On Randomly Generated Content In Games

Thanks to Skotos.net for their article discussing randomly-generated content in videogames, in which the author discusses pioneering games with random elements, suggesting: "One of the reasons [classic RPG] Rogue was so popular (and spawned so many children) is due to its generation of random content." But he goes on to point out: "Computers don't have the imagination to make good puzzles... asking a computer to create an interesting puzzle is very similar to asking it to tell a story, make up a joke, or create a riddle." The suggested answer is game elements "placed randomly within the [linear] structure", but with recent random level-generating games such as Toe Jam & Earl III striking out, how far should randomness be taken in games?

Re:Another Game with pretty good Random Content

[Vaevictis666]

Gee, and it's not like they didn't ACTUALLY MENTION these in the article or anything... Dare I Quote: In fact, it would be pretty easy to argue that modern games such as Diablo2 were extended variants of the Rogue family.

Re:Another Game with pretty good Random Content

[HanClinto]

Geometry was the same for the SAME CHARACTER, but when you switch characters (or games), it re-generates the level. There are several locations in the games that are hard-coded, but often how to get to those places are dynamic.

Re:Another Game with pretty good Random Content

[Cecil]

Uh. Not in Diablo. I don't know about Diablo II, as I tried it briefly and considered it a boring rehash of Diablo and promptly abandoned it in favour of more interesting games.

Diablo was quite random. With the exception of "quest objectives" which were merely prefabs placed randomly within a dungeon, the entire dungeon, layout, entrances, exits, doors, rooms were randomly generated for each floor. (Which is why the savegame files could get up to about 15MB if I recall correctly.. hey, it was a big deal wh

Re:Another Game with pretty good Random Content

[Goldberg's Pants]

MORE games should have random elements I think. I remember WAY back around 1991 or so when Lotus 3 came out on the Amiga, there was a random track generator that worked pretty well. I would LOVE to see a feature like that in a modern racing game. (Hell, even an easy to use track editor).

As for Diablo, essentially it's Nethack with flashy graphics and less character classes:) But that's not a bad thing. Nethack is a classic. It was the first roguelike I played, on my old 386/33 with a huge 120 meg hard driv

Re:Another Game with pretty good Random Content

[Pofy]

Actually, the elements you mentioned as random does not at all inflate the save file. The save file (for single player) only save changes between the initial state of the dungeon and the current. Basically it means saving only the stats of monsters that changes (and unfortunately a few such is NOT saved). It do inflate the save files some of course but when you reload, the game recreates the full dungeon from the initial seed used to create it (which is saved) and then when placing the monsters (and items w

Re:Another Game with pretty good Random Content

[Pofy]

Lets sort this out and correct your statement that only monster spawns are random.

First Diablo 1, which had both single pand multi player. In single player, you save the game and with it the full dungeon at any time and can reload it as well. Of course you then get back the exact same dungeon (AND monsters) as when you saved. One can at any time start a NEW game with the saved character though. It will then have a completely new dungeon.

In Diablo 1 multiplayer, you can't save the game. The character is sa

An Old Joke

[NickFusion]

There's an old saying that goes, Art hung in restaurants is usually as bad as food served at museums.

Paraphrasing, asking a computer to do level design is as bad as asking a level designer to do math.

This is one of those features that the marketing department loves ("Infinite Gameplay!"), but in practice almost always sucks. It's the rare game (Populous?) where random numbers can deliver a enjoyable level.

Re:An Old Joke

[El]

Then why was rogue/ultrarogue/hack/Castle of the Winds such an intriging game, when the graphics blatently sucked?

Re:An Old Joke

[Zathrus]

Rogue/Nethack/etc. are no different from Civ/MOO or any other strategy game (because that's what they all are - strategy. Rogue/Nethack/etc are certainly NOT RPGs) -- the location of content is randomized, but content itself is not dramatically different. Nor is the strategy for beating the game different, despite the randomization. In fact, people who have mastered the game and can beat it on a regular basis have to invent challenges for themselves -- Nethack has a whole list of things like vegetarian, vegan, atheist, pacifist, etc. intended purely as additional challenges.

When it comes to puzzles though they don't offer anything different from game to game. No, I don't consider maze levels to be "puzzles" -- they're merely tedious. Look at the Sokoban levels in Nethack 3.4 and up -- they're always the same, simply because writing a generalized puzzle generator for such a thing would be very difficult.

What Rogue/Nethack/etc have isn't graphics, it's gameplay. They're damned difficult, even for those who are good at them.

Re:An Old Joke

[twifkak]

Look at the Sokoban levels in Nethack 3.4 and up -- they're always the same, simply because writing a generalized puzzle generator for such a thing would be very difficult.

Maybe so, but it's been done [uni-trier.de], at least on a smaller scale.

Re:An Old Joke

[jjhlk]

How are Rogue/Nethack/etc. (Diablo?) not RPGs?

Re:An Old Joke

[Universal Nerd]

Have you played nethack?

Rouge-like games are the king of enjoyable gameplay - Nethack has been on my PC at home and work for the past.... hmmm... 17 years and I never get tired of playing it - for the past 14 years I've tried looking for a game quite as fun and random as Nethack.

I dunno, Falcon's Eye and other 3D versions of Nethack are, IMHO, the building blocks of a truly awsome game - give me a randomly generated 3D dungeon with combat control (like Quest for Glory 2) with a touch of management (like t

Re:An Old Joke

[Cecil]

"Diablo", "Master of Magic", and to some extent "Age Of Wonders: Shadow Magic" are some other games that stand out in mind as having an excellent, enjoyable random level design. And they are a lot more dependent on having a good map than Populous was (In Populous, a major part of the game involved flattening the map to build up your castles anyway. So who really cares how it's laid out to begin with?)

Master of Magic is in my mind the holy grail of randomized level design. Mind you, it only had to deal with

Re:An Old Joke

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

" "Diablo", "Master of Magic", and to some extent "Age Of Wonders: Shadow Magic" are some other games that stand out in mind as having an excellent, enjoyable random level design. "

Offtopic, But check out diablo2 LOD 1.10 patch (probably still in public beta, I stopped following it).

Its mostly the same until you get to hell when they really upped the randomization. Now theres more random monsters that wernt even on the act before, each gaining some more random abilities.
Really adds onto the randomly desig

Re:An Old Joke

[jafuser]

Star Wars Galaxies is an interesting case of a game using randomly generated content.

The reasoning was that many players would come from existing games which had already invested several years accumulating content.

These players would come to SWG, which is brand new, so it was necessary to "fill" it with content. The only way to do this without hiring a few thousand people to create content was to make it randomly generated.

While their work is quite technically impressive (their terrian generator got som

Re:An Old Joke

[FileNotFound]

SWG had HORRID HORRID terrain!

Mountains, mountains, mountains, mountans, swamps, swamps, swamps, swamps, swamps.

It was ALL the same. Games that had great partialy random terrain:
AO
AC2

SWG terrain sucked not because of "patterns" but because of the sameness of it all. You could run for miles and everything would look the same. The mountains came out of nowhere as did the valleys. No terrain could be like that in RL.

It is true that automaticly generated content cannot surpas the quality of handcrafted cont

Re:An Old Joke

[Stubtify]

What about all the successful worms games? The randomness of the levels is what makes the game more fun, you never know what you're going to have to work with next. And you'll know that no one has played the level to death to achieve an unfair advantage.

Re:Worms and Scorched Earth

[ZzzzSleep]

Quoth Stubtify:

The randomness of the levels is what makes the game more fun, you never know what you're going to have to work with next. And you'll know that no one has played the level to death to achieve an unfair advantage.

Did Worms have the ability to specify some general characteristics for the maps like Scorch [classicgaming.com] did?

Randomly generated content

[Jerf]

One of my two "main" programming projects at the moment is a Rogue-like that tries to do for plot what Rogue did for level generation. I put "main" in quotes because it has since been overshadowed by the other main project I'm doing, but I still hope to get back to it someday.

For anybody else who would like to take this up, since you could probably finish at least a "0.1" release before I turn back to this project personally, I would point out what is probably "the way" to do that sort of thing. The fundamental problem with modern roguelikes is they are too low-level, where "the dungeon" is an array describing what is there, and "the engine" just manipulates this. Thus, "the engine" is only capable of generating really low-level events, like "X killed Y".

To get a "plot" in place, you need to generate a much higher-level representation of the world to start with. You need to start with what "groups" are in place (cities, towns, nations), maybe run through a routine that does high-level generation of the map (placing these groups in cities, etc.), then iterate down to the next level where the groups are given relationships and placed in actual buildings, then iterate on the landscape again, then build actual people in the context of the groups, then build the place for the people, etc. When you're done, you'll have not only a map like a current Roguelike does, but also an engine with a much higher-level understanding of what the map actually has on it, allowing quests like "Get X out of the evil henchmen's building and return them to Y", etc.

(Alternatively, you can try to "grow" the land, starting by placing down the general landscape, then adding settlements and using some basic economic rules to govern how they grow and interact, then try to create the "game" at the end.)

Obviously in a Slashdot post I can't explain too much, but IMHO at least in the Open Source efforts I've seen (and even many commercial ones) this is the fundamental mistake I've seen made at the architecture level that prevents this stuff from working. It probably seems obvious after you've thought about it for a while but it apparently isn't. From here you can probably fill it out too. (If not, perhaps you should be thinking of something else to do. ;-) )

One warning: You're going to need (or really wish you had) some actual Computer Science to pull this off well, specifically the study of expanding unrestricted grammars into final statements, which is essentially what this is, especially when it comes time to add links between the entities (for instance, antagonism between a "legitimate government" of a town and the underground theive's guild). It's not easy, but IMNSHO it's the only way likely to work.

I'm quite certain this is possible and I have a design half-sketched out, I just haven't had time to implement it until my other project becomes at least self-sustaining.

Re:Randomly generated content

[Snowspinner]

Some English professors I worked with in the past actually worked on something akin to this once. Their goal was to provide a demonstration of either the success or failure of structuralist models of literature, such as those offered by Vladimir Propp in his book Morphology of Folktales.

If you're not familiar with Propp or with structuralism, you really should be before you do any work on this project. The basic idea is that all stories of a given genre have a common core structure, and amount to filling i

Re:Randomly generated content

[RobotWisdom]

Shuffling in cardgames is just creating random content-- what's critical to a cardgame's success is that it be designed so that a randomly shuffled deck produces interesting variations in gameplay.

Applying this to Propp's story-elements, randomisation won't help unless the story elements are really orthogonal, which Propp's weren't. I proposed a much more orthogonal breakdown in my Anti-Math [robotwisdom.com] notation system, but it's not rich enough for gaming yet.

Propp's 1927 scheme is one of many I tried to track in my

Re:Randomly generated content

[Snowspinner]

The way that the Linear Modeling Kit works is that it randomizes each element of the story independently. The user puts in the basic structure - all of the elements as defined by Propp, and then for each element creates a number of entries that could fit there. Then the program shuffles the entries for each element, and strings them together to form a story.

There are some complicating elements - the ability to skip steps, which is crucial to Propp, and the ability to make flags that have the effect of not

Next big thing in FPS

[El]

My only complaint with Doom was that the levels were the same every time... it would be much more challenging and realistic when you didn't know where everything is when you entered a room. Of course, then you would also have to make the "secrets" much easier to find.

Re:Next big thing in FPS

[Darth Fredd]

Actually, I've been thinking about a doom plugin that would scan in nethack/rogue levels, or vice-versa.

Obvious problems are that nethack is an RPG, and that dooms slope feature would be useless, but with a little work, it could all be integrated.

"quakehack", anyone?

Hi-res doom with 2 POVs piped to 3d glasses == very realistic 3d. In theory.

Care to flame me again, El?

Re:Next big thing in FPS

[El]

Care to flame me again, El?

Well... no.
Your idea of making a hack to doom toimplement nethack random level generation is a good one... I hope you can get it to work.
I don't recall actually flaming you, but you were in my foes list because I perceived that you were flaming me. I may have responded to something you posted. If I have offended, I apologize. I share your perception that /. ACs have become particularly nasty, vicious, and personal lately. I assumed it was because M$ and SCO flunkies had infiltrat

SLIGE for Doom by Dave Chess

[dpilot]

Dave Chess wrote an automatic level generator for Doom, called SLIGE. Search against "SLIGE" and "doom" and you'll find it on top, add "chess" if you wish.

I've never actually tried one of these levels myself, but it is automatically generated content for a game, pertinent to the thread. Imagine a pseudorandom (deterministic, repeatable) in-game SLIGE based on x and y coordinates, a garbage-collecting in-core map, and you could have infinite space to play in. The map keeps expanding in your direction of travel, and it gets thrown away behind you. (There would be some problems of course, especially with switches, objects, and monsters.)

Re:SLIGE for Doom by Dave Chess

[mugnyte]

This is actually one of the biggest potentials for FPS/RPG/MultiPlayer that I can think of. Not exactly random, but a form of optimization in mapping (i.e. ungenerated unless visited by *anyone* in game). Problem is, I think it would get tremendously big before some sort of forced wrap would have to occur.

For single player, I'd love to see a game that employed this concept into a mapping concept. Imagine an Unreal world that didn't force paths, but you could wander. Dead zones and "overbearing" zones

Re:SLIGE for Doom by Dave Chess

[G-funk]

Perhaps instead of completely pseudo-random stuff, have certain goals and story options beforehand, and have variations based on it, like say you have 8-15 towns, one of these 6 npcs must be found spread amongst these towns, at some stage depending on which npcs where picked various story events occour, and you walk around randomly generated cities in a randomly generated landscape, and to people on the inside such as the developers they could quickly guess which parts of the story were being included / ex

Re:SLIGE for Doom by Dave Chess

[Suppafly]

morrowwind is pretty good if you are wanting a game that will let you wander off the linear path so to speak.. the only problem is that it is really easy to make it so that you can't complete the linear main quest that is built into the game.. luckily once you kill one of the main guys which would end the linearality, it warns you and lets you undo the move if you want..

Re:SLIGE for Doom by Dave Chess

[mugnyte]

Thats interesting, I'll look into it. However, not out of pacifist but boredom, I'm a little against having a "kill" capability in a game easily. It kinda cheapens the aspect of the immersion. If, then again, once you died all your saved games of that story were erased, we'd see a little more mutual relationship between player and nonplayer characters. I'm sure that game would last about 15 minutes in a reviewer's post.

Somehow though, I'd like a game to focus more on "equal levels" of NPCs. If they di

Re:SLIGE for Doom by Dave Chess

[Shiifty]

I'll have to try that out, I've become addicted to DOOM again, but with an updated Quake style interface ZDOOM [zdoom.org]

My favourite mod for DOOM was one that took all the items in the level and randomly changed them into something else. You could pick the percentages if you wanted, so I'd change them mostly into barrels and sargents. You really didn't have to shoot much, they blew themselves up pretty good LOL

Re:SLIGE for Doom by Dave Chess

[kisrael]

Wow, that sounds pretty cool.

rRootage [asahi-net.or.jp] is another random game, though limited: a "boss only" space shooter, where big enemy motherships get created for your blasting pleasure.

Other similar ideas are a few games that generate games based on music...there was that one (unreleased in the USA?) for PSX, MOnster Rancher, a few others based on MP3...

Are we still waiting for FPS to "randomize" your opponents, mixing 'em the visual appearance enough so every game doesn't feel like a battle against the clone armi

Re:SLIGE for Doom by Dave Chess

[danila]

It might be extremely cool, especially with low values for the "throw away" distance. What is a huge annoyance in GTA (characters and vehicles disappear) can become an excellent feature if applied to levels, especially if it can be done in complete 3D (unlimited in a vertical dimension as well). Add to that some crazy style (crazier than American McGee's Alice) and you have a cool and innovative game on your hands. The story could be about the world that fell into chaos and your quest to bring order back. T

Mission generation, etc

[MightyTribble]

The games I have the most fun with are those with decent random content generators. Done right, they can really add to the replayability of a game. Port Royale has suitably 'open-ended' gameplay (within the confines of its environment) through random mission generation and all the fun of trading.

The thing that really gets me, though, are games that are billed as 'open-ended', infinitely replayably, etc, that are instead cripplingly linear. (Republic : The Revolution is a great example of this - a game *crying out* for decent random mission generators, but instead has a lockstep set of objectives that you have to complete to advance ).

Randomly generated OS content

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had plenty to deal with over the years in randomly-generated OS behavior in Windows, with Blue Screens showing up at very inconsistent moments, and unexplained slowdowns and file corruption.

I guess it is all a game?

Nethack...

[AdamTrace]

I've been playing Nethack seriously now for the past 6 months, and not serious for the past, what, 15 years?

That game is such a classic, and it's mix of randomness and expected elements make it a fun, different experience every time. And while there exists that element of randomness (what will that scroll labelled FOOBIE BLETCH do?), you can always expect to find the Oracle and this level, or the entrance to the mines on one of these levels, etc.

In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts.

Thank you.

I know what FOOBIE BLETCH is!

[jonathan_the_ninja]

It's a scroll of enchant weapon. :D

SoFII

[Mike Hawk]

The random map generator in Soldier of Fortune II was pretty dope IMHO. For multiplayer. Some of the best CTF times I've had in an FPS were in that game because it was a different experience literally every time. Single player was not as good, however. Can anyone derive any useful insights from that?

Re:SoFII

[Mike Hawk]

I'd most prefer to play on 1000+ different maps with any number of humans. Only SoFII has this right now, to my knowledge.

Castle of the Winds?

[HanClinto]

Interesting that they didn't list Castle of the Winds [prohosting.com] (an old Windows 3.x game by Epic Megagames) as a Rogue spinoff.

Reading the article, as I read about the trap doors, the randomly enchanted/cursed objects, the randomly generated levels/monsters/drops, Castle of the Winds immediately came to mind. I'm frankly extremely puzzled why they didn't list this on the site -- it's not exactly a new game.

Probably because

[xenocide2]

It didn't really feature any random generation of levels.

Re:Probably because

[Drantin]

Actually, some of the maps were, but the top levels (ground, and 1st floor of the fort and cave) were static, items and monsters in the 2nd and lower levels of the dungeons were random...

Randomy generated thoughts

[lightspawn]

We played rogue because it was the only "game" in town. Now some games just make you "do" the dungeons to advance the plot and such - you wouldn't play these without a plot (remember a DC/GC release called "Evolution"? thought not).

Now some games (I guess like Diablo) are good enough so you're having fun as you're playing, rather than suffering for the sake of a later payoff. These are the kinds of games that can pull off random dungeon generation.

But talk to almost any serious RPG gamer and you'll hear randomly generated stuff sux. It's OK in the 50-floor-tower-of-leveling-up, but not in the main game.

No, it can be done right.

[Vaevictis666]

Take Ancient Domains of Mystery [www.adom.de] - This is a roguelike game in every sense of the word, and the only maps that are static are the world map, towns, and a select few dungeon floors.

There is only one pure level-up dungeon, the rest all have limitations and hard-coded stuff - ie the first dungeon will always have 7 floors, and it's associated quest will climax at that point. The floor layouts are always random, and in a roguelike game (where death is permanent) not having the same floorplan all the time is a

NOLF & NOLF2

[Dreadlord]

one of the games I was really impressed by its randomly generated stuff was no one lives forever, every time you reload a game, enemies and puzzle items are randomly positioned through out some parts of the level, requiring different strategy to solve the puzzles every time!

F-Zero X had random races

[edwdig]

F-Zero X on the N64 had a cup called the X cup, which consisted of randomly generated races. Unfortunately, most of the races were really bland. One time though I was playing multiplayer, with 1 other person and 2 computers racing. Shortly past the start was an almost 90 degree turn. The road wasn't level either, which made it harder to realize how bad the turn was. The two computer cars went flying off immediately. My friend and I just barely managed to stay on the course. That one race was a lot of fun, but otherwise the random courses don't offer much challenge. The only thing that makes them hard is you'll get random patches of track without any railing on the side, making it easy to fall off the course.

Girlfriend

[Gr33nNight]

If I wanted to play games that appear randomly, id get a girlfriend.

Re:Girlfriend

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

(+1, it's funny cuz it's true :)

Course, I have a good strategy for winning with women...

"I agree dear."

"You're absolutely right dear."

Well, to me, winning = surviving + nookie + being able to zone out and think about other stuff - pride doesn't enter the equation ;)

Re:Girlfriend

[Gr33nNight]

Ever played the fun game where if you agree with her, your wrong? Yeah, I get hours of enjoyment out of that one.

Re:Girlfriend

[Gr33nNight]

Now it is time for your inner asshole to go out on the prowl and score some.

Re:Girlfriend

[RisingSon]

If I wanted to play games that appear randomly, id get a girlfriend.

That game is way way way to expensive.

It's a creativity issue.

[eyepeepackets]

Computers can't be creative, at least not in the way humans _can_ be. The randomness of the Rogue levels was rather successful in making the game continuously challenging, but at a rather superficial level.

Compare this with a table game with five players and a DM for an ongoing game of AD&D (or other, insert your fav here) and you'll notice a truly _huge_ difference. Between the DM and the responses/actions of the other players, you have six people tossing out so much randomness a good DM actually spends a fair amount of energy keeping the game focused.

Perhaps one way around this problem for developers of computer-assisted (or just computer games, whatever) is to build into the game resources which mimic the random creativity a DM would supply during a table-top game. One way might be to supply with the game a database of random elements which could "happen" during any particular part/level/area of a game. Have the game engine check for triggers (events/times/states) which would allows for possible "random" insertion events.

For such a method to be successful though, the database would have to be large enough to seem truly random to the player (say BIG as in many,many possible random events.)

The Baldur's Gate PC game did try something like this in that when moving from city to city you might often be waylaid by some nasties, but that was mostly an annoying failure because it didn't seem to be random at all, IMO.

Re:It's a creativity issue.

[cbiffle]

> Computers can't be creative,
> at least not in the way humans _can_ be.

Oh, poppycock.

We humans have a very nice, cushy, arrogant view of human creativity. I see it in movies, where the humans win over the 'calculating machines' by creativity or love or some hogwash like that. Scifi's traditionally very bad about this as well.

My degree is in psychology with a tendency toward physiology. The brain is a deterministic machine -- or at least, as deterministic as anything else. This hypothesis is as strong as nearly anything else in science: it fits the data well, and has yet to be proven false.

A statement like "computers can't be creative" has the assumption (correct me if I'm wrong) that a deterministic, calculating, "pure-logic" machine like a computer isn't capable of producing the same level of creative work as a human. I would argue that a human is just as deterministic as a computer, though the calculation and logic functions in a very different fashion.

I say the problem is in the algorithms. I've seen properly trained computers draw brand new Picassos and compose fugues as good as anything from Bach. "Oh," the critics would say, "they're just taking the input data and modifying it and reproducing it."

Yes. Yes they are. And so are you. That's why we have a concept of 'inspiration.' Of 'derivative works.' That's why each song that's written, each house that's designed, isn't a completely new, off-the-wall creation. That's why we can categorize things into 'styles' and 'genres.'

A properly trained (read: programmed) computer could generate levels for your-game-of-choice that would be on par with a human designer. And chances are good the computer would take some directions that the human wouldn't have thought of.

By contrast, I doubt Bob off the street would design a very interesting level for Counterstrike. It's all in the input and training.

Re:It's a creativity issue.

[eyepeepackets]

"Oh, poppycock."

Keep poppy's cock outta this, please.

But seriously, here are some thoughts on your reply.

"We humans have a very nice, cushy, arrogant view of human creativity. I see it in movies, where the humans win over the 'calculating machines' by creativity or love or some hogwash like that. Scifi's traditionally very bad about this as well."

Hmm, that's rather out of left field. I didn't mention anything about scifi.

"My degree is in psychology with a tendency toward physiology. The brain is a

Re:It's a creativity issue.

[SamBeckett]

I can disprove you hypothesis if you allow my one Axiom .

Axiom 1. A human can take any turing machine and within a finite amount of time determine if it halts or not.

Theorem : Humans are not deterministic machines.

Proof:
See Turing.

Re:It's a creativity issue.

[You're All Wrong]

You can disprove his hypothesis much more easily if you are allowed a simpler axiom:

Axiom 1: He's wrong

Just as likely to be accepted as your axiom.

YAW.

Re:It's a creativity issue.

[ThePyro]

My degree is in psychology with a tendency toward physiology. The brain is a deterministic machine -- or at least, as deterministic as anything else. This hypothesis is as strong as nearly anything else in science: it fits the data well, and has yet to be proven false.

It's one thing to say that computers and brains are both deterministic. It's a VERY different matter, however, to conclude that they are both computationally equivalent.

DFAs, PDAs, and Turing machines are all deterministic models of comp

Yeah, sure.

[jensend]

Sure, the "deterministic logic-cruncher" theory of the mind fits the data well- as long as you have deterministic psychologists and physiologists selecting the data which are to be fitted and what constitutes fitting the data. The reason the deterministic-reductionistic thesis has been held to so firmly in fields such as those is because it is an article of faith for the fields, not one of their theses but one of their presuppositions. After all, if human actions really are underdetermined, why should one b

Re:It's a creativity issue.

[LordMyren]

"creativity" in algorithms is more often a euphimism for bad things than an effort to instill "inspiration in thought" or whatever artsy definition you want therefore.

level designers have styles. i still drool under thoughts of some of the quake neo-gothic-industrial-xyz levels i loved fragging down. making an algorithm to emulate a style in level design is possible, albiet hard, but even the best of self training systems has difficulty generating its own styles.

before you even talk about style generati

Pre-compiled randomness

[madmaxx]

I was thinking about this problem the other day, as it relates to open-source game development. One of the main problems with small-scale game development is the creation of content (it's a lot of effort), and algorithmic content would make it easier for a smaller-group of developers to build a good game.

But a problem with random content is that it can suck, like impossible nethack levels, etc., as the algorithms have no great sense of athstetics or any of the other abilities require to make 'good' levels. Designing algorithms to test for athstetics is also difficult, and probably only worth doing for a few cases.

The conclusing I came to was that algorithms could be used to pre-generate content (like maps, etc), in the sense of the "millions-of-monkeys" problem, except with a bit of focus. Algorithms would generate content (maps, shapes, etc.), and then the work would be filtered by the developers, and the good stuff made part of the game. The algorithms could also use some sort of learning to improve the generation process, similar to spam filtering - "this is spam" vs. "this is not spam" user-initiated filter improvement.

This sort of approach would really make small-shop game development easier, as would improving (and standardizing) content-production tools and processes.

Stupid question...

[Anonymous Coward]

how far should randomness be taken in games?

..stupid answer : "As far as possible!"

PlayStation 2 .Hack-Infestation generated content

[Anonymous Coward]

The game uses a randomly generated battle zone, with the random seed based on the name of the zone. The player selects the name of the zone by picking three keywords from three separate lists. This can be seen in more detail on gamefaqs .Hack keywords effects [gamefaqs.com]

While the zone weather, day/night, and element type are determined from the keywords, while the locations of enemies, scenery, and the dungeon entrance on the map appear to be random. They are consistent for each visit to the zone, so the RNG must be seeded from the combination of keywords. The dungeon maze within the zone is also randomly generated, by connecting various prerendered rooms by matching up doors. The level generator only needs to connect rooms so that the doors match up and rooms don't overlap. Rooms may have multiple doors, allowing for loops and dead-ends. Dungeons are multiple levels deep, controlled by the difficultly level of the zone.

Some keyword combinations are "special" and contain plot elements and bosses and/or cutscenes. These keywords combinations are revealed within the game, or by watching the related anime series.

Anyone remember Impossible Mission on the C64?

[Radius9]

That game was quite fun, and all the rooms where randomly generated each time you played. In addition, it was always possible to beat the game.

Re:Anyone remember Impossible Mission on the C64?

[You're All Wrong]

My first radomly generated games, that I got totally addicted to, were Mazogs and 3DMonster Maze on the ZX81, which pre-dates the C64. I remember "FAST" mode, where the screen would be disabled, to speed up the maze generation too. Cool!
However, even they borrowed from the hack/rogue family of games.

Toejam and Earl III'srandom levels not new!

[Chris_Jefferson]

Toejam and Earl III's random level isn't a new feature, because the first Toejam and Earl was doing it way back near the beginning of the megadrive. Sure it's got slightly more advanced, but having played the original the "feel" of the way it makes maps is very similar. Interestingly (or not) Toejam and Earl II didn't have randomly generated maps, possibly because it was side-scrolling and I imagine making interesting maps would have been harder (because you are much more restricted on what it is possible for a valid map to look like)

Right now we're not ready to just throw away...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...human designers. But I'm not convinced that people are making that much effort at generating random puzzles and levels. Just randomly throwing stuff together isn't going to get you anywhere, but machines can appear to do interesting stuff.

Consider playing chess against a machine. Sometimes it can really feel like their is a plot-line behind the moves the machine is making. It seems to me that the same might be true of levels in games if people put as much effort into a random level generator as they pu

The 90% rule:

[Thedalek]

Let's say you make a program which will generate a random level for, oh just for argument's sake, Doom. Let's say you don't really put that many restrictions on what it can and cannot do, just that it must make a level which is contiguous (or connected by teleporters) and doesn't have any passages smaller than the player character.

Most of these are going to be duller than a chisel made out of Play-doh. Some of them will be exceedingly bad or overly complicated. Some of them will be enjoyable, and a very

Darklands

[gtshafted]

Does anyone remember an old RPG game by Microprose called Darklands [links.net]? Darklands was a very different game. It was a game set in Medieval Germany that "generates" infinite "quests" ranging from stealing from Medici merchants, cleansing satanic sites, to helping pilgrims reach the next city safely. The game successfully captures the "feel" of the times and it was very original: the Catholic Church is both holy and full of intellectual elitists (excommunication or something close to it, strongly affects your ch

Randomness vs. AI

[DarkGamer20X6]

There has been much talk about design, or puzzle creation, or tasks that require a "human" mind. I would like to bring into question exactly what random content (specifically randomly-generated dungeons) brings to games as far as gameplay is concerned. I believe that using AI to extend and replace the capabilities of random content could create a better gameplay experience, even if at this point it lacks the ability to design, etc.

So, what does random content bring to a game? At first glance, I would sa

More on Random Content

[ShannonA]

We've had a few other columnists talk about random content at Skotos. Here's a few of my favorites:

• The Value of the Random Dungeon [skotos.net] - Sam Witt on building blocks for random game environments.
• The Dynamic Dilemma, Part One [skotos.net] - My own thoughts on issues with static content.
• The Dynamic Dilemma, Part Two [skotos.net] - Randomness in object recreation.
• The Dynamic Dilemma, Part Three [skotos.net] - Replacing randomness with player intervention.

Creative??

[Rutje]

> Computers can't be creative, > at least not in the way humans _can_ be. Human creativity is nothing more than random ideas that are filtered for quality!

Seven Cities of Gold

[c64cryptoboy]

The random content (continents actually) generator in Seven Cities of Gold made the game. Of course, waiting 10+ minutes for it to complete was annoying, but this wasn't uncommon in 1984.

They forgot Atari's "Adventure" for randomness

[kisrael]

Atari did have an excellent "randomized" game--mode 3 on Adventure, if memory serves, would scramble the basic elements. Admittedly I think the level layout was constant, and there weren't THAT many items to scramble, but still, when mixed in with the chaos provided by the bat, it had the makings of some interesting gaming.

*PLUG*

[Lonath]

I have a project [sf.net] in which I am trying to completely generate a MUD and then run a massive simulation to have a dynamic world.

It isn't about whether or not the output is "as good as" what a human can do. It's about the fact that games and art in general are patterns of symbols, and using computers to record and playback symbols and patterns that people create isn't very interesting to me. It's not that I think taking pictures or recording music or writing a story is bad, it's just that computers can do so m

which is why

[butane_bob2003]

C++ needs a 'sometimes' keyword. it would allow you to easily create random behavior in any code without messing with random numbers and the like. It would take an integer probability, (the higher, the more likely)
for example:

/* Theres a 30% chance that a grue will appear */
sometimes(30)
{
room->injectGrue( );
}

Re:which is why

[inQ]

#define sometimes(x) if(rand()RAND_MAX/100*(x))

Re:which is why

[inQ]

#define sometimes(x) if(rand()(RAND_MAX/100*(x)))

Pseudo-randomly generated content... Daggorath

[Destoo]

Actually, this looks more like fractally-compressed content.

On the TRS-80 Color computer, Dungeons of Daggorath.
5 levels.
The total game was 8k. Not enough room to store all the information in there.

The dungeon was around 40x40. 5 floors.
each room taking one bit (is there a monster, is there a door north, is there a secret door north, etc), that would have meant 7.5k on a 8k cartridge.

Not very practical...

So instead, using a feature of the coco's random number generator (seeding it with a negative numb