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We've heard this same claim so many times before. Procedurally generating each atom? Come on, this is just a marketing gimmick. These never turn out to be decen

by RyanZAG 13y ago

We've heard this same claim so many times before. Procedurally generating each atom? Come on, this is just a marketing gimmick. These never turn out to be decent games, usually it's just running around a world with randomly appearing enemies who all act the same and you're bored within 10 minutes. I'd be more optimistic if this exact thing hadn't been claimed before every year for the last 20 with no results.

nacs 13y ago
Yeah I think it has potential but the abuse of the term procedural for blatant marketing purposes is a bit overboard. Procedural down to the "atom" yet when you watch the trailer, you see the same old trees, rocks, 2-jet engine spaceships and an extremely Earth-like world.. The only thing that looked procedural are the seemingly random colors. Everything else looks like they modeled a bunch of 3D assets. Maybe they're procedurally generating the terrain like Minecraft but they're definitely building the world from pre-modeled assets.
- ronaldx 13y ago
  Actual trees are generated procedurally via their cells, and they look like the same old trees. That's how trees work.
  - nacs 13y ago
    And your point is? Are you suggesting that they're 'growing' a tree procedurally from the cellular level?
    - ronaldx 13y ago
      No, my point is that your complaint above doesn't make sense. Trees are trees: if anything, the fact that you've correctly identified 'the same old trees' shows that the designer has done a good job in this respect.
sillysaurus2 13y ago
It's true. Speaking as a gamedev, more people should really study how Notch was able to make procedural gen so interesting to look at. It's rather involved, and took a lot of testing to get right. And even that starts to get boring after awhile. Every environment you see in this video will probably look roughly the same: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU The reason is because most programmers simply do 'procedural' gen like "if desert, then X. If temperate, than Y. If..." But you can achieve much more interesting results by using weighting instead of special casing.
- exizt88 13y ago
  > more people should really study how Notch was able to make procedural gen so interesting to look at. Could you elaborate or link an article on this?
- fhars 13y ago
  Procedural generation along similar lines has been used successfully for most of the vegetation in Pixar's "Brave", see http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-4-June-July-2012/The-Royal-Treatment.aspx http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-4-J... for some background.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
electrograv 13y ago
First, I want to say how amazingly cool I think "No Man's Sky" looks -- as an enjoyer of scifi content and indie games, I will certainly be among the first in line to buy/play it when it comes out. That said, I agree with this criticism of "procedural content" completely. A while ago I created a little toy WebGL tech demo featuring "a vast virtual 3D universe containing billions of unique stars and planets" (it's open-source on github if anyone's interested) -- so I encountered this issue first-hand (and saw it come up many times elsewhere in the past, of course). IMO, the fundamental problem lies in a subtle distinction between "infinite variation" vs. "infinite novelty". Most procedural generation amounts to not much more than random noise passed through a variety of hand-tuned filters and/or custom code. In most cases it's how you tune that filtering and custom logic that leads to any amount of interesting results, not the underlying random noise generator (from which the too-good-to-be-true claim of "infinite variety" is derived). I don't think it's completely impossible to derive interesting variation from a combination of mathematics and randomness, but I think the degree to which we find something interesting or "novel" is at least somewhat related to the amount of computational complexity put into its derivation (at least, that's my intuition on the matter).
- hyp0 13y ago
  I think grammars are a way to formalize this intuition of novelty (NB: grammars can be use to generate as well as to parse). Noise is like a stream of random symbols from an alphabet - anything is possible; most all of it boring. A grammar carves out a subset of the possible streams, only those with certain relationships between the symbols. Regular expressions are a simple kind of grammar (aka "Regular Grammars") - you can see generation as choices made for explicit choice operators ("|"), and choices of whether to loop ("∗") or continue. Although limited, they can be surprisingly expressive. Context Free Grammars allow you to generate things that have the basic structure of xml, json and source code. And you can have Turing Equivalent grammars that, in describing a subset, can compute anything. Of course, grammars aren't restricted to the Chomsky Hierarchy, but can include any way of describing the subset of streams (or generating an instance of them) - for example, the recent HN travesty/markov generators. You can search for the right grammar (machine learning), by taking a corpus of instances of what you want to generate, and test out your grammar, by seeing how well it compresses them. This shows whether it is capturing regularities within them and between them - the rules or laws that are the essence of a grammar. In doing this, you should also take into account the size of the grammar itself: consider the extremes of one grammar that factors out deep regularities; versus one that is simply a choice between each instance, verbatim (this compresses real well: it just needs to encode which instance. i.e. log2(1/N) bits, e.g. 8 bits to encode which of 256 different instances, assuming uniform probability). Accounting for the complexity of the grammar avoids this. This comes down to the length of the description of the instances + the length of the description of the grammar. ( "Model" is probably a better term than "grammar", since it doesn't imply a sequence. ) Re: your last point, there's no theoretical reason that an extremely accurate model must be computationally expensive to execute (e.g. flocking behaviour was simpler than expected; and Occam's Razor gives us hope) - but it might well be computationally expensive to discover in the first place. e.g. require many great leaps of intuition by humans. (Even if it's obvious in hindsight.) The trailer looks a little repetitive to me - esp the yellow underwater plants; and the trees seem to be random blocks of foliage - like minecraft trees or github icons, just rendered nicer. I don't want to criticize, as they probably have some cool innovations hidden away in there. What I'd like is gameplay-significant procedural generation. e.g. trees you can climb, so their shape affects where you can reach and how. Terrain - mountains, streams - naturally has this effect. Then, developers have to make it work right! So far, only the minecraft/dwarf fortress genres do this. Because generation is fundamental to their concept, their gameplay, and why people like the games, I suspect that that genre is where we'll eventually get the hi-res breakthroughs - whereas for every other genre, including "No Man's Sky", if their gameplay isn't 100% dependent on generation, whenever there's a conflict between the two, generation will lose (crunch time! what must be finished to ship?). Servant of two masters etc. FWIW I still think FarCry2 (not 3) creates the most immersive world so far. Hopefully something even better will be done for nextgen consoles/PCs, as opposed to just higher resolution and higher gamification.
dscrd 13y ago
Ever played rogue, nethack or dwarf fortress?
barbs 13y ago
> We've heard this same claim so many times before. Could you please list some examples?
mikeash 13y ago
Never turn out to be decent games? Some of the most beloved and respected games in history (e.g. Elite) are done this way.
fidotron 13y ago
Nonsense. This lot being Brits of the right age it blatantly follows from the tradition of Elite and Exile, two old 8-bit titles where everything was procedurally generated in order to fit into the machines of the era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_(1988_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_(1988_video_game)
- louthy 13y ago
  Everybody knows Elite, so I won't say much about that. But Exile really was a spectacular game for the time. Actually, I didn't realise it was procedurally generated - which probably explains why I spent many hours as a teen trying to work out how on earth they made it all fit in ~20k of RAM.
  - louthy 13y ago
    Super impressive disassembly of Exile from the wikipedia page: http://www.level7.org.uk/miscellany/exile-disassembly.txt http://www.level7.org.uk/miscellany/exile-disassembly.txt
fzltrp 13y ago
I don't think that the word atom here refer to the usual physical object (which shouldn't be called that way btw), but rather to indivisible objects (ie. the original meaning of atom) in the game data model, iow every actors (passive or active).
deelowe 13y ago
Minecraft, terraria, and starbound seem to contradict your point.

by RyanZAG 13y ago

nacs 13y ago

Yeah I think it has potential but the abuse of the term procedural for blatant marketing purposes is a bit overboard. Procedural down to the "atom" yet when you watch the trailer, you see the same old trees, rocks, 2-jet engine spaceships and an extremely Earth-like world.. The only thing that looked procedural are the seemingly random colors. Everything else looks like they modeled a bunch of 3D assets. Maybe they're procedurally generating the terrain like Minecraft but they're definitely building the world from pre-modeled assets.

ronaldx 13y ago
Actual trees are generated procedurally via their cells, and they look like the same old trees. That's how trees work.
- nacs 13y ago
  And your point is? Are you suggesting that they're 'growing' a tree procedurally from the cellular level?
  - ronaldx 13y ago
    No, my point is that your complaint above doesn't make sense. Trees are trees: if anything, the fact that you've correctly identified 'the same old trees' shows that the designer has done a good job in this respect.

sillysaurus2 13y ago

It's true. Speaking as a gamedev, more people should really study how Notch was able to make procedural gen so interesting to look at. It's rather involved, and took a lot of testing to get right. And even that starts to get boring after awhile. Every environment you see in this video will probably look roughly the same: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU The reason is because most programmers simply do 'procedural' gen like "if desert, then X. If temperate, than Y. If..." But you can achieve much more interesting results by using weighting instead of special casing.

exizt88 13y ago
> more people should really study how Notch was able to make procedural gen so interesting to look at. Could you elaborate or link an article on this?
fhars 13y ago
Procedural generation along similar lines has been used successfully for most of the vegetation in Pixar's "Brave", see http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-4-June-July-2012/The-Royal-Treatment.aspx http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-4-J... for some background.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

electrograv 13y ago

First, I want to say how amazingly cool I think "No Man's Sky" looks -- as an enjoyer of scifi content and indie games, I will certainly be among the first in line to buy/play it when it comes out. That said, I agree with this criticism of "procedural content" completely. A while ago I created a little toy WebGL tech demo featuring "a vast virtual 3D universe containing billions of unique stars and planets" (it's open-source on github if anyone's interested) -- so I encountered this issue first-hand (and saw it come up many times elsewhere in the past, of course). IMO, the fundamental problem lies in a subtle distinction between "infinite variation" vs. "infinite novelty". Most procedural generation amounts to not much more than random noise passed through a variety of hand-tuned filters and/or custom code. In most cases it's how you tune that filtering and custom logic that leads to any amount of interesting results, not the underlying random noise generator (from which the too-good-to-be-true claim of "infinite variety" is derived). I don't think it's completely impossible to derive interesting variation from a combination of mathematics and randomness, but I think the degree to which we find something interesting or "novel" is at least somewhat related to the amount of computational complexity put into its derivation (at least, that's my intuition on the matter).

hyp0 13y ago
I think grammars are a way to formalize this intuition of novelty (NB: grammars can be use to generate as well as to parse). Noise is like a stream of random symbols from an alphabet - anything is possible; most all of it boring. A grammar carves out a subset of the possible streams, only those with certain relationships between the symbols. Regular expressions are a simple kind of grammar (aka "Regular Grammars") - you can see generation as choices made for explicit choice operators ("|"), and choices of whether to loop ("∗") or continue. Although limited, they can be surprisingly expressive. Context Free Grammars allow you to generate things that have the basic structure of xml, json and source code. And you can have Turing Equivalent grammars that, in describing a subset, can compute anything. Of course, grammars aren't restricted to the Chomsky Hierarchy, but can include any way of describing the subset of streams (or generating an instance of them) - for example, the recent HN travesty/markov generators. You can search for the right grammar (machine learning), by taking a corpus of instances of what you want to generate, and test out your grammar, by seeing how well it compresses them. This shows whether it is capturing regularities within them and between them - the rules or laws that are the essence of a grammar. In doing this, you should also take into account the size of the grammar itself: consider the extremes of one grammar that factors out deep regularities; versus one that is simply a choice between each instance, verbatim (this compresses real well: it just needs to encode which instance. i.e. log2(1/N) bits, e.g. 8 bits to encode which of 256 different instances, assuming uniform probability). Accounting for the complexity of the grammar avoids this. This comes down to the length of the description of the instances + the length of the description of the grammar. ( "Model" is probably a better term than "grammar", since it doesn't imply a sequence. ) Re: your last point, there's no theoretical reason that an extremely accurate model must be computationally expensive to execute (e.g. flocking behaviour was simpler than expected; and Occam's Razor gives us hope) - but it might well be computationally expensive to discover in the first place. e.g. require many great leaps of intuition by humans. (Even if it's obvious in hindsight.) The trailer looks a little repetitive to me - esp the yellow underwater plants; and the trees seem to be random blocks of foliage - like minecraft trees or github icons, just rendered nicer. I don't want to criticize, as they probably have some cool innovations hidden away in there. What I'd like is gameplay-significant procedural generation. e.g. trees you can climb, so their shape affects where you can reach and how. Terrain - mountains, streams - naturally has this effect. Then, developers have to make it work right! So far, only the minecraft/dwarf fortress genres do this. Because generation is fundamental to their concept, their gameplay, and why people like the games, I suspect that that genre is where we'll eventually get the hi-res breakthroughs - whereas for every other genre, including "No Man's Sky", if their gameplay isn't 100% dependent on generation, whenever there's a conflict between the two, generation will lose (crunch time! what must be finished to ship?). Servant of two masters etc. FWIW I still think FarCry2 (not 3) creates the most immersive world so far. Hopefully something even better will be done for nextgen consoles/PCs, as opposed to just higher resolution and higher gamification.

dscrd 13y ago

Ever played rogue, nethack or dwarf fortress?

barbs 13y ago

> We've heard this same claim so many times before. Could you please list some examples?

mikeash 13y ago

Never turn out to be decent games? Some of the most beloved and respected games in history (e.g. Elite) are done this way.

fidotron 13y ago

Nonsense. This lot being Brits of the right age it blatantly follows from the tradition of Elite and Exile, two old 8-bit titles where everything was procedurally generated in order to fit into the machines of the era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_(1988_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_(1988_video_game)

louthy 13y ago
Everybody knows Elite, so I won't say much about that. But Exile really was a spectacular game for the time. Actually, I didn't realise it was procedurally generated - which probably explains why I spent many hours as a teen trying to work out how on earth they made it all fit in ~20k of RAM.
- louthy 13y ago
  Super impressive disassembly of Exile from the wikipedia page: http://www.level7.org.uk/miscellany/exile-disassembly.txt http://www.level7.org.uk/miscellany/exile-disassembly.txt

fzltrp 13y ago

I don't think that the word atom here refer to the usual physical object (which shouldn't be called that way btw), but rather to indivisible objects (ie. the original meaning of atom) in the game data model, iow every actors (passive or active).

deelowe 13y ago

Minecraft, terraria, and starbound seem to contradict your point.