Shamus Young Gets Procedural With Project Frontier

[Andy Chalk]

Shamus Young Gets Procedural With Project Frontier

Procedural generation is a world-building technology that hasn't really caught on with game makers but Shamus Young is doing some pretty incredible things with it.

As the man behind Shamus Plays [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points], Shamus Young should be familiar to most readers of The Escapist. But in his spare time, when he's not talking about games or playing games, he's making games - specifically, something called Project Frontier.

Procedural generation, roughly put, is the act of creating content with algorithms rather than by hand; you give the computer a set of instructions, then stand back and let it work. It's used primarily to generate background content in large, open-world games - think the great forests of Oblivion [http://www.amazon.com/Elder-Scrolls-IV-Oblivion-Game-Pc/dp/B000V9C9FO/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1311178716&sr=8-5] - but Young sees much greater potential in the technology.

"Basically the large-scale building of the world is a solved problem," he said in a new interview with Edge [http://www.next-gen.biz/features/building-worlds-single-click]. "There are small details left over - bushes here, or maybe I could have more water effects - but basically everything is solved in terms of what I set out to do."

Significantly, Young's world-building is not as hardware-intensive as it sounds. "I have a mid-to-low range PC - about two and half years old, I think," he continued. "If I lift the cap on my frame limit I can run the world at 350 FPS, so the processing power is there and then some. [Project Frontier] has similar specs to Minecraft. Actually it might run a little better on old machines, since it's not as CPU hungry. There's a lot of stuff that hasn't been explored still on the hardware that's a couple of years old."

Part of the reason for that, he explained, is that while the final result looks good, the simulation driving it all is "very simplistic." That's fine for videogame purposes, he added, because the goal is not to make a realistic world, but one that is believable and interesting. "I could flip a button and generate something the size of North America, but it would be completely boring," he said. "The player shouldn't travel for more than a couple of minutes without seeing something new."

To find out more about the technology and capabilities of Project Frontier, check out Shamus Young's blog at shamusyoung.com [http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=11874].


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[Xaryn Mar]

Seems like an interesting way of creating landscapes. Quite effective too.

I will be looking forward to seeing the end result.

 

[Irridium]

It's funny how a 40 year-old programmer can do more in a few weeks and with no budget than what major studio's do in months with huge budgets. Yes he's just world-building so far, but still, this is just ridiculous.

Why don't more studio's use procedural generation again? Because after following this project since it started, I can't think of a decent reason for why damn near nobody else uses it.

Also, I guess this explains why Stolen Pixels has taken another hiatus.

 

[AvsJoe]

His procedurally-generated Cityscape video on YouTube is awesome. It's among my favourite videos on the site.
Hope he has a bright future ahead of him.

 

[USSR]

Make some Stolen Pixels with this and I'll be happy.

 

[Supernova2000]

See also Infinity: The Quest for Earth, an (eventually) upcoming space flight MMO with a procedurally-generated galaxy.

 

[Brainst0rm]

Veeeeeeery interesting.

But then, procedural world generation hasn't caught on because mostly because of the difficulty of then creating procedural content to go with it. We know how much game makers love to keep us strictly on rails so we experience their breathtakingly innovative stories in exactly the way they want us to. The open-ended kind of design which games like MineCraft and Terraria require is damn difficult.

If this does catch on, it might push the whole industry in a more interesting direction. We might even starting thinking of video games as a valid, stand-alone artistic medium, instead of these strange movies that resent your ability to interact with them.

 

[GrizzlerBorno]

Mr. Young hasn't posted anything on the site in a while I think. Looks like he's been busy.....which sounds like innuendo, so I apologize.

OT: Procedural Generation is only as good as what you use it FOR. Minecraft uses procedural generation fantastically; Introversion softwares current project Subversion can create entire believable cities in a heart beat. As niche as the tech is in modern gaming, Shamus has some real competition.

 

[qwertyz]

See also Infinity: The Quest for Earth, an (eventually) upcoming space flight MMO with a procedurally-generated galaxy.

Oo, oo! I'm watching that little project. I have high hopes for it.

Procedurally generated worlds are the wave of the future, I love the sense of roaming and freedom that comes with them.

 

[GeorgW]

So that's why you've been so bad at updating Stolen Pixels!
Seems like a good idea, but what's the gameplay?

See also Infinity: The Quest for Earth, an (eventually) upcoming space flight MMO with a procedurally-generated galaxy.

I've been following that, the combat looks like a lot of fun and the tech is used really smartly.

His procedurally-generated Cityscape video on YouTube is awesome. It's among my favourite videos on the site.
Hope he has a bright future ahead of him.

Wow, that's really impressive!

 

[Eggbert]

Mr. Young hasn't posted anything on the site in a while I think. Looks like he's been busy.....which sounds like innuendo, so I apologize.

He was busy with some stuff, Spoiler Warning went on hiatus, but he's updating again.
OT, this project is very pretty. I love this thing.

 

[Canadish]

I remember Shamus first blogging about the idea. Really glad to hear that Frontier is getting attention by the gaming media.

Hope it goes far!

 

[Scarim Coral]

Wow imagine the free time they will have by letting the program do the work? They beter put those free time on working on the parts of the game not to doze off work!

 

[Femaref]

It's funny how a 40 year-old programmer can do more in a few weeks and with no budget than what major studio's do in months with huge budgets. Yes he's just world-building so far, but still, this is just ridiculous.

Why don't more studio's use procedural generation again? Because after following this project since it started, I can't think of a decent reason for why damn near nobody else uses it.

Also, I guess this explains why Stolen Pixels has taken another hiatus.

Because you have no real control over the landscape whatsoever. If your target is a 100% sandbox, its okay. But the moment you need certain sights or want to tell a story, you need to craft it your own. Mixing is quite hard from that point on.

 

[Bad Jim]

Why don't more studio's use procedural generation again?

There is no free lunch. You can spend a couple of weekends coding a procedural environment that makes a pretty YouTube video, but you can also hand craft a landscape over a couple of weekends and make a pretty YouTube video.

It is true that you can wander around a procedural environment for hours, but do you really want to? You'll usually find that it's all the same after a while. And if you do find an environment that's interesting enough to play for months, such as Nethack, you also find the amount of effort that has been put into it is staggering. Just like a traditionally designed game.

Procedural generation is not a substitute for human creativity. In some cases it is the most efficient creative tool but it is not the cornucopia that many people imagine it to be.

 

[Irridium]

Because you have no real control over the landscape whatsoever. If your target is a 100% sandbox, its okay. But the moment you need certain sights or want to tell a story, you need to craft it your own. Mixing is quite hard from that point on.

Dwarf Fortress has shown that you can procedurally generate stories, people, monsters, towns, adventures... damn near whatever you want really. It still is rough around the edges yes, but it shows you can do more with procedural content instead of just environments.

It is true that you can wander around a procedural environment for hours, but do you really want to? You'll usually find that it's all the same after a while. And if you do find an environment that's interesting enough to play for months, such as Nethack, you also find the amount of effort that has been put into it is staggering. Just like a traditionally designed game.

Procedural generation is not a substitute for human creativity. In some cases it is the most efficient creative tool but it is not the cornucopia that many people imagine it to be.

Um, yes, I would love to explore a procedural environment. It would be fantastic for fantasy-based games or space-sims, since both require huge-ass worlds that would be really, really hard to hand craft. Space-sims more than fantasy, especially if you want to let the player land on and explore planets. There's a game that's exploring that technique actually. It's called Infinity, and it's 99% procedural. And it looks amazing.

I'm not saying we should just use procedural generation, I'm saying we should give it more of a chance instead of just letting it grow trees/shape environments.

 

[BrotherRool]

Mr. Young hasn't posted anything on the site in a while I think. Looks like he's been busy.....which sounds like innuendo, so I apologize.

OT: Procedural Generation is only as good as what you use it FOR. Minecraft uses procedural generation fantastically; Introversion softwares current project Subversion can create entire believable cities in a heart beat. As niche as the tech is in modern gaming, Shamus has some real competition.

I'm not sure you've got to the right place, you need the 20sided tale blog, which wasn't directly linked to? http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/

I know you're wrong because he's got 2 posts this day and due to spoiler warning, a minimum of a post per for probably more than several months, maybe even years. Lack of posts on the weekends being made up for by his quite regular more than one post a day

 

[draythefingerless]

Because you have no real control over the landscape whatsoever. If your target is a 100% sandbox, its okay. But the moment you need certain sights or want to tell a story, you need to craft it your own. Mixing is quite hard from that point on.

Dwarf Fortress has shown that you can procedurally generate stories, people, monsters, towns, adventures... damn near whatever you want really. It still is rough around the edges yes, but it shows you can do more with procedural content instead of just environments.

It is true that you can wander around a procedural environment for hours, but do you really want to? You'll usually find that it's all the same after a while. And if you do find an environment that's interesting enough to play for months, such as Nethack, you also find the amount of effort that has been put into it is staggering. Just like a traditionally designed game.

Procedural generation is not a substitute for human creativity. In some cases it is the most efficient creative tool but it is not the cornucopia that many people imagine it to be.

Um, yes, I would love to explore a procedural environment. It would be fantastic for fantasy-based games or space-sims, since both require huge-ass worlds that would be really, really hard to hand craft. Space-sims more than fantasy, especially if you want to let the player land on and explore planets. There's a game that's exploring that technique actually. It's called Infinity, and it's 99% procedural. And it looks amazing.

I'm not saying we should just use procedural generation, I'm saying we should give it more of a chance instead of just letting it grow trees/shape environments.

no you realy dont want to. there is already a very famous game that uses this, its called Minecraft. that game flourishes because the point of the game is to use every new environment and create around it. and even then, i am BORED of minecraft. i love the game, but there is only so much fuckin caves and mountains i can explore before im fed up with seeing them for the 100th billionth time. the game stands because of its building mechanic. but for deeper intrinsic content? we are eons away from having enough power to have procedural generated content that is near the quality of custom made one. it is great as a background feature for smaller and simpler games, but it gets terribly awful when you want to make sth more complex or sth more on the lines of your thoughts. it becomes GENERIC. thats the word that describes procedural content. it seems nice idea to explore a fantasy world or a sci fi world in such a world, but of all the times ive seen this done, it became generic. HELL, custom made worlds that are big are ALREADY generic. Spore? Just Cause 2? i was sick of planets in spore being all the fcking same, and in Just Cause 2 suffers from copy pasting of buildings and bases.

it is just a fact that given anth big enough, it will become a miriad of copy pasting and generic senseless content. this type of content generation is good for simple ideas based around creating random worlds. but it relaly isnt the future of gaming or anth.

 

[The Random One]

There are a lot of things I and Shamus agree with, and how awesome procedurally generated content is one of them (very awesome). I bought FUEL based on the vague recollections of him talking about it and it's my favourite racing game of this gen. (Relevant, as FUEL uses a huge procedurally generated map that would not fit on the disc if it was saved as an actual map instead of just instructions for creating one. It shows how this tech can be used to create a world that feels huge but still has points of interest around it. FUEL is mostly empty though and there are a lot of weird things that pop up, but is a great tech demo. Also a very fun arcade rally game.)

I remember an idea someone had for a procedurally generated game would be to create a lot of Zelda style rooms that could only be solved if you had a certain tool, then tell the game which tools they were and it could design dungeons based around getting a tool to beat a certain room. Bam, instant Zelda.

no you realy dont want to. there is already a very famous game that uses this, its called Minecraft. that game flourishes because the point of the game is to use every new environment and create around it. and even then, i am BORED of minecraft. i love the game, but there is only so much fuckin caves and mountains i can explore before im fed up with seeing them for the 100th billionth time. the game stands because of its building mechanic. but for deeper intrinsic content? we are eons away from having enough power to have procedural generated content that is near the quality of custom made one. it is great as a background feature for smaller and simpler games, but it gets terribly awful when you want to make sth more complex or sth more on the lines of your thoughts. it becomes GENERIC. thats the word that describes procedural content. it seems nice idea to explore a fantasy world or a sci fi world in such a world, but of all the times ive seen this done, it became generic. HELL, custom made worlds that are big are ALREADY generic. Spore? Just Cause 2? i was sick of planets in spore being all the fcking same, and in Just Cause 2 suffers from copy pasting of buildings and bases.

You do make a point, but I'll nitpick something on it: procedurally generated worlds are LESS generic. You never see cut and paste in a procedurally generated world, not because there isn't, but because it happens at a scale you don't realize, i.e. there won't be two identical bases anywhere in the world, but every base will have identical walls. It doesn't feel bad because you expect military bases belonging to the same army in the same country to be more or less the same anywhere you go. With a little[footnote]For very, very loose definitions of 'little'.[/footnote] effort you could create a world just like JC2's for every session, and you'd never run into two identical buildings in your life but the world would still look like a city that was deliberately built by human beings. Mostly.

There's probably a Nexus War vs. Urban Dead debate here but I didn't bring by hipster beret (hipsteret?) today so I'll let it be.

 

[draythefingerless]

There are a lot of things I and Shamus agree with, and how awesome procedurally generated content is one of them (very awesome). I bought FUEL based on the vague recollections of him talking about it and it's my favourite racing game of this gen. (Relevant, as FUEL uses a huge procedurally generated map that would not fit on the disc if it was saved as an actual map instead of just instructions for creating one. It shows how this tech can be used to create a world that feels huge but still has points of interest around it. FUEL is mostly empty though and there are a lot of weird things that pop up, but is a great tech demo. Also a very fun arcade rally game.)

I remember an idea someone had for a procedurally generated game would be to create a lot of Zelda style rooms that could only be solved if you had a certain tool, then tell the game which tools they were and it could design dungeons based around getting a tool to beat a certain room. Bam, instant Zelda.

no you realy dont want to. there is already a very famous game that uses this, its called Minecraft. that game flourishes because the point of the game is to use every new environment and create around it. and even then, i am BORED of minecraft. i love the game, but there is only so much fuckin caves and mountains i can explore before im fed up with seeing them for the 100th billionth time. the game stands because of its building mechanic. but for deeper intrinsic content? we are eons away from having enough power to have procedural generated content that is near the quality of custom made one. it is great as a background feature for smaller and simpler games, but it gets terribly awful when you want to make sth more complex or sth more on the lines of your thoughts. it becomes GENERIC. thats the word that describes procedural content. it seems nice idea to explore a fantasy world or a sci fi world in such a world, but of all the times ive seen this done, it became generic. HELL, custom made worlds that are big are ALREADY generic. Spore? Just Cause 2? i was sick of planets in spore being all the fcking same, and in Just Cause 2 suffers from copy pasting of buildings and bases.

You do make a point, but I'll nitpick something on it: procedurally generated worlds are LESS generic. You never see cut and paste in a procedurally generated world, not because there isn't, but because it happens at a scale you don't realize, i.e. there won't be two identical bases anywhere in the world, but every base will have identical walls. It doesn't feel bad because you expect military bases belonging to the same army in the same country to be more or less the same anywhere you go. With a little[footnote]For very, very loose definitions of 'little'.[/footnote] effort you could create a world just like JC2's for every session, and you'd never run into two identical buildings in your life but the world would still look like a city that was deliberately built by human beings. Mostly.

There's probably a Nexus War vs. Urban Dead debate here but I didn't bring by hipster beret (hipsteret?) today so I'll let it be.

ill double nitpick on it by saying that the generic of procedural worlds comes from recognizable patterns. generic...ness in custom made comes from using elements that you need in a certain area over n over again, but the terrain, the geography and object placement will always be random and different. the problem comes at individual objects themselves. procedural on the other hand, comes with the problem that algorithms get stuck in a pattern, and due to our advanced brain, we begin to see that pattern over n over again. oh that mountain is gonna be a bit high and then itll drop a lot then go up a hill, or hey that tree is gonna have a section of it missing. granted, this becomes less recognizable as more n more advanced it gets, but thats why i said we arent there enough to create exclusively with it. hell i cant tell you how many times i PREDICTED how a minecraft cave was gonna shape up to be, and you can learn the best layers to find minerals because of their spawn pattern.(althou thats actually a good thing, since it makes sense).