy? With a procedural generator, it's difficult to determine what accomplishments will be hard and what will be easy. All those components you mentioned could appear right near the users spawn point, or they could all be impossibly hard to gather, due to procedural randomness.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  So, how do you create benefits that stack like that, without making the game too easy? With a procedural generator, it's difficult to determine what accomplishments will be hard and what will be easy. There are geometrical properties that let me tune how hard certain combinations will be to find, statistically. EDIT: Also, almost all benefits will come with some kind of penalty or incompatibility. It will be impossible to build a perfect ship that does everything well. Instead, you will be able to easily build a ship that does one very narrow thing rather well, one thing badly, but generally sucks otherwise. Also, you should be able to make something that does 2 things above average, one thing non-sucky, but otherwise sucks.
  - dr_zoidberg 10y ago
    I was going to suggest some form of automated testing during development and monte-carlo simulation of games to run a batch of "10,000 playthroughs a night", paired with a cost-function to "evaluate" the strength of a character-build (it can be as simple as "total damage" or "total DPS") and see if some outlier(s?) appear.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      That's probably a good idea. But you can also pre-empt a lot of problems by designing the system around physical limitations. Many games have done that for a long time. E.g. I believe Terminus included things like mass for components, so adding all kinds of extras had a cost in fuel usage and maneuverability. So if you did build a ship loaded with the most powerful weapons, you could, but it'd also be a slow, hard to control, big target. Mass, volume, energy expenditure, waste heat - there are lots of factors you can add to make it hard to exploit. Of course, you need to tune those factors, but it makes it less likely for really extreme effects.
      - stcredzero 10y ago
        I totally want players to have extremely powerful effects -- but coupled with really big penalties.
        vidarh 10y ago
        Yeah, that makes sense. Powerful is fun, but not if it becomes unbeatable.
      - dr_zoidberg 10y ago
        Yes, but even well designed games (from a gameplay pov) can have unexpectedly powerfull builds, like what happened with Starcraft 2 and the genetic-algorithm build order[0]. So simulating builds/gameplays can give you another edge at detecting strange/powerful scenarios. I also think you should rely on player feedback and community to spot this kind of things, but that could become time consuming if you're a lone developer. [0] http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/11/using-genetic-algorithms-to-find-starcraft-2-build-orders/ http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/11/using-genetic-algorithms-to-...
chongli 10y ago
Right, but if that gooey puke colored special snowflake was the only source of a power coupling compatible with a laser amplifier that could work with your rare Blatovian power generator that only has the 0.025 inertial penalty and enables your new fighter's super hit and run tactic, then you would totally give a bunch of !@$%&#. No, I still don't. Games to me are about interesting choices. I don't care about rare "loot", or about finding yet another key to open this lock, or about improving some score by 0.35 angstroms. I care about "do I castle kingside or queenside? Because if I castle queenside then my rook will be opposite his queen and blah blah blah but if I castle kingside then I won't have to worry about a quick a5 strike with the potential to undermine my b pawn." These choices (with chess only as an example) are interesting because they have serious consequences that can be reasonably foreseen but are not totally obvious. It's sometimes the case that the space between reasonably foreseeable and totally obvious is a very fine narrow one, but then your game might be lacking in depth. Adding procedural puke special snowflake enemies doesn't add any more depth than "rare Blatovian power generators" does, unless the tradeoff over using a "Snargglemoofian power generator" is that your ship can no longer turn left or something.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  No, I still don't. Games to me are about interesting choices. I don't care about rare "loot", or about finding yet another key to open this lock, or about improving some score by 0.35 angstroms. That's totally not what I was getting at. It's more like, "do I castle kingside or queenside? Because if I castle queenside then my rook will be opposite his queen...?" The low inertial penalty is probably the rare (actually statistically, as opposed to "rare") quality of that particular item -- and it would still come with some other form of penalty. (Like a really PITA set of compatibility requirements and high fragility.) unless the tradeoff over using a "Snargglemoofian power generator" is that your ship can no longer turn left or something. I hadn't thought of "your ship can't turn left." It might be a great tradeoff for something that would otherwise be an overpowered weapon, combined with another kind of movement penalty. I have thought of things like a shield upgrade that gives you really high resists across 120 degrees of arc, but which isn't configurable. "Your ship can't turn left" might be a really good penalty for a high resist/partial arc shield augment that mostly covers your right side. EDIT: An even better idea: you get high resists over a 120 degree arc, but then you also get a susceptibility penalty over the rest!
scotty79 10y ago
You are right sir. Playing in procedurally generated world is like going for a walk in the forest. Trees you see are unique and rich in detail but since they have no use for you you don't care about how different they are. If you ware a primitive man from long ago when those different kinds of trees were unique resources to craft the specific things that your existence depends on then you'd notice the difference between them and you'd care.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  Joerg Sprave of the "Slingshot Channel" might be interested in how the grain is formed in the crooks of certain branches, because those might make for good slingshots. Most of us wouldn't even notice.
- vanderreeah 10y ago
  That kind of assumes that trees can't be resources for other kinds of value than tooling. For example, aesthetic appreciation, healing contact with nature, etc. These things are subjective - I certainly don't necessarily seek forests for those exact reasons, but they, and others, do exist. Pretty much none of these values is extractable from a fecking random polygon.
jwatte 10y ago
Even random lock/key puzzles become boring quickly. Procedural tools is a great way of amplifying artist creativity, but don't generate fun games on their own. Not until we solve "hard" AI, at least. Once we do, I expect that will be what they do to keep us pets happy.
- Splines 10y ago
  Borderlands is another good example of this. Procedurally generated guns, but they fall into buckets of terrible->ok->good->amazing, and the particular uniqueness of that weapon becomes stale after a few minutes. I enjoyed about the game until about halfway through until it started turning into a slog. (Although this is probably a matter of MMO mechanics not meshing well with FPS).
imtringued 10y ago
Remember randomness doesn't add content. It just spreads it out. You still have to create good base content yourself. A lot of games basically have useless 2%-5% modifiers. Nobody cares about the difference between 0.025 and 0.027 inertial penalty. It just wastes the time of the player checking their loot. In the real world a weapon or armor is either effective or useless. Nobody takes down tanks with a glock. I would recommend you to have several types of items even if that means the items have fixed statistics instead of having one item type with flexible statistics.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  Nobody cares about the difference between 0.025 and 0.027 inertial penalty. I was thinking more along the lines of the difference between 0.025 and 2.5. There's also stacking. I would recommend you to have several types of items even if that means the items have fixed statistics instead of having one item type with flexible statistics. Darn. I was going to have just one type of item, called "Object." Everything would be a variation on that, and inherit behavior from it. But seriously, I am going to have very specific functions for a set catalogue of items. The procedural generation is all about their potential for interaction when incorporated into a crafted item.