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Orzo posted:I'm not missing the point. I conceded in my original post that I'm probably just showing my age. I understand that people like games like that, it's just that I don't. I also understand that it enables entirely new genres and gameplay elements to exist, but I end up disliking those most of the time. So it's not so unreasonable to think we could have an AI make a game that's fun for some people, and that's also the best a human can do. I'm sure we could have an AI at least design gameplay elements for modern games, since about half of modern games' gameplay essentially boils down to "push button to continue movie". (Got a bug in my rear end about this right now because I just saw an ad for a game that looked beautiful but loving terrible.)
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Mar 14, 2012 17:33
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How about we settle this in a Game Jam? I propose the following topic: Make a game which either demonstrates the benefits of procedural content or exposes the failures of procedural content. We won't come to an answer, but I'll bet we'll all come away with some useful insights and concrete points of discussion.
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Mar 14, 2012 18:13
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I'm not sure there's anything to settle. Orzo just expressed a personal preference for hand-developed content, and most of us (myself included) jumped to the defense of procedural. In part, this is because we've all used it or seen it used to some important extent... but this also more or less proves his point, of procedural development having a strong emotional component. We wouldn't be white knighting it like that if we didn't think it was pretty individually cool.
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Mar 14, 2012 18:20
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That article on Super Metroid's world design does show some general themes and rules that should be considered in procedural generation. I think what Orzo is lamenting is when world generation fails to show good game design. I suppose we could look at Nethack, which takes a lot of time to understand all the crazy crap that goes on. Or even Dwarf Fortress, which pretty much just throws you right into it. That feeling of freedom is great, although you could make a game easier to learn, and more popular, by designing in invisible hands for guidance. The hands would have to be pretty well invisible though; not some ham-fisted rails to work against, but something where a new player can stumble and bumble but still end up learning how the game generally works in most of its facets right away. If you're personal choice is to have advanced players skip all that, then the generator should give them that option.
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Mar 14, 2012 18:37
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Shalinor posted:I'm not sure there's anything to settle. Orzo just expressed a personal preference for hand-developed content, and most of us (myself included) jumped to the defense of procedural. In part, this is because we've all used it or seen it used to some important extent... but this also more or less proves his point, of procedural development having a strong emotional component. We wouldn't be white knighting it like that if we didn't think it was pretty individually cool. As for the 'different game every playthrough' feature, I don't like that for separate reasons--it eliminates the aspects of 'mastery' that you get with hand-designed levels, like different creative ways of solving the same environmental puzzles, or beating a certain section faster than your friend. I've never seen a speed run of a game with randomly generated levels that was interesting, but I'm blown away with the amazing things people do to get through the original Quake, for example.
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Mar 14, 2012 18:49
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Orzo posted:As for the 'different game every playthrough' feature, I don't like that for separate reasons--it eliminates the aspects of 'mastery' that you get with hand-designed levels, like different creative ways of solving the same environmental puzzles, or beating a certain section faster than your friend. I've never seen a speed run of a game with randomly generated levels that was interesting, but I'm blown away with the amazing things people do to get through the original Quake, for example. One of the cool things about procedural generation is you normally need something as a seed for the generation. I imagine one could make a pretty fun game by allowing the player to enter a specific seed and also have his buddies use the same seed for competition purposes. I also imagine that with enough time one could still develop a game with procedural content that still contains a hand crafted element to it. It's just that game developers really haven't taken the idea very far yet.
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Mar 14, 2012 19:06
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SuicideSnowman posted:One of the cool things about procedural generation is you normally need something as a seed for the generation. I imagine one could make a pretty fun game by allowing the player to enter a specific seed and also have his buddies use the same seed for competition purposes. You mean like /r/minecraftseeds?
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Mar 14, 2012 19:08
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Though I'm on the side of decent procedurally generated content (and consider most Roguelikes to be examples of it), I do agree with Orzo that procedurally generated content that is then saved and used as real non-mutable content frequently just comes across as kind of crappy, lazy design. It's okay if the open world is part of the beauty of a game (I don't know if Shadow of the Colossus's world is procedurally generated, but it could be, and it's nice to roam around either way), but when it's just making big open spaces between the parts of the game that you actually play it's frustrating boring padding. As an example of the opposite I would cite the maps of Guild Wars, which, again, I guess might have been based on procedural content, but there was so much hand-crafted beauty in there that even pointless roaming was quite delightful. On the bad side of it we have pretty much every recent sandbox/open world game. In conclusion, I'm on the side of procedural generation when it's deliberate and for the sake of a different experience every time you play, and I'm opposed to it when it's used as a lazy substitute for hand-crafted content - but if it's good enough that I can't actually tell the difference then that's fine too! Edit: I also like Internet Janitor's idea for a game jam themed around procedural generation. roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Mar 14, 2012 |
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Mar 14, 2012 19:08
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Good points all around. Reminds me that I need to give Spelunky a shot, I wonder how that'll influence my opinions. Edit: grammar Orzo fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Mar 14, 2012 |
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Mar 14, 2012 19:12
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No Safe Word posted:You mean like /r/minecraftseeds? Well yeah, but Minecraft really doesn't offer much in the way of speed running or competition.
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Mar 14, 2012 19:16
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Orzo posted:Good points all around. Reminds me that I need to play give Spelunky a shot, I wonder how that'll influence my opinions. Spelunky is super awesome, and it does a really good job of using procedural generation in a way that feels hand-crafted. That's probably because it's stitching together a bunch of hand-crafted areas though.
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Mar 14, 2012 19:53
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Gordon Cole posted:Spelunky is super awesome, and it does a really good job of using procedural generation in a way that feels hand-crafted. That's probably because it's stitching together a bunch of hand-crafted areas though.
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Mar 14, 2012 20:02
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Spelunky is fantastic, and a strong argument for the artistry of a procedural game being in the procedural gen algorithms themselves. The levels manage to have charm, despite being random. ... however. While I'm working on something vaguely similar, the extreme difficulty of Spelunky isn't something I've much interest in following after. I'd really like to see more procedural games with an emphasis on exploration or long-term play, rather than quick iteration nethack things (though nethack is still nowhere near as fast as Spelunky). It works for nethack and Spelunky, that's their core design and gameplay loop, but I don't think it's a requisite feature of procedural games. EDIT: Mostly I'm just bitter because I've still never seen any levels past the Amazon set in Spelunky. I am beginning to think that there is no way to survive the Amazon set. 
Shalinor fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Mar 14, 2012 |
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Mar 14, 2012 20:53
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Prove to me the human brain is anything more than a very complex computer and I'll believe that there isn't a way to make computers do anything a human can. Does tigsource have a really crappy SQL server or is it just me? Every time I try to go there, the SQL server is broken.
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Mar 15, 2012 00:42
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Manslaughter posted:Prove to me the human brain is anything more than a very complex computer and I'll believe that there isn't a way to make computers do anything a human can.
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Mar 15, 2012 01:25
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I was out today and had nothing better to do, so I played around with a simple paint app for android. Made some pretty sprites I might use in the upcoming gamedev contest thread, but some of you might like them and have a use for some of them, feel free to use them in anything noncommercial! The right is a quick mockup of how they can be used. They're 12x12.  And a quick gif of the mushroom. 
Jewel fucked around with this message at 12:44 on Mar 15, 2012 |
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Mar 15, 2012 12:41
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ambushsabre posted:Ok since I'm impatient and bored I threw together the thread. You can look at it here. I choose friday as the start / end date because that gives the weekend and friday night for people to work on their games, and it's also something to kind of look forward to at the end of the week. If you have any suggestions please let me know! I'll probably just put the week's theme at the top with So are you/Jewel gonna start this thing or what? A Friday approaches! One minor suggestion would be to immediately snag the second post of the thread as reserved space to link to past week's games. Fist post would be the current week's theme and general  , the second post would be a list likeWeek 1: Wacky Game Theme
Week 2: Yet Another Wacky Game Theme
so that folks who aren't actively following the thread can easily find the games and try them out / provide criticism. It'd be cool if we could figure out how to permanently host the entries so the list doesn't devolve into a bunch of dead links, but I've no idea how best to go about doing that.
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Mar 15, 2012 16:24
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's all around it.
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GDC behind us means it's research paper time, oh boy. Tri-Ace released some stuff that was mostly about handling area and ambient lights with better accuracy: http://research.tri-ace.com/ ... I guess they also have an amusing 2005 paper on how to do stuff like DOF and HDR on the PS2's fixed-function 8-bit-targets-only rendering architecture. DICE released some stuff on how BF3's terrain and animation works, but their server crashed.  http://publications.dice.se/ Ubisoft released a paper on how Far Cry 3's real-time GI works. http://engineroom.ubi.com/wp-content/bigfiles/farcry3_drtv_lowres.pdf
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Mar 15, 2012 16:35
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Weird question I know but anyone know of some sort of texture compression format that can be decompressed by a shader in OGL ES 2.0? I'm working with some API that doesn't support any sort of texture compression and might not even be considered in the future in order to maintain device compatibility, even though there's a pretty awful memory limit for both heap and video that doesn't make any lick of sense but whatever. One idea I have is to change the textures to reference a 256 color palette for that texture, but I don't think alphas can work too well as I could only have one color in the palette with a 0 alpha, leading me to dither that alpha in the texture itself. That doesn't look great, so I was thinking about having some channel specifically for the alpha, with the rest of the components indexing the palette. Unfortunately the next pixel format I can fit that in is probably RGBA4444, which makes the compression ratio 2:1, while I was hoping for at least 4:1. It wouldn't really even be 2:1 either, as there is some 4096x4 texture along with it that would be the texture's palette. I really want to work with this platform (you guys will find out soon what it is) but these arbitrary limitations to force developers to support all targeted devices is pissing me off.
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Mar 15, 2012 19:28
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OneEightHundred posted:GDC behind us means it's research paper time, oh boy. I realize it isn't actually new, but my favorite algorithmic thing of late is Light Pre-Pass Rendering (the new thing there is - it's on iPhone). Kinda makes me miss jinkying around with renderers.
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Mar 15, 2012 19:40
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Shalinor posted:I realize it isn't actually new, but my favorite algorithmic thing of late is Light Pre-Pass Rendering (the new thing there is - it's on iPhone). Kinda makes me miss jinkying around with renderers. 
OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Mar 15, 2012 |
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Mar 15, 2012 20:00
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PDP-1 posted:So are you/Jewel gonna start this thing or what? A Friday approaches! I really like these ideas. Maybe the dude who runs the SAGameDev wiki can set something up maybe (or give us his blessing or something)? And yeah, I'm going to post the thread in just a minute.
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Mar 15, 2012 20:30
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It's up! Come talk and encourage new people to join in! http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3472624&pagenumber=1
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Mar 15, 2012 20:33
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So I got a question that I hope will set me off on the path to discovery. I've tried googling this a bit, but landing on the right keywords is proving to be a bit difficult. Short version: how do game developers typically store their world data in memory? Longer: I'm mostly interested in generating outdoor game worlds. From what I've been able to gather, terrain is typically stored as a heightmap, because games that let you import/export data typically do it with greyscale images. Are these games holding this data in memory as enormous 2d arrays, or do they actually load an image file and write methods for accessing (and manipulating) the data? Or some other more complex format? Do they bother with two copies of the data? Say, a high resolution one used for rendering, and a lower resolution one for managing player boundaries or other "game logic" tests? Probably my two favorite examples of what I'm trying to pull off might be Sim City 4, or Dwarf Fortress.
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Mar 15, 2012 20:39
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One thing I like about procedural generation is that it can really give a 'sense of place' that can be lacking in hand-generated environments. Even in those hand generated environments that are quite superb (super metroid), I find myself too easily getting 'into the head' of the designer, and finding myself seeing obvious places where I'm guided, always taking the 'wrong' route, etc. The human mind, even an amazing one, slips easily into patterns that are very easy to pick up, and don't emulate a natural environment very well. On the other hand, procedural worlds without guidance might give the sense of being in a natural environment, but without some sort of guided design, they tend to lack 'points of interest'. I think the natural course of game world design is going to be 'procedurally generated' content of increasing complexity, but with better and better tools to sculpt it, define points of interest, and generally communicate and describe the desired environment to the increasingly powerful mathematical and expert systems that are generating the pixel/bush/block-level content. There's really no reason to put human designers on placing every bush or tree in a large world, but it is very important to be able to define important locations in a forest, the sorts of vegetation, the fact that there's been a goblin army through here in the last 20 years, and currently there may be some bandits in here, etc. Eventually the expert systems/AI will be better at generating that plot and specific content too, but that's still a 'few' years off. Basically, I think collaboration between increasingly powerful expert sytems and human designers is just getting started.
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Mar 15, 2012 21:45
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Unormal posted:Eventually the expert systems/AI will be better at generating that plot and specific content too, but that's still a 'few' years off. Basically, I think collaboration between increasingly powerful expert sytems and human designers is just getting started. Granted, this speaks more to procedural art techniques - taking the same algorithms we presently apply to making realistic terrains, then applying them to character design and prop design as well. Procedural weathering is probably going to be one of the most important. It will also influence design, though, as we further hit uncanny valley territory and the gamer starts to notice minor discrepancies in designed content / game item interactions / etc. It isn't practical to fix all of that through warm bodies, we'll need advanced world and AI sims capable of running at real-time. EDIT: Though it's possible that digital distribution will give us another generation's worth of breathing room. That shaves, what, an easy $20 off a publisher's costs? It doesn't make it to the developer, but that's irrelevant, those reduced costs can be funneled by the publisher into larger budgets without impacting their present profit margin. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Mar 15, 2012 |
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Mar 15, 2012 23:21
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Unormal posted:On the other hand, procedural worlds without guidance might give the sense of being in a natural environment, but without some sort of guided design, they tend to lack 'points of interest'. You basically described exactly what I'm going for with the game I'm currently working on. Its a 2d Terraria type game, but instead of going the Minecraft route and trying to build a random world generator with no real goal, we want to have a more hand-crafted experience but with the benefits of procedurally placed resources/points of interest/etc.
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Mar 16, 2012 03:05
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Shalinor posted:Granted, this speaks more to procedural art techniques I mean I think it's just natural to eventually extend it to all design, basically, technical or artistic. Look at something as simple as photoshop, it's come from deluxepaint working on pixels to content-aware background fill; and eventually you'll just pick a filter like 'hotty' or 'blue' and just wave your brush around. I don't think this takes away from the human designers, it simply allows them to multiply how productive an hour of design is, rather than spending it twiddling individual pixels that can be done algorithmically just fine. Sort of like how ASM, or nowadays even C++ are cool and all, but higher level languages are just flat out more productive. You can describe more with less, and let the machine handle the lower level constructs. There's certainly going to be good and bad use of procedural content; like most things there will be (and already is) a good amount of confirmation bias, as you notice bad uses of procedural content and don't notice when it's used well. e: As silly as it may seem I think Star Trek with Riker building hot jazz chicks ("a redhead...", "no a brunette") will be a lot of design in the future. e2: http://vimeo.com/36579366 This is a really great video that starts to look in the right way towards how even technical creative work will be assisted by technology in the future, though it doesn't speak specifically to procedural content, it's message is very relevant to the overall thesis of tool-assisted design. Unormal fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Mar 16, 2012 |
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Mar 16, 2012 03:46
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I've heard a lot about LUA and it being used for "game scripting" and whatnot. Could someone tell me what's so special about it? What can you do with LUA that you can't/it's more difficult to do with another high level language like Python? I'm not only looking to its advantages regarding games but in general too. A link extolling the advantages of LUA or something like that would be fine too.
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Mar 16, 2012 15:52
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Markovnikov posted:I've heard a lot about LUA and it being used for "game scripting" and whatnot. Could someone tell me what's so special about it? What can you do with LUA that you can't/it's more difficult to do with another high level language like Python? I'm not only looking to its advantages regarding games but in general too. A link extolling the advantages of LUA or something like that would be fine too. Lua is a scripting language. So is python. You can technically do the same things with both. I think WoW having the ability to write mods with Lua was a big deal and probably gave Lua a moment of spotlight, but really they could have gone with lua, python, ruby, javascript, etc.
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Mar 16, 2012 16:01
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Markovnikov posted:I've heard a lot about LUA and it being used for "game scripting" and whatnot. Could someone tell me what's so special about it? What can you do with LUA that you can't/it's more difficult to do with another high level language like Python? I'm not only looking to its advantages regarding games but in general too. A link extolling the advantages of LUA or something like that would be fine too. It's very simple, performs well, and is relatively easy to embed - you can just throw the source into your project. With LuaJIT2 I'm fairly certain it's much faster than python, and its simplicity combined with a few core features (coroutines, metatables, first class functions) means that you can do things like roll your own class system or whatever. Lua is also used in most major games, not just WoW. For instance the Dawn of War series, Baldurs Gate 1&2, Far Cry, Painkiller, and many others. I'm pretty sure Firaxis switched from python to lua for Civ 5 as well. If you're not embedding it into another program, I don't think it really has any great advantages over other dynamic languages. poemdexter posted:Lua is a scripting language. So is python. You can technically do the same things with both. I think WoW having the ability to write mods with Lua was a big deal and probably gave Lua a moment of spotlight, but really they could have gone with lua, python, ruby, javascript, etc. SavageMessiah fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Mar 16, 2012 |
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Mar 16, 2012 16:21
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Lua evolved as an embedded language, and it shows in the design. One of its 8 types, "userdata", is specifically dedicated to interoperating with C. Python evolved as a general purpose language, and embedding it was obviously never a primary objective.
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Mar 16, 2012 18:17
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The source-level implementation of it shows its embedded goals as well. Reconfiguration like changing what type "number" is internally are trivial, it compiles as C++ (including proper exception support) or you can include it as C in a C++ application by just wrapping the include in an extern "C" block, and interfacing with script code is incredibly easy. I do have four specific gripes about it though: - It's 1-based and changing it to 0-based would require a lot of changes to the standard library. - It doesn't let you assign GC traces to userdata - It's terrible about dealing with structured or packed data, i.e. having matrix/vector operations requires either hammering the allocator or using tuples - Table operations are a bit unpredictable. rawget from the C API will crash your application if you try accessing a non-table value (even though rawget from Lua API will not), and gettable from the C API can potentially call code. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Mar 16, 2012 |
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Mar 16, 2012 18:33
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What's the best free-to-use game engine for putting together an RTS or overhead style game? Doesn't have to be 3D, 2D is fine too. I downloaded Unity but I'm not sure if it's the best tool for the job, but I haven't looked that deeply at it. I have some moderate level of programming skill, and I'm definitely willing to learn more, but right now I'm just looking to do some extremely basic prototyping to help develop the concept, so simpler tools would be better.
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Mar 16, 2012 18:58
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XboxPants posted:What's the best free-to-use game engine for putting together an RTS or overhead style game? Yeah there's that too, though SC2 map making can be really cumbersome, mostly due to actors being loving terrible and not duplicating properly in the editor. vvvvv OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Mar 17, 2012 |
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Mar 16, 2012 19:01
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XboxPants posted:What's the best free-to-use game engine for putting together an RTS or overhead style game? Doesn't have to be 3D, 2D is fine too. I downloaded Unity but I'm not sure if it's the best tool for the job, but I haven't looked that deeply at it. I have some moderate level of programming skill, and I'm definitely willing to learn more, but right now I'm just looking to do some extremely basic prototyping to help develop the concept, so simpler tools would be better. Create a Starcraft 2 mod.
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Mar 17, 2012 01:01
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I realize this has probably been beaten to death, but can anyone point me to some articles that explain how Angry Birds was so drat portable that it runs on everything under the sun? I am understanding that the game logic is in Lua, the input for the game is basically 'pull the bird back and release' (and possibly tap again later), and then you've got a fairly simple polygon graphics engine, sound, and then the physics engine. Is it really that simple of a port or has it just gotten everywhere since it's been out for a few years and they have other teams porting for them?
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Mar 17, 2012 04:29
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Bob Morales posted:I realize this has probably been beaten to death, but can anyone point me to some articles that explain how Angry Birds was so drat portable that it runs on everything under the sun? No articles, but as long as you're porting to other C++-supported platforms, 2D games are much, much simpler to port than 3D games (as a general rule). Making hilarious amounts of money also helps in the porting resource department. Box2D (which I believe was the physics engine used) doesn't need any additional porting work; sound most likely doesn't either assuming it's using OpenAL, so all you're left with is the input and graphics. The former is going to be very simple in this case, and the latter may be as well depending on the backend used. Assuming you're making a C++ Android port (This may be a flawed assumption on my part; I know absolutely nothing about android development), I doubt a port would be much more than a few weeks worth of work on the programming side. If you're porting the whole thing to Java though, forget everything I just wrote. Vinterstum fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Mar 17, 2012 |
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Mar 17, 2012 05:50
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The problem with using placeholder art is sometimes you get attached.  
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Mar 17, 2012 07:07
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Jo posted:The problem with using placeholder art is sometimes you get attached. (Unless there's some sort of legal/licensing problem.)
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Mar 17, 2012 07:18
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