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> Pattern Density. Players naturally learn to identify patterns in game content over time. This is not exclusive to procedurally generated content; ... procedu
by yarg 3y ago
> Pattern Density. Players naturally learn to identify patterns in game content over time. This is not exclusive to procedurally generated content; ... procedurally generated content is more susceptible to pattern identification in this way. Generated content might be described as ‘repetitive’ if it is too easy to notice patterns.
Not necessarily - just feed in a stream of pseudorandom data?
Even a 32 bit seed space can generate more environments than a player could ever explore, each with arbitrary levels of detail.
The data stream may be lacking in true complexity, but (done right) it would be indistinguishable from the player's perspective.
(Or am I missing something?)
- pharmakom 3y agoI had this experience playing No Mans Sky. At first it’s amazing, but after you visit a few planets, you start to see repeated elements. After a while, you see The Matrix: the knobs that the PRNG can turn become more obvious than the game world itself! Then the illusion is broken.
- NBJack 3y agoThis jumped to mind for me too. Basically 5-10 unique elements per planet, arranged to give it an organicish feel, but the terrain sadly lacks much to explore. The most interesting planets tend to be more forested or have extreme terrain features, but the patterns are still obvious.
- eru 3y agoAs a thought experiment, think about reading a text. In some sense, if you feed your reader truly random letters (generate uniformly and independently), they should be maximally surprised. But they aren't. They will be bored. And they will be able to predict roughly how many spaces there will be in next million characters. Or roughly how many repetitions of the sequence 'xyz'. And they will notice that there's no overarching structure. If you give people a carefully written text, the individual letters will be more predictable, but your readers / viewers will feel more surprised when they learn that Darth Vader is Luke's father.
- layer8 3y agoSee the explanation of the "oatmeal" reference elsewhere in this thread. Having a bowl of oatmeal each day will quickly feel repetitive, even if each bowl of oatmeal technically has a unique arrangement. Adding more "randomness" to the arrangement of oatmeal won't change that. This relates to high entropy. The macroscopic pattern can remain largely the same even if the microscopic configurations differ a lot.