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The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y. Lots of breadth, little depth. When you have a set number of variab

The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y. Lots of breadth, little depth. When you have a set number of variable sliders, you don't have to see all the possible worlds to get a sense of how many sliders there are and what their ranges are. The problem only gets worse when moving away from planet/landscape generation (dumb matter) and getting into simulations of history or society. I'd be really interested in learning about any work in the "interestingness" of procedural content. Is it possible to quantify that sort of emergent complexity that happens in life, or in a work or story with artistic direction that takes on a life of its own? Can a system make a billion compelling and unique stories without solving the issue of Strong AI and just making a superintelligent DM?

gavanwoolery 12y ago
Even though I am an advocate of procedural generation, I concur that this is a problem with procedural generation. Even though one algorithm can create millions of permutations, they are all based on the same algorithm (for example, you can vary the size and distance of Worley noise in many ways, but in the end it looks like variations on the same type of noise). For each really new thing you want to produce, you basically have to create a new algorithm to produce it. You can often combine algorithms (say, combining simplex noise with worley noise to produce rocky terrain), but there are only so many interesting ways you can do this, and so many ways you can do it that won't break your game. You can't go wild adjusting the parameters, because 99 percent of the results will look like junk, so you often have to restrict yourself to meaningful subsets of the parameters. Really, it gets pretty close to manual generation at some point, because there is so much human input. Even if you were creating creatures, simply varying the amount of limbs would only produce so many interesting results. Then you have to code separate algorithms to generate eyes, horns, claws, skins, fur, etc -- and then make sure that every generated permutation looks ok. Edit: to add an additional distinction, I am referring to the generation of visual content here. You can do much more in an emergent (AI-driven, state-based, or chaotic) system and produce surprising results, although you still fall into the dilemma of making sure that all resulting permutations look/function correctly.
- filearts 12y ago
  If the procedural system were only used as inputs for the initial state and the world were based on a chaotic model then the the starting game state (after some iterations of the world model) could be wildly different for very similar sets of input states. As you mention, the challenge then becomes to define this sort of chaotic system in such a way that the resulting worlds are not 'nonsense'. Nonsense states could be culled using some fitness functions... sounds like fun :-)
  - gavanwoolery 12y ago
    Yes, in my mind there are at least two levels of procedural generation: 1) Generating the layout of the world, placement of entities, and other world states (such as available quests or plot devices). 2) The generation of the actual content itself (NPCs, items, terrain, flora, fauna, etc). Here, I'm mostly referring to the second type. :) As far as the first type, there is a LOT more you can do with chaotic systems because they are often AI-driven, and AI-driven things can (potentially) have emergent results (although even an AI-less system, like Conway's game of life, can produce many interesting results).
- jmpeax 12y ago
  > Even if you were creating creatures, simply varying the amount of limbs would only produce so many interesting results. That's exactly what I was thinking when I saw the gazelles, the diplodocus, and that oversized rhinoceros plowing through the purple forest. This is meant to be a one of infinite worlds to explore, and it's just Earth with a few tweaks.
flatline 12y ago
I'd be interested as well in any recent academic research in this. The best I've seen in the wild is Dwarf Fortress, which focuses on building interesting terrain, a rich global history, and interesting local power structures and NPC behavior. I think the ultimate vision for the game is pretty ambitious, and it is slowly getting there, step by step, over the course of years.
gabemart 12y ago
> The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y Yes. It's easy for a developer to say "trillions of possible combinations" or "every x is unique with a high degree of certainty" but those statements mean very little without seeing the end product. Creating vast numbers of combinations is completely trivial. E.g. http://jsfiddle.net/JpZ7s/3/ http://jsfiddle.net/JpZ7s/3/ which has ~10 million possible combinations but most are garbage and they're all very samey. > I'd be really interested in learning about any work in the "interestingness" of procedural content. Given that selecting "interesting" content from a pool of procedurally generated content is essentially a curation problem, I imagine any such method might also be applied to select potentially interesting content from a pool of human-generated content. As publishing in all media grows easier and easier, curation is going to increase in importance and difficulty.
- teamonkey 12y ago
  The No Man's Sky approach to curation is interesting. Bots that roam around and create animated gifs of the universe so the developers can get an at-a-glance cross-section of the universe.
mjn 12y ago
That's often a problem with what's sometimes called "constructive" PCG, i.e. manually writing an algorithm that generates variations of content. It's somewhat hard to craft an algorithm that produces a ton of variations that don't look trivially like variations, at least without a lot of careful tweaking. > I'd be really interested in learning about any work in the "interestingness" of procedural content. Some of the AI research on PCG goes in that direction. Instead of writing a constructive algorithm, you instead try to specify what content you want in some formal way, and then use a solver to generate content meeting the description (a genetic algorithm, constraint solver, etc.). I.e. start from the goal rather than from the algorithm. It is still difficult to quantify "interesting content" though! Instead it usually needs to be something more specific, like "a level with the following properties: A, B, C". As a shameless plug, two colleagues and I are working on a book that surveys the current research: http://www.pcgbook.com http://www.pcgbook.com
- gavanwoolery 12y ago
  > Instead of writing a constructive algorithm, you instead try to specify what content you want in some formal way, and then use a solver to generate content meeting the description (a genetic algorithm, constraint solver, etc.) This is basically the difference between imperative programming and logical programming. Each has advantageous domains (basically which ever way is easier to implement).
VonGuard 12y ago
Dwarf Fortress. Read about it. Play it. Marvel at it. http://www.bay12games.com http://www.bay12games.com There is nothing same-y about a game where you can't hit a bogeyman with a hammer because he's too fast, but you can kick his ass with cranberry leaves because they're lighter and let you hit faster. Or, how about the elephants roosting in trees? Or the vampirism that can take over a fortress? Of the possible were-versions of most creatures, with infections, meaning were-swallows, were-frogs, and plague-like invasions of were-spiders? Dwarf Fortress is built to generate stories, not just monsters and treasure. Every dwarf has likes and dislikes, friendships, pets, belongings, all driven by a fairly simple AI that just takes these preferences into account when deciding whether or not the dwarf is drunk enough to actually do some work, or whether it's so depressed it wants to sit in its room and cry.
- SixSigma 12y ago
  And if you haven't yet, you should read Roomcarnage Start at Chapter I and don't spoil it, it isn't yet fully played out and the community anticipates the next installment http://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/2b6up6/roomcarnage_of_rats_and_dwarves/cj2ct3m http://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/2b6up6/roomca...
- presidentender 12y ago
  I love Dwarf Fortress, and there are some real treasures in the legends of many worlds. But even with all the possibilities, things still get redundant. Yes, the elephants have taken to their emergent treenests, and that's beautiful. But that's a single bug (feature) that makes us say 'wow' once, after which we've seen it. The possibilities of were-spiders and were-alpacas and reanimated spleens and rains of dwarf blood are just more evidence of those sliders he mentioned. Urist likes tigermen for their stripes, and you can care about it, but Tosid likes cows for their mooing and Tovist prefers to consume purring maggot cheese and at a certain point we've seen it all. That doesn't mean that Dwarf Fortress is flawed. It's easily the most involved story generator out there, and I'm really glad to live at a time when I get to read about it. But it's still not immune to the issues that the grandparent post raised.
  - 12y ago
swayvil 12y ago
Also there is an absence of beauty in the generative/algorithmic-art scene. Much neato, interesting and colorful - which equates to weak. It's HARD to make beauty happen algorithmically. Nigh impossible. Frankenstein hard. Also, the intersection between people who code and people who possess a sharp aesthetic sense is minescule.
- gavanwoolery 12y ago
  I'd agree that a lot of coders lack a good sense for design and art (hence the term "programmer art" :D). I'm not a great programmer or artist, but I'm a competent programmer and an "average" artist (at best). This is only because I put so much time into learning art as a kid, and then later doing a lot of design work (mostly related to web design). Additionally I began 3D modeling when I was 13 and most games were still 2D. Anyhow, I think that learning at least a little of both goes a long way in terms of the resulting abilities. Nonetheless, many of the old demo-scene pieces, which are entirely algorithmic, are occasionally beautiful, I'd argue. (A lot of the newer demos just look like music visualizers though...for dubstep songs :/ )
  - swayvil 12y ago
    Ya, I dig alot of that demo scene stuff too. I sniff a natural beauty there somewhere. A natural beauty, a smart shape game, or something. It's what I'm trying to get at with my own work (http://fleen.org http://fleen.org). Sorta got a handle. Frankly done with the whole subject presently.
    - gavanwoolery 12y ago
      Wow, that is some impressive tessellation :)
lmkg 12y ago
A totally different type of procedurally-generated content: The physical card game, Dominion. It is a deck-building game, where players play cards to generate cash to buy cards that go into the deck that they are playing out of (which cycles endlessly). There are 6 boring and fundamental cards that are present in every game, and 10 'kingdom' cards which do interesting and clever things. The 10 kingdom cards that are present in any given game are randomly selected from a set of 25 (around 170 in the expansions), without constraint. The variations are extreme. Some games have fast drawing and high power curves, some are slow slogs. Some games progress linearly, others build slowly and then explode, and some have stair-shaped power curves because there just aren't any cards at certain price-points. Some games have ways of attack other players. Some games have alternate victory conditions. Some games have multiple paths to victory, other are won by fine-grained control over normally-minor details. In short, the variation is immense and novel experiences have continued, even years after I first started playing. Can we extrapolate from this? I think so. The two conclusions I would draw are: qualitative variation, and combinatorial traits. Differences in game worlds that are the most interesting may not fit into a slider, and binary or enumerated traits should be considered. Also, the interaction between random variables is what allows for a combinatorial explosion of situations. Stemming from that, it must be the case that multiple variables are meaningful.
- newobj 12y ago
  I wouldn't say that's procedural content, I would say that it's emergent, or even less impressively, combinatorial. I would probably call it emergent, in that the designers likely could not test the entire state space of all strategies. What's impressive, in light of that, is that the game ends up balanced, or at least not fundamentally broken. To your point though, is that the "content" (cards) introduces mechanics. Most procedural gameplay content doesn't necessarily introduce mechanics. That's why it's easy to feel "boring".
  - aetherson 12y ago
    Dominion is balanced largely through the fact that it's symmetrical. No matter how good or bad the kingdom cards, both players are interacting with them in the same way, so, barring things like writing cards that give additional advantage to the first player, it's hard to unbalance it. If you played "a game like Dominion, except each player had their own independent set of Kingdom cards," it would be big-time not balanced. Like, kingdom sets aren't balanced against each other. Or perhaps you meant that it's balanced like "a given card tends to be about as good as a given other card." But that's just... not very true. In any Kingdom, there are typically a few must-buys and a few must-not-buys, and there are cards that are almost never good buys and cards that are almost always good buys. Source: played a few thousand games of Dominion on isotropic back when that was a thing. Disclaimer: Haven't played Dominion since Hinterlands, so this may not still be accurate.
cf 12y ago
I think of lot of the solution to this problem is going to be make the random creation conditioned on user-provided examples of interesting content. You already see a lot of this happening in the most recent SIGGRAPH papers, such as http://people.cs.umass.edu/~kalo/papers/ShapeSynthesis/ http://people.cs.umass.edu/~kalo/papers/ShapeSynthesis/
stonewhite 12y ago
The article mentions of evolution of creatures, which probably involves genetic algorithms. I suspect if you would procedurally generate planets and move the clock forward with genetic algorithms a few million years, both landscape and life would look pretty natural. But since even our best RNG algorithms eventually converge, the resulting systems would start converging as well. So the issue of same-yness is an inherent issue of CS.
millstone 12y ago
There's a possibility for hybrid approaches, where interesting content is generated procedurally from a corpus of real-world content. For example, lichess generates chess puzzles by [procedurally analyzing real-world games](http://en.lichess.org/blog/U4sjakQAAEAAhH9d/how-training-puzzles-are-generated http://en.lichess.org/blog/U4sjakQAAEAAhH9d/how-training-puz...). Imagine a tactical warfare game that drew from actual military upsets. I think this would avoid the same-yness problem.
lifeformed 12y ago
I've been working on combating this problem for a few years now. I'm working on a game called Spire (http://hitboxteam.tumblr.com/ http://hitboxteam.tumblr.com/), which is a mix of Quake and Roguelikes. Every procedural dungeon creator I've seen so far seems to just use pre-made rooms or chunks of rooms, and shuffles them around. It never feels like you're in a new world each time, it just feels like you're in the same world jumbled up. For the past few years, I've been working on an alternate system, which is to use a goal-oriented design based around the player experience. Each element in the world is placed purposefully, instead of randomly. I do this by emulating the traditional level design process. I think about every action and intention that goes in creating a level manually, and reduce it to rules for my system. The goal is that the end result feels crafted to guide the player through an experience, rather than to rely on the player to create a experience for themselves. Examples of the generation behavior: - Lights are placed in areas to guide the players attention towards the primary path, or treasures and dangers. - Geometric features are generated based on spatial aesthetic rules (eg. a pleasing amount of symmetry and repetition), as well as gameplay rules (eg. jump distances based on player capabilities, corridor widths based on desired feeling of claustrophobia and combat difficulty). - Unique color palette for each seed. - Parameters of room construction have emotional analogues (high density -> claustrophobia; harsh angles -> tension; high symmetry -> order; sweeping vistas -> a moment to take a break; gradually lowering elevation -> an unsettling descent). - The curve of emotional parameters over time have varying mathematical relationships to other parameters' curves, so every seed feels like there is a unique consistency to it.
- taurath 12y ago
  The "emotional analogues" sound actually very interesting. I wonder how well that will hold up in practice - it seems like if it were possible to generate a compelling story from variables we'd be able to do it by now - we would be able to consistently put out compelling stories in book form at the very least. Its frequently not the structure or even the overall plot that's the point, but the little details that matter. I've heard it said of movies that the point is not what happens, but how it happens (probably a paraphrase of Roger Ebert). It feels like we're a very long way off from having any machine generate that.
mathgenius 12y ago
This guy makes PCG art: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathanmccabe https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathanmccabe http://vimeo.com/jonathanmccabe/ http://vimeo.com/jonathanmccabe/ He does interesting things with fitness functions that try to vary the entropy across different regions.
moron4hire 12y ago
Are there "a billion compelling and unique stories" to be told? Perhaps the reason procedural content falls down is because it's so much easier to exhaustively explore than real life. In other words, the novelty of real-world stories is an illusion borne from ignorance/inexperience.
otikik 12y ago
> The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y Unless you are Dwarf Fortress.
hyp0 12y ago
idea: random constraints A grammar that generates every possible squence of symbols is boring. What makes it interesting is contraints, that only some subset of all possibilities is generatable. Even the Chomsky hierarchy relates to characterists of the subset defined. So, you don't need more elements, but more constraints. e.g. a novel is a sequence of a small number of symbols... This would make each section of a game have a certain style or character. For gameplay elements, figuring out the constraint could be part of the puzzle. Generating interesting constraints then would be the difficulty...
namlem 12y ago
This is true, but I don't think it's a huge obstacle for this game or others like it. Sure, it'll get boring after a while, but what game doesn't? It will likely remain interesting enough to enable dozens of hours of play, if not hundreds, which is more than anyone could ask. Minecraft and Starbound are both procedurally generated, and I got lots of enjoyment out of both before eventually getting bored.
tripzilch 12y ago
A long time ago (so forgive me if I can't provide the reference), I read a paper about exploring a parameter space with a focus on "novelty". The basic idea was that there were two different machine learning algorithms competing against each other. One was searching for configurations in the parameter space (I forget what type of learning algorithm the first one was), and the other was an unsupervised learning algorithm (a Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM), IIRC) which tried to model/predict the output of the model with the parameters chosen by the first one. So there was a parameter space being explored by some search/learning algorithm. These parameters, when fed into a model (I forget what kind, I think it was a procedural graphics formulas of some kind) produce an output image. This image (not the parameters) is then fed into the SOM (which is doing online learning, so it's training and classifying at the same time), which slowly adapts to what sorts of images it sees, creating a sort of internal model. The parameter-configurations found by the first algorithm were then scored against how well the SOM could fit/represent the output image of those parameters (IIRC, in the SOM algorithm you can calculate a score for how well it's doing). So if the first algorithm would find something novel, something unexpected, the SOM would have more trouble fitting that output with its internal model. From what I remember, it worked relatively well. The output images definitely had more "variety" in them than purely randomly chosen parameter values. I'm not at all sure how to apply these ideas to planet/ecosystem-generation, though. Apologies for the super-vague description, but it must have been at least 10 years since I read that paper :) -- BTW another completely different approach to this problem might be found by using constraint solvers. Check out this site: http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/2013/06/the-saturday-paper-goldilocks-and-the-three-puzzles/ http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/2013/06/the-saturday-paper-go... (if you're interested in procedural content generation, there's a lot of cool articles there, bringing together scientific research and game development). I'm not entirely sure why, but from most examples I've seen, generally when you add constraints to a random generator, it tends to produce more variety. Variety is really all about restricting the randomness, anyway. White noise all looks the same, but it's the most random from an entropy point-of-view.

gavanwoolery 12y ago

Even though I am an advocate of procedural generation, I concur that this is a problem with procedural generation. Even though one algorithm can create millions of permutations, they are all based on the same algorithm (for example, you can vary the size and distance of Worley noise in many ways, but in the end it looks like variations on the same type of noise). For each really new thing you want to produce, you basically have to create a new algorithm to produce it. You can often combine algorithms (say, combining simplex noise with worley noise to produce rocky terrain), but there are only so many interesting ways you can do this, and so many ways you can do it that won't break your game. You can't go wild adjusting the parameters, because 99 percent of the results will look like junk, so you often have to restrict yourself to meaningful subsets of the parameters. Really, it gets pretty close to manual generation at some point, because there is so much human input. Even if you were creating creatures, simply varying the amount of limbs would only produce so many interesting results. Then you have to code separate algorithms to generate eyes, horns, claws, skins, fur, etc -- and then make sure that every generated permutation looks ok. Edit: to add an additional distinction, I am referring to the generation of visual content here. You can do much more in an emergent (AI-driven, state-based, or chaotic) system and produce surprising results, although you still fall into the dilemma of making sure that all resulting permutations look/function correctly.

filearts 12y ago
If the procedural system were only used as inputs for the initial state and the world were based on a chaotic model then the the starting game state (after some iterations of the world model) could be wildly different for very similar sets of input states. As you mention, the challenge then becomes to define this sort of chaotic system in such a way that the resulting worlds are not 'nonsense'. Nonsense states could be culled using some fitness functions... sounds like fun :-)
- gavanwoolery 12y ago
  Yes, in my mind there are at least two levels of procedural generation: 1) Generating the layout of the world, placement of entities, and other world states (such as available quests or plot devices). 2) The generation of the actual content itself (NPCs, items, terrain, flora, fauna, etc). Here, I'm mostly referring to the second type. :) As far as the first type, there is a LOT more you can do with chaotic systems because they are often AI-driven, and AI-driven things can (potentially) have emergent results (although even an AI-less system, like Conway's game of life, can produce many interesting results).
jmpeax 12y ago
> Even if you were creating creatures, simply varying the amount of limbs would only produce so many interesting results. That's exactly what I was thinking when I saw the gazelles, the diplodocus, and that oversized rhinoceros plowing through the purple forest. This is meant to be a one of infinite worlds to explore, and it's just Earth with a few tweaks.

flatline 12y ago

I'd be interested as well in any recent academic research in this. The best I've seen in the wild is Dwarf Fortress, which focuses on building interesting terrain, a rich global history, and interesting local power structures and NPC behavior. I think the ultimate vision for the game is pretty ambitious, and it is slowly getting there, step by step, over the course of years.

gabemart 12y ago

> The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y Yes. It's easy for a developer to say "trillions of possible combinations" or "every x is unique with a high degree of certainty" but those statements mean very little without seeing the end product. Creating vast numbers of combinations is completely trivial. E.g. http://jsfiddle.net/JpZ7s/3/ http://jsfiddle.net/JpZ7s/3/ which has ~10 million possible combinations but most are garbage and they're all very samey. > I'd be really interested in learning about any work in the "interestingness" of procedural content. Given that selecting "interesting" content from a pool of procedurally generated content is essentially a curation problem, I imagine any such method might also be applied to select potentially interesting content from a pool of human-generated content. As publishing in all media grows easier and easier, curation is going to increase in importance and difficulty.

teamonkey 12y ago
The No Man's Sky approach to curation is interesting. Bots that roam around and create animated gifs of the universe so the developers can get an at-a-glance cross-section of the universe.

mjn 12y ago

That's often a problem with what's sometimes called "constructive" PCG, i.e. manually writing an algorithm that generates variations of content. It's somewhat hard to craft an algorithm that produces a ton of variations that don't look trivially like variations, at least without a lot of careful tweaking. > I'd be really interested in learning about any work in the "interestingness" of procedural content. Some of the AI research on PCG goes in that direction. Instead of writing a constructive algorithm, you instead try to specify what content you want in some formal way, and then use a solver to generate content meeting the description (a genetic algorithm, constraint solver, etc.). I.e. start from the goal rather than from the algorithm. It is still difficult to quantify "interesting content" though! Instead it usually needs to be something more specific, like "a level with the following properties: A, B, C". As a shameless plug, two colleagues and I are working on a book that surveys the current research: http://www.pcgbook.com http://www.pcgbook.com

gavanwoolery 12y ago
> Instead of writing a constructive algorithm, you instead try to specify what content you want in some formal way, and then use a solver to generate content meeting the description (a genetic algorithm, constraint solver, etc.) This is basically the difference between imperative programming and logical programming. Each has advantageous domains (basically which ever way is easier to implement).

VonGuard 12y ago

Dwarf Fortress. Read about it. Play it. Marvel at it. http://www.bay12games.com http://www.bay12games.com There is nothing same-y about a game where you can't hit a bogeyman with a hammer because he's too fast, but you can kick his ass with cranberry leaves because they're lighter and let you hit faster. Or, how about the elephants roosting in trees? Or the vampirism that can take over a fortress? Of the possible were-versions of most creatures, with infections, meaning were-swallows, were-frogs, and plague-like invasions of were-spiders? Dwarf Fortress is built to generate stories, not just monsters and treasure. Every dwarf has likes and dislikes, friendships, pets, belongings, all driven by a fairly simple AI that just takes these preferences into account when deciding whether or not the dwarf is drunk enough to actually do some work, or whether it's so depressed it wants to sit in its room and cry.

SixSigma 12y ago
And if you haven't yet, you should read Roomcarnage Start at Chapter I and don't spoil it, it isn't yet fully played out and the community anticipates the next installment http://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/2b6up6/roomcarnage_of_rats_and_dwarves/cj2ct3m http://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/2b6up6/roomca...
presidentender 12y ago
I love Dwarf Fortress, and there are some real treasures in the legends of many worlds. But even with all the possibilities, things still get redundant. Yes, the elephants have taken to their emergent treenests, and that's beautiful. But that's a single bug (feature) that makes us say 'wow' once, after which we've seen it. The possibilities of were-spiders and were-alpacas and reanimated spleens and rains of dwarf blood are just more evidence of those sliders he mentioned. Urist likes tigermen for their stripes, and you can care about it, but Tosid likes cows for their mooing and Tovist prefers to consume purring maggot cheese and at a certain point we've seen it all. That doesn't mean that Dwarf Fortress is flawed. It's easily the most involved story generator out there, and I'm really glad to live at a time when I get to read about it. But it's still not immune to the issues that the grandparent post raised.
- 12y ago

swayvil 12y ago

Also there is an absence of beauty in the generative/algorithmic-art scene. Much neato, interesting and colorful - which equates to weak. It's HARD to make beauty happen algorithmically. Nigh impossible. Frankenstein hard. Also, the intersection between people who code and people who possess a sharp aesthetic sense is minescule.

gavanwoolery 12y ago
I'd agree that a lot of coders lack a good sense for design and art (hence the term "programmer art" :D). I'm not a great programmer or artist, but I'm a competent programmer and an "average" artist (at best). This is only because I put so much time into learning art as a kid, and then later doing a lot of design work (mostly related to web design). Additionally I began 3D modeling when I was 13 and most games were still 2D. Anyhow, I think that learning at least a little of both goes a long way in terms of the resulting abilities. Nonetheless, many of the old demo-scene pieces, which are entirely algorithmic, are occasionally beautiful, I'd argue. (A lot of the newer demos just look like music visualizers though...for dubstep songs :/ )
- swayvil 12y ago
  Ya, I dig alot of that demo scene stuff too. I sniff a natural beauty there somewhere. A natural beauty, a smart shape game, or something. It's what I'm trying to get at with my own work (http://fleen.org http://fleen.org). Sorta got a handle. Frankly done with the whole subject presently.
  - gavanwoolery 12y ago
    Wow, that is some impressive tessellation :)

lmkg 12y ago

A totally different type of procedurally-generated content: The physical card game, Dominion. It is a deck-building game, where players play cards to generate cash to buy cards that go into the deck that they are playing out of (which cycles endlessly). There are 6 boring and fundamental cards that are present in every game, and 10 'kingdom' cards which do interesting and clever things. The 10 kingdom cards that are present in any given game are randomly selected from a set of 25 (around 170 in the expansions), without constraint. The variations are extreme. Some games have fast drawing and high power curves, some are slow slogs. Some games progress linearly, others build slowly and then explode, and some have stair-shaped power curves because there just aren't any cards at certain price-points. Some games have ways of attack other players. Some games have alternate victory conditions. Some games have multiple paths to victory, other are won by fine-grained control over normally-minor details. In short, the variation is immense and novel experiences have continued, even years after I first started playing. Can we extrapolate from this? I think so. The two conclusions I would draw are: qualitative variation, and combinatorial traits. Differences in game worlds that are the most interesting may not fit into a slider, and binary or enumerated traits should be considered. Also, the interaction between random variables is what allows for a combinatorial explosion of situations. Stemming from that, it must be the case that multiple variables are meaningful.

newobj 12y ago
I wouldn't say that's procedural content, I would say that it's emergent, or even less impressively, combinatorial. I would probably call it emergent, in that the designers likely could not test the entire state space of all strategies. What's impressive, in light of that, is that the game ends up balanced, or at least not fundamentally broken. To your point though, is that the "content" (cards) introduces mechanics. Most procedural gameplay content doesn't necessarily introduce mechanics. That's why it's easy to feel "boring".
- aetherson 12y ago
  Dominion is balanced largely through the fact that it's symmetrical. No matter how good or bad the kingdom cards, both players are interacting with them in the same way, so, barring things like writing cards that give additional advantage to the first player, it's hard to unbalance it. If you played "a game like Dominion, except each player had their own independent set of Kingdom cards," it would be big-time not balanced. Like, kingdom sets aren't balanced against each other. Or perhaps you meant that it's balanced like "a given card tends to be about as good as a given other card." But that's just... not very true. In any Kingdom, there are typically a few must-buys and a few must-not-buys, and there are cards that are almost never good buys and cards that are almost always good buys. Source: played a few thousand games of Dominion on isotropic back when that was a thing. Disclaimer: Haven't played Dominion since Hinterlands, so this may not still be accurate.

cf 12y ago

I think of lot of the solution to this problem is going to be make the random creation conditioned on user-provided examples of interesting content. You already see a lot of this happening in the most recent SIGGRAPH papers, such as http://people.cs.umass.edu/~kalo/papers/ShapeSynthesis/ http://people.cs.umass.edu/~kalo/papers/ShapeSynthesis/

stonewhite 12y ago

The article mentions of evolution of creatures, which probably involves genetic algorithms. I suspect if you would procedurally generate planets and move the clock forward with genetic algorithms a few million years, both landscape and life would look pretty natural. But since even our best RNG algorithms eventually converge, the resulting systems would start converging as well. So the issue of same-yness is an inherent issue of CS.

millstone 12y ago

There's a possibility for hybrid approaches, where interesting content is generated procedurally from a corpus of real-world content. For example, lichess generates chess puzzles by [procedurally analyzing real-world games](http://en.lichess.org/blog/U4sjakQAAEAAhH9d/how-training-puzzles-are-generated http://en.lichess.org/blog/U4sjakQAAEAAhH9d/how-training-puz...). Imagine a tactical warfare game that drew from actual military upsets. I think this would avoid the same-yness problem.

lifeformed 12y ago

I've been working on combating this problem for a few years now. I'm working on a game called Spire (http://hitboxteam.tumblr.com/ http://hitboxteam.tumblr.com/), which is a mix of Quake and Roguelikes. Every procedural dungeon creator I've seen so far seems to just use pre-made rooms or chunks of rooms, and shuffles them around. It never feels like you're in a new world each time, it just feels like you're in the same world jumbled up. For the past few years, I've been working on an alternate system, which is to use a goal-oriented design based around the player experience. Each element in the world is placed purposefully, instead of randomly. I do this by emulating the traditional level design process. I think about every action and intention that goes in creating a level manually, and reduce it to rules for my system. The goal is that the end result feels crafted to guide the player through an experience, rather than to rely on the player to create a experience for themselves. Examples of the generation behavior: - Lights are placed in areas to guide the players attention towards the primary path, or treasures and dangers. - Geometric features are generated based on spatial aesthetic rules (eg. a pleasing amount of symmetry and repetition), as well as gameplay rules (eg. jump distances based on player capabilities, corridor widths based on desired feeling of claustrophobia and combat difficulty). - Unique color palette for each seed. - Parameters of room construction have emotional analogues (high density -> claustrophobia; harsh angles -> tension; high symmetry -> order; sweeping vistas -> a moment to take a break; gradually lowering elevation -> an unsettling descent). - The curve of emotional parameters over time have varying mathematical relationships to other parameters' curves, so every seed feels like there is a unique consistency to it.

taurath 12y ago
The "emotional analogues" sound actually very interesting. I wonder how well that will hold up in practice - it seems like if it were possible to generate a compelling story from variables we'd be able to do it by now - we would be able to consistently put out compelling stories in book form at the very least. Its frequently not the structure or even the overall plot that's the point, but the little details that matter. I've heard it said of movies that the point is not what happens, but how it happens (probably a paraphrase of Roger Ebert). It feels like we're a very long way off from having any machine generate that.

mathgenius 12y ago

This guy makes PCG art: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathanmccabe https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathanmccabe http://vimeo.com/jonathanmccabe/ http://vimeo.com/jonathanmccabe/ He does interesting things with fitness functions that try to vary the entropy across different regions.

moron4hire 12y ago

Are there "a billion compelling and unique stories" to be told? Perhaps the reason procedural content falls down is because it's so much easier to exhaustively explore than real life. In other words, the novelty of real-world stories is an illusion borne from ignorance/inexperience.

otikik 12y ago

> The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y Unless you are Dwarf Fortress.

hyp0 12y ago

idea: random constraints A grammar that generates every possible squence of symbols is boring. What makes it interesting is contraints, that only some subset of all possibilities is generatable. Even the Chomsky hierarchy relates to characterists of the subset defined. So, you don't need more elements, but more constraints. e.g. a novel is a sequence of a small number of symbols... This would make each section of a game have a certain style or character. For gameplay elements, figuring out the constraint could be part of the puzzle. Generating interesting constraints then would be the difficulty...

namlem 12y ago

This is true, but I don't think it's a huge obstacle for this game or others like it. Sure, it'll get boring after a while, but what game doesn't? It will likely remain interesting enough to enable dozens of hours of play, if not hundreds, which is more than anyone could ask. Minecraft and Starbound are both procedurally generated, and I got lots of enjoyment out of both before eventually getting bored.

tripzilch 12y ago

A long time ago (so forgive me if I can't provide the reference), I read a paper about exploring a parameter space with a focus on "novelty". The basic idea was that there were two different machine learning algorithms competing against each other. One was searching for configurations in the parameter space (I forget what type of learning algorithm the first one was), and the other was an unsupervised learning algorithm (a Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM), IIRC) which tried to model/predict the output of the model with the parameters chosen by the first one. So there was a parameter space being explored by some search/learning algorithm. These parameters, when fed into a model (I forget what kind, I think it was a procedural graphics formulas of some kind) produce an output image. This image (not the parameters) is then fed into the SOM (which is doing online learning, so it's training and classifying at the same time), which slowly adapts to what sorts of images it sees, creating a sort of internal model. The parameter-configurations found by the first algorithm were then scored against how well the SOM could fit/represent the output image of those parameters (IIRC, in the SOM algorithm you can calculate a score for how well it's doing). So if the first algorithm would find something novel, something unexpected, the SOM would have more trouble fitting that output with its internal model. From what I remember, it worked relatively well. The output images definitely had more "variety" in them than purely randomly chosen parameter values. I'm not at all sure how to apply these ideas to planet/ecosystem-generation, though. Apologies for the super-vague description, but it must have been at least 10 years since I read that paper :) -- BTW another completely different approach to this problem might be found by using constraint solvers. Check out this site: http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/2013/06/the-saturday-paper-goldilocks-and-the-three-puzzles/ http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/2013/06/the-saturday-paper-go... (if you're interested in procedural content generation, there's a lot of cool articles there, bringing together scientific research and game development). I'm not entirely sure why, but from most examples I've seen, generally when you add constraints to a random generator, it tends to produce more variety. Variety is really all about restricting the randomness, anyway. White noise all looks the same, but it's the most random from an entropy point-of-view.