Procedural Programming- The Secret Behind Spore

imashoe writes "Ever wonder how Spore works under the hood? The game seems to be insanely huge and how is it that there can be an infinite amount of different creates created in the game? The answer is Procedural Programming."

Eh?

[MrSteveSD]

I really feel like the person who wrote the article doesn't know what he is talking about.

Crap alert

[VeryProfessional]

This article reads like pure garbage. Procedural programming [wikipedia.org] simply refers to any form of programming in which procedure calls are made... ie. any mainstream imperative programming language. Does anybody really believe that games fill up multiple DVDs because there are too many IF statements? Editors, wake up please.

Procedural Generation?

[Asgerix]

Perhaps the author is confusing Procedural Programming with Procedural Generation [wikipedia.org]?

Re:Eh?

[mmacdona86]

Yes, the distinction that they are probably trying to make is that between procedural or algorithmic content generation and the more common situation where content is created individually by artists.

The talk about procedural versus object-oriented programming is moronic bs.

Reminds me of Elite...

[tcopeland]

...that is, this game [mobygames.com] which had an "infinite" universe. The book Infinite Game Universe [amazon.com] has some good discussions of this sort of thing, too.

Re:Functional

[sholden]

No, they are talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation [wikipedia.org]

Re:Vaporware

[MindStalker]

Oh come on, its only been 2 years. A lot of games have taken 3 years sense their first showing to the public till release. DNF is going on 11 years. No comparison really.

Re:Reminds me of Elite...

[Anonymous Coward]

Elite had hundreds of systems on something like four galactic maps, but it wasn't infinitely generated. Usually one plied a route between just two or three systems and ground that over and over. It wasn't nearly as mission-oriented as elite 2 which had you running around all over the place. Far as I know, Elite just had the Constrictor mission (and not on all ports of the game), and even that chase was maybe a half-dozen systems.

Re:Typo in summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh... No. A 3D cube has six faces. At any given time, at most 3 are visible in a 2D projection of a 3D scene. It takes two triangles to represent a square face (many 3D toolkits "really" only using triangles underneath). So, 6 triangles. So, the original poster was correct, you lose, do not pass go, do not collect 200.

Re:Eh?

[MrSteveSD]

Yes, the distinction that they are probably trying to make is that between procedural or algorithmic content generation and the more common situation where content is created individually by artists.

Yeah, that would be something interesting to talk about. Whoever wrote the article probably isn't the man to do it though. Did you ever play Kreiger? http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger#20 [theprodukkt.com] They managed to cram a 3D first person shooter into 96k. It relies heavily on procedurally generated content.

Re:Attention Procedural Programmers

[mikael]

Procedural generation [wikipedia.org]

Spore

Terrain synthesis/generator - Terragen [planetside.co.uk]

Renderman shaders [renderman.org]

Procedural animation [wikipedia.org]

Practical procedural modeling of plants [td-grafik.de]

Procedural planets [baddoggames.com]

Re:Crap alert

[init100]

I think that part of the issue here is that they've both confused the concept of procedural programming(...) with procedural generation then proceded to give a better description of the first.

Exactly. And procedural generation isn't hard to understand (at least conceptually), he could just have given a brief on fractals, since they are a well-known example of procedural content generation. A tiny piece of code generates a nice-looking picture. And regardless of how much you zoom in, it never becomes pixelated, as new content is generated on the fly. The Mandelbrot set is an excellent example.

Thank you!

[quax]

The beauty of /. is that even an absolute crap article will in most case get somebody to point out what actually was newsworthy about the item. So to summarize: It seems that the game allows the user to create their own procedural content generation [wikipedia.org] through the use of editors.

The article already removed from bonafidereviews

[S3D]

The link form TFA no gives:

We appreciate the honest feedback and correction regarding the content of this article. While it was well intentioned, it was inaccurate and for that we apologize. Accordingly this article has been removed.

Something not good going with slashdot choice of article lately.

Article pulled

[gatesvp]

Well fellow /.ers, the article was pulled (anyone have an original for laughter purposes?) I'm oddly proud of the /. community for successfully cleaning cruft from the vast sludge of the internet. If only with could do this stuff for mainstream media... like any of us bother any more :)