Developer experiences from the trenches
Thu 01 December 2011 by Michael Labbe
Some wisdom on procedural content generation.
- Don’t build a procedural content gameplay generator until you have
built two fully realized gameplay segments yourself. If you don’t
know what “it” is, don’t waste resources by investing in automation
of “it”.
- Building a PCG because you have insufficient level design time to
populate a universe is not the same as building a PCG because you
want users to have access to unlimited content. The former justifies
an offline PCG and the latter argues for an online one. The offline
one can take bigger technical risks, incorporate more processing
time and output the level for a level designer to further tweak.
Know why you need a PCG before coding one up.
- 3D PCG is largely unexplored outside of terrain heightmaps. When I
wrote a random indoor level generator for Doom 3 years ago
(unreleased), filling the room space with prefabs took an hour of
CPU time even though my implementation was in good, clean, common
sense C++ running on a reasonable processor from the middle of the decade.
| These videos are some of my favorite “outer space” PCG generators. I
really like the zoom out on the third video down. (Fast forward to about
halfway through.) |
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=17&Itemid=93
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