3 ms·

Not a game dev but can Unity/Unreal/etc do procedurally generated everything? I thought they were more designed for manual map/environment building.

nineteen999 8y ago
Can't comment on Unity but Unreal4 definitely allows this, although you may have patch the engine source or implement your own base classes etc. I would imagine Unity is not that much different. See Astroneer for an example of this, the planets surfaces (which are deformable by the way) are procedurally generated, even if they are deployed from a kind of template specifying the parameters. UE4 has a ProceduralMeshComponent for this sort of thing, not to mention procedural foliage component etc.
bsamuels 8y ago
yes, but you probably wont have the benefit of the map editor
barbecue_sauce 8y ago
Unity gets shit on a lot because of how easy it is to churn something out with it (of dubious quality), but if you understand how it works at a fundamental level and also actually know how to code, you can pretty much do anything with it. It would be difficult do something of this scale procedurally, but you can definitely do procedural generation in Unity. You would just have to be smart about how you load resources at runtime to avoid hangups.
- foobarchu 8y ago
  > but if you understand how it works at a fundamental level This circles back to another key reason I think a lot of people choose to build their own engine, many people don't want to spend time learning the ins and outs of somebody elses creation. When you build your own engine, you know the entire api in and out from the start and as it evolves, you know what it can and can't do, and you know where to go if it's missing a feature or has a bug.
  - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
    That's fine if you have the time and inclination and you need very specific features that existing game engines wouldn't have, but at some level it can just be technological masturbation. For the most part, you're just going to be re-implementing things that already exist in much more robust forms in the major engines that have had the benefit of dedicated teams and a solid user base sussing out the edge cases (like render pipelines with shader support, physics engines, collision detection, etc. ). Chances are, to build a game engine, you're going to have to research the features and architecture of an existing one anyway to know what you even need to make. Building a game engine and building a game have very little to do with each other, and having skill in one does not necessarily imply skill in the other. If you're an indie dev in a small team (or a team of one) your first priority should be validating your game mechanics. Gameplay is where you have the most chance of innovating; you're only limited by your creativity.

nineteen999 8y ago

Can't comment on Unity but Unreal4 definitely allows this, although you may have patch the engine source or implement your own base classes etc. I would imagine Unity is not that much different. See Astroneer for an example of this, the planets surfaces (which are deformable by the way) are procedurally generated, even if they are deployed from a kind of template specifying the parameters. UE4 has a ProceduralMeshComponent for this sort of thing, not to mention procedural foliage component etc.

bsamuels 8y ago

yes, but you probably wont have the benefit of the map editor

barbecue_sauce 8y ago

Unity gets shit on a lot because of how easy it is to churn something out with it (of dubious quality), but if you understand how it works at a fundamental level and also actually know how to code, you can pretty much do anything with it. It would be difficult do something of this scale procedurally, but you can definitely do procedural generation in Unity. You would just have to be smart about how you load resources at runtime to avoid hangups.

foobarchu 8y ago
> but if you understand how it works at a fundamental level This circles back to another key reason I think a lot of people choose to build their own engine, many people don't want to spend time learning the ins and outs of somebody elses creation. When you build your own engine, you know the entire api in and out from the start and as it evolves, you know what it can and can't do, and you know where to go if it's missing a feature or has a bug.
- barbecue_sauce 8y ago
  That's fine if you have the time and inclination and you need very specific features that existing game engines wouldn't have, but at some level it can just be technological masturbation. For the most part, you're just going to be re-implementing things that already exist in much more robust forms in the major engines that have had the benefit of dedicated teams and a solid user base sussing out the edge cases (like render pipelines with shader support, physics engines, collision detection, etc. ). Chances are, to build a game engine, you're going to have to research the features and architecture of an existing one anyway to know what you even need to make. Building a game engine and building a game have very little to do with each other, and having skill in one does not necessarily imply skill in the other. If you're an indie dev in a small team (or a team of one) your first priority should be validating your game mechanics. Gameplay is where you have the most chance of innovating; you're only limited by your creativity.