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."

want to be "evolutionary"?

[SolusSD]

use a functional programming language. prove mathematically that your functions are correct. and technically, it should be fairly easy to write compilers that automatically thread the program due to the nature functions are written in a functional programming language. i encourage everyone, especially the writer of this article, to read up on it. Haskell (a programming language) is a good place to start.

Functional

[hey]

*Functional* programming sometimes seems like magic. Maybe that's what they are talking about.
Its not new but still cool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programmin g [wikipedia.org]

Re:Eh?

[tundra_man]

Yes I would have to agree. The method of programming being discussed is more akin to a Finite State Machine (FSM) in which you describe various states, events which cause state transitions and of course the define what all happens during the transition. It is a valid programming methodology and is used in telephony and other places. One popular application for working with such code was Rational ObjecTime which became part of the Rational Rose product before Rational was bought by IBM. Where FSM has troubles is with switch statements as they become quite complex (switch is the same as many IF and IF ELSE in many ways) which may be why the author was so negative to IF statements. As for games size, yes games have gotten bigger, this is however more to do with all the artwork and sounds that accompany the games and not the software driving them. As for the developer's of comment "nearly everything is created procedurally" this would explain the smaller size not because of "procedural programming" but because rather then grabbing an image or sound from artwork on a CD they are creating it in code. For example I can write some code to render a sphere, with the API allowing for color, material, lighting and others to be defined, now I can write small bits of code to call the API and create a thousand spheres all with unique characteristics, all with minimal amount of CD space being used (lets say 1K for the API definition and 100bytes per sphere = 1K+(100B*1000) = 98.6Kb). Now if I was to have 1000 unique spheres using artwork you would have 1000 unique images saved on CD plus a smaller API to load them (0.2Kb API, 100Kb per image = 0.2Kb + 100Kb *100 = 12.2Mb). Even if you were to do some optimization, which you would, the difference is clearly visible.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

bzzt, wrong.

[Inoshiro]

They meant procedural content generation, like L systems [wikipedia.org], used to make believable looking plants that grow and change over time.

It's all about repeated iteration over a particular type of finite automata with a particular string.. Easily done if you've taken your 3xx/4xx graphics an theory classes, but perhaps past what most technology reporters are capable of.

So, to summarize:
* C is an example of procedural programming.
* Haskell is an example of functional programming.
* L-systems are an example of procedural content generation (content generated by a procedure, in a deterministic fashion).

Re:All you need to read is this sentence...

[Krilomir]

Wasn't the Firehose supposed to weed out stuff like this? What went wrong?

Re:Vaporware

[Movi]

Wrong. Duke Nukem Forever was first started using a heavily modified Quake 2 Engine(much like in spirit of Half-Life which used a heavily modified Quake 1 Engine), then near the end of development cycle a switch to the Unreal Engine was decided, with most of the work done scrapped.
By the time they were anywhere close to beeing done UT2k3 was out, so they decided to use Unreal Engine 2. As far as i know they either use the updated Unreal 2 Engine (and inherited the fixes from UT2k4) or are working with Unreal Engine 3. But then again, this is Duke Nukem Forever and Ever, so who knows? Maybe they're waiting for ID Tech 5 to switch? ;]

Re:Starflight?

[GreggBz]

They used fractal algorithms to generate terrain lifeforms, minerals, and in fact the whole universe.
Starflight I and II were written in Forth, using a custom compiler. Here is some old design documentation [geocities.com] from Starflight.
It's interesting stuff.

I am in fact recreating the game (or, rather a game much like it using entirely original content) using many similar algorithms.
Check out my webpage. [outerspacecrew.net]