The Importance of Procedural Content Generation In Games 160
Gamasutra reports on a talk by Far Cry 2 developer Dominic Guay in which he discussed why procedural content generation is becoming more and more important as games get bigger and more complex. He also talks about some of the related difficulties, such as the amount of work required for the tools and the times when it's hard to retain control of the art direction. Quoting:
"Initially, the team created a procedural sky rendering approach based on algorithms — which led to a totally unconvincing skybox that was clearly inferior to what a hand-authored skybox would be. 'We considered it to be a total failure,' he said. He explained that a great deal of focus must be put on the tools that surround the algorithms, to allow the systems to be properly harnessed. In the end, the game shipped with a revamped procedural sky system that ended up much more effective than the first attempt."
Re:Absolutely (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you've never made a game yourself, you'd be amazed at how much work it is to create content."
And it's so much work because of the art, animation and effects, lets face this fact. Back in the 8-bit days the amount of work required was a lot but managable, you could put a lot more content into a 2D game in a lot less time then you can in a modern 3D rendered game in which the resolution is much higher and the more artists and designers you need just to get the most basic and mundane things done that existed in the 2D area. The same content in 2D that was easy, takes infinitely more time in the 3rd dimension just to get anywhere near the artistic quality of a good team of 2D artists. But this is something companies brought on themselves with their technolust, as we've seen with MegaMan 9 there are still people out there that like games for more then just their looks.
Re:Absolutely (Score:2, Insightful)
Ahhh but you forget that it costs a lot less to hire a few decent artists than a few decent programmers.
Citation needed. My personal experience conflicts with your statement.
Re:Absolutely (Score:3, Insightful)
Man, I can't wait for "Average Mid-Sized City the RPG!" Procedural content is alright for some things, but where's the gameplay in it? People loved Grand Theft Auto in large part to the amount of care that went into each area that most players would never notice - such as the mural in an out of the way subway station. Also, the little differences in the various boroughs from the design to the locals that made it feel authentic. You could generate a thousand square miles of procedural city, but it will make for crappy level design and people will still be more impressed with the hand-modeled statue near the town hall and not the span of how much content you have. At the end, you're just left with a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Handcrafting is a procedure, too (Score:3, Insightful)
Handcrafting a scenery is just another form of procedural generation, at the core. The crafter follows his or her own heuristics and combine them with specific content models and elements as a source, while remaining within the technical constraints projected for the end-result.
How do you make, say, a RTS map ? You start by stating your goals: there will be N starting bases, the landscape will include M ridges so that the length of path between each base is balanced, and each will have access to pretty much the same amount of ressources, etc. Then you just lay out all those required elements down in a fractal or geometrical way, and that process may have a lot in common with some pathfinding algorithm.
Of course, the crafter is not limited a priori in terms of sources and methods, but then anything you may think about including into your one-time work could just as well be set to end up included in the generatio nalgorithm that mimics your handcrafting. Just because right now an human has a much vaster culture than a piece of software, does not mean heuristics might not one day be able to piece out elements from, say, news websites or art libraries.
The point of procedural generation is not to machine-generate content, rather to humanize the machine and its content, so I will not be one bit surprised when game content generation becomes a fully-recognized branch of AI research. Could Turing tests be one day judged by art critics evaluating proposed 3D models and scenes, or scripted events ?
The article's mention of choosing between a handcrafted skybox and a generated one is not that far from it: soon enough game studios will be considering the "tastes" of the many different content-generation tools.