Shamus Young Gets Procedural With Project Frontier

[Halceon]

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.

I feel I sound like a broken record, but I'm going to point toward Dwarf Fortress adventure mode. The world is procedurally generated, all entities and characters are fully generated. Yes, that means entire nations with ruler dynasties over several centuries of development and warfare. Plus creatures of the night, megabeasts and monsters. And only then do you come in. In the current version any villager can ask you to deal with a pesky bandit that's been bothering them, a local lord will ask you to deal with greater monsters, up to dragons, a king may ask you to assassinate a rival king.
And so on, and so on.

 

[Alleged_Alec]

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.

You don't need to made a game totally procedural. You could create a world procedurally, perhaps even the towns, and go from there to a manual creative process. You could add NPCs, certain buildings, probably edit on or two as well. This way, you spend less time creating a huge-ass world, and get to spend more time on the elements which a player interacts with.

 

[Bad Jim]

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.

Here's a rather old space sim with a procedural universe. Frontier: First Encounters


It doesn't look nearly as good as Infinity, but it has the advantage that you can actually play it. It doesn't work under Dosbox though so you'll need to download WinJJFFE, a hacked exe, to get it running.

http://www.eliteclub.org.uk/