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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

I say this as someone currently developing a vast space game using procedural generation: The danger with procedural generation is "remix boredom." The user can feel, "Oh, this is just a remixed variation of the same stuff."

The reason why we don't feel that way about the real world, is because the real world doesn't just have "remix procedural." You have to have some player-significant emergent effects coming out of the procedural generation. You see this in Minecraft. You even see it in the 1st generation of the original Elite game. The player's interest in your procedural world is directly dependent on how deep these emergent effects are. (So the emergent effects can be shallow or deep, with the corresponding amount of interest from the user.) (Which is why my procedural generated world primarily exists to support a procedural generated technology tree.)

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One could take the Dwarf Fortress mechanism of generating a complete history and take it to the extreme: simulate the formation of entire solar systems based on seed values that effect randomly generated planetary masses (and resulting gravity), atmosphere, tectonic events, ice ages, warming periods that carve valleys/lakes/rivers into the landscape, biological events influencing the creation of life based on the planet's properties and the landscape, insect swarms that ravage an area, and so on. Simulate meteor impacts which might destroy life, visits from alien species, etc. Then simulate the effects of any emergent properties on the landscape. So instead of:

  p(tree_goes_here) > random()

And then randomly placing various tree models according to the RNG output, your random events produce a story. You should be able to look at a series of mountains and trace it back to tectonic events, then if one mountain has a patch of trees missing, you should be able to see that there were various events that either removed the trees (eg: some local civilization) or a Tunguska-like meteor strike cleared a path and made the soil infertile for growing more trees.

If one did this, such a game would have value not only from the game itself but it might open up a whole subculture of archaeologists who go from planet to planet studying the evidence to piece together the events that led to the planet's present state.

Otherwise, you're right. Each world would end up being different much in the same way that listening to static noise is different each time you hear it.

One could take the Dwarf Fortress mechanism of generating a complete history and take it to the extreme

I'm going to do something like this, but for one specific class of enemies: The dire "it's time to do your best to survive" encounter. Specifically, I'm going to see if I can't use genetic algorithms to evolve "kill the crap out of the player" combat groups. You can't write a fitness function for fun or player involvement. But you can write a fitness function for "kill the crap out of a player" -- even equalized for level. So the trick is to hand-balance the timing/opportunities for a player to encounter the dire situation.

I'm going to let players post-mortem the genetic algorithm tuned AIs and ship/item configurations. So instead of archaeologists, there would be hackers and xenobiologists.

Random brainstorm: Introduce a Dark Souls type async-community aspect: Players can come across the wrecks/corpses of other players and are rewarded somehow for figuring out what happened and why; their analysis becomes feedback/evaluation function output.

Actually, I have ship corpses right now. All I have to do is to make them persistent past the player "logging out." Of course, this seems rife for griefing.

Do you mean that the detective player's analysis would be, say, an input to the fitness functions of a genetic algorithm? That sounds super interesting. Would you care to elaborate on what form the analysis would take, in order to be both parsable by the system and writable by a player?

I have an idea for a fairly simple possibly: The user just declares that certain features of the scene are interesting and relevant, maybe by "taking a sample", so that the algorithm can boost the weight of inputs that have a relationship to those features. But, I suspect that you have something much more interesting in mind...

So the question is how to complete the feedback loop. The Adversary needs something causally coupled to its victory or defeat that it can use to improve its monsters.

I think that the most straightforward way to do this is to have the Archaeologist player indicate features of the combatants or the scenario that led to victory/defeat, like you said. The Adversary then uses those to guide its optimizer. For example, you might indicate something like "The Monster won because: Monster had high armor, Player had low jump height, this platform in the middle of the room". The system then knows to put those features together more often.

Hmm, now that I think about it, there's actually a metagame issue here: Players will tend to support each other by trashing the AI. It'd be more effective to set players against each other somehow. Or we need a better way to reward players.

So what we want to do is tie the monster's success to the player's success. A simple answer is "I want this": The player gets to choose something to take from the monster's ship and add to their own. The Adversary might be able to use that somehow, but there's a little bit of a mismatch there because the player's ship and style will be different than the monster's, and a feature might be selected to shore up something about the player's ship rather than to point out a useful bit of the monster.

Maybe have the investigator player redo the fight with tweaks. The player's job might be to change the monster until it loses a rematch. Could do this by having the player take over the past player's ship and fight "in simulation", or could just do it automatically. Player gets a better reward the less they have to change the enemy to win, which encourages efficient changes. The Adversary then changes the monster in the opposite direction and sends it back out.

Could split things up into teams and set players against each other on a grand scale? The player's job is to find battlefields where their team's monsters lost and then optimize the allied monsters. You never actually see another player - might do something asymmetric here, with a dimensional boundary or something that prevents players from interacting with other players except via salvaged guncam footage from allied monsters.

Maybe have the investigator player redo the fight with tweaks.

Now that I've had some hours to think, this'd actually work better in a single-player format: The player can only advance by tweaking enemies until they can defeat them, knowing that the next time they encounter that enemy it'll be stronger in exactly the wrong way. Then it becomes a complex game of managing how the enemies grow and balancing tactical concerns ("how do I beat this one enemy") versus strategic concerns ("I could beat this one by decrementing its dex, but then it'd be unstoppable in the future.").

EDIT: this feels a little bit like "warning forever" but maybe with more depth and a clearer focus?

Or we need a better way to reward players.

So what we want to do is tie the monster's success to the player's success.

One thing I've played with is to let Players take "contracts" to build security drone warships. The players will get paid a small royalty, plus a sizeable bonus for combat success.

To keep players from trying to rig the system in their favor too easily, the AI scripting language can be processed by the genetic algorithm. The players will still be able to exploit the system by nefarious means, but they will have to create bots that are tough on the surface, and hope that not too many others will discover and also exploit their backdoors. (I would love it if players started doing this!)

That's pretty neat! Reminds me a little bit of the old terrarium game that microsoft used to demonstrate .NET, or maybe of a version of spore that doesn't suck, or even a little bit of the nature of open-source: build something, send it out into the world, see it grow and develop from where you started it.

Genius nefarious builds could definitely be flavored as a reward, and I agree that that's one of the big draws of this system: if you manage to build something that's good enough to survive and spread but still flawed in a way that you can exploit, kudos to you! Reward: you get to break into anything that's guarded by your creations. :P Just good luck building something that you can exploit that not enough other people can for it to not succeed.

(I think I'd love to check this game out when it's further along, BTW. Do you have a news list I could throw an email address at?)

"Reassembly" does this well-- you build ships with prices for every component and roam the galaxy, fighting a variety of built-in and player-created enemy ships.

Getting destroyed encourages you to try new tactics to counter the superior designs and build more efficiently.

Coincidentally, this is exactly how Minds from Iain M. Banks's Culture books spend much of their free time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mind_(The_Cultu...

Playing devil's advocate, I think this is a dangerous road to go down. I'm in my second year of making a procedural game, and I think the existential danger involved is that of making a game that's more interesting to develop than it is to play.

That is, it's more challenging and rewarding to me to simulate tectonic movement than it is to generate terrain from random noise and tweak it until it feels okay. But the important question is, is the game noticeably more interesting either way? Do mountains affect gameplay in a way that gets more compelling if they're placed according to tectonic movement?

There are certainly games where the answer is yes, but there are a hell of a lot more where it isn't. And if your game is one of the latter, then complicated simulations are a dangerous trap - not only do you waste time, you also hinder yourself by making your game's content harder to tune (in that you can't just, say, make the mountains 30% higher if mountain height is determined by a complicated process).

Games are simplified, stylized reality e.g. chess is war. So are some fps: using real locations as maps isn't as much fun as carefully balanced maps, taking sightlines into account, chokepoints, with interesting and complex strengths and vulnerabilities of positions within each section, and all sections close to each other.

Similar to fiction: it's more dramatic and makes more sense than ordinary life.

A simulation is akin to a tech demo, which can be impressive, but usually isn't a game.

Switching gears, I'm interested in how you've done tectonics. I was thinking of doing it as a magma fluid simulation (very slow, only one timestep every few hundred frames) and using convection to move and rotate plates.... though it turns out, the cause of tectonic movement isn't nearly that well understood. My concern is that using a fixed direction/speed will eventually mess up the world. If tectonics really are governed by convection, movement must change at the end of that magma cycle. Maybe a bit over the top! How are you doing tectonics?

One (expensive) solution to the 30% mountain height problem is monte carlo: rerun the simulation til it fits the parameters. What's nice is that you don't distort the generation probabilities, apart from the explicit constraint. Of course, not plausible for very unlikely constraints, esp. combinations thereof!

If you just want the end-produce (not an ongoing, evolving world like mine), some people have used a more declarative approach. e.g. Instead of generating rivers by waterflow and erosion over a terrain, you can generate a hierarchy of rivers and tributaries first, work out the watersheds implied, then generate the terrain based on that constraint.

I'm not doing any tectonics. Sorry if I was unclear, I meant it would be an interesting challenge, but in my game it doesn't make sense to worry about, because one doesn't interact with the world at a scale where you notice how the mountains are laid out.

At a more fundamental level though, doing evolutionary-type stuff in a procedural world is a problem I'm wrestling with. I'm running an infinite world that's generated one chunk at a time, like Minecraft, so you can't, say, "start by generating all the rivers, and then...". Obviously this means everything has to be deterministic, but also it means that whatever macro-sized calculations I do need to be re-done for each chunk, or else cached somehow, etc.

I've looked for articles on such things but not had much luck. Maybe others here have approaches they've tried?

I think you might be able to solve this with certain level of laziness, at a cost that you would sometimes need to generate more than just a single chunk.

I.e. once you encounter a river, you will then generate the whole river, from source, to sink (either you have a sea, or some other already existing, but undiscovered river?)

You would then need to account for 3 states of your world: a) blank canvas b) pre-generated but yet unexplored terain c) already explored terain

The world in state b) would then be the one both cached and available for re-calculating :-)

If I were you I would read up on pen&paper sandbox designs, i.e. Stars Without Number [1] relies on lots of random tables to generate a sector of space with different factions/tech-levels/ecosystems, combined with rules for faction interaction. This gives it a nice "I am just a small ship in a big universe" feel :) You can generate example sector [2]

[1] http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/86467/Stars-Without-Numb... [2] http://swn.emichron.com/

Perhaps you could try a multi-resolution chunk system - LoD for chunks.

For large scale features like rivers, generate those at coarse resolution on very large chunks. When generating the detailed chunks, take input from the coarser resolution levels which overlap the same spatial region, and add fine scale detail.

A couple of levels of detail might suffice in practice, but if you want to go crazy you can more or less make as many as you like: As long as each level is downscaled by at least some constant factor of the more detailed level below it, you'll only have O(log(N)) overhead for O(N) chunks which is small even for very large N.

Compare mipmapping, which is more or less the opposite of this process.

To add to my own comment a bit, fundamentally I think this boils down to randomness vs. hidden state. It feels very "emergent" for a game to have lots of subtly interconnected systems, but if they depend on factors the player doesn't know about, or depend in ways the player can't possibly intuit, then they're indistinguishable from randomness, so you might as well have flipped a coin.

For me the canonical example of this is Nethack, which is full of such things - monsters that are slightly more dangerous during a (real-life) full moon, and so on. One can argue that NH is a special case, with its rich tradition of players reading the source code as they play, but in general I think it's an anti-pattern for game developers to beware.

You can create an AI that never makes mistakes and always defeats the player but the point of the AI is to make the game fun not impossible to win.

> Do mountains affect gameplay in a way that gets more compelling if they're placed according to tectonic movement?

One of the supposed problems with No Man's Sky is planetary isotropy (uniformity at a global scale, variation only on a local level). They're all single biomes and once you've seen the local area, you might as well find another planet. But you're right: I don't know that people would be any more impressed with planets if they were more 'realistic' in regards to geomorphology.

imo its not the rules of reality that specifically matter in a game; its that there are rules at all, and that they're interesting ones. Emulating reality is just an "easy" way to achieve that. Games are inherently a challenge to learn, understand, and best an instantiated mini-universe.

when the universe follows simply-governed rules, then of course there's little for the player to do; he wins by understanding, and understanding simple things is, well, simple.

And ofc, the internal rules can very well be trivial to implement. Its the rules to from the players viewpoint that matter. And vice versa; the engine could be infinitely complex, but if all it does is spawn the same mountain repeatedly, then there's not much left once the player bests the first.

Introversion (creators of Prison Architect, Uplink, Darwinia and Defcon) made this mistake with their cancelled game "Subversion". They started creating elaborate mechanisms and procedurally generated cities only to realize that the entire intricate "bank heist" missions could basically be solved by shooting people and taking their keys.

IOW, they tried so hard to make the game realistic that the intended gameplay was no longer enforceable. Setting up all these intricate puzzles and writing the procedural generators was fun, but actually playing the game was immensely dull unless you went out of your way not to take the path of least resistance.

They ended up using some of the lessons learned in Prison Architect by making the "level design" the actual gameplay. There's actually a very interesting presentation of how Subversion was intended to be played versus how it would have actually been played somewhere on YouTube.

As a counterpoint, RimWorld is a game that's largely based on procedurally generated worlds with heavy inspiration from Dwarf Fortress. But the entire premise of the game is that you build a colony which the game tries to actively challenge to create an interesting story for you.

IOW, they tried so hard to make the game realistic that the intended gameplay was no longer enforceable

Realism is sometimes a misguided goal. Games are media, just like movies. What you want most of the time isn't realism, but an impression of realism. Robert Crumb and his son sometimes do "realistic" portraits, but in the biographical movie about Crumb, he reveals that his "realistic" portraits actually contain very subtle elements of caricature, to draw the user's attention to the most interesting aspects of the subject's face.

Contrast this with films of war vs. actual war. Head-cam movies of modern soldiers in combat look like people in battle gear taking cover while yelling at each other about people you can't see or barely see, then calling in air support. There's nothing cinematic or easily parseable by the viewer. If you're on a modern battlefield, and you're posing for the cameras in a nicely composed scene laid out by the "Rule of Three" you're likely to get shot in the very next second.

Documentaries and action films are very different things. Both of those are very different from documentary-styled fictional films. Analogies to sandboxes, various other game genres, and sandboxy games apply.

I'm in my second year of making a procedural game, and I think the existential danger involved is that of making a game that's more interesting to develop than it is to play.

I think the key comes down to basics: Games are media. One of the key attributes of great media is a focus on the audience experience. So if you're going to spend a lot of effort on procedural generation, then this procedural generation had better be "paying rent" commensurate to the resources taken up by it.

If your game is about tactical improvisation and combat, then the procedural generation should be directly contributing to enhancing those experiences; therefore tweak the statistical properties of procedurally generated tactically useful things to enhance the user experience. Likewise if your game is about survival, or managing resources, or what have you.

If your game is about viewing scenery, then good luck to you. People will get "remix boredom." Furthermore, if you've sunk all this energy into producing "interesting" to view scenery, then people are let down by your tactics and combat -- well go figure!

Awhile back, I wrote a library[1] to wrap a hex grid around a sphere (technically, there are 12 pentagons so it isn't a true hex grid, but close enough) and perturbed the elevation via perlin noise and then wrote some cellular automata-type vegetation simulations.

Several types of plants would grow, and randomly catch on fire and burn half the planet to the ground, and so on. I had a primitive water cycle, too; water flows to low points or gets absorbed by plants or evaporates. When plants burn, they release their moisture into the air, which rains back down on the ground. It's interesting how small changes to the cellular automata logic can cause major changes in emergent behavior.

That was a very fun experience and I could imagine it being the basis of a game. And being a finite world (unlike Minecraft's practically infinite expanse) it's computationally tractable to simulate a complete ecosystem that's constantly changing; even the parts you haven't explored yet.

[1] https://wiki.haskell.org/IcoGrid

You've given me flashbacks to SimEarth, which I spend a good deal of time playing with as a kid. It was a weird "game", but a modern version I could play on current hardware would be a lot of fun, I think.

Have you ever heard of 'space engine'[0]? It is not a game, more something like static a simulation. But the generation of random planets works kind of like you just described. There are no rocks or living objects on the surface (yet) but I think the generated geography is pretty and rich in features.

[0]: http://en.spaceengine.org/

> remix boredom

A sentiment captured perfectly by: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/08/17/infinite-and-i...

Right, but if that gooey puke colored special snowflake was the only source of a power coupling compatible with a laser amplifier that could work with your rare Blatovian power generator that only has the 0.025 inertial penalty and enables your new fighter's super hit and run tactic, then you would totally give a bunch of !@$%&#.

EDIT: That sounds snide but I'm actually being sincere. I'm planning on including items in my game from a procedurally generated tech tree with location-dependent item availability.

So, how do you create benefits that stack like that, without making the game too easy? With a procedural generator, it's difficult to determine what accomplishments will be hard and what will be easy.

All those components you mentioned could appear right near the users spawn point, or they could all be impossibly hard to gather, due to procedural randomness.

So, how do you create benefits that stack like that, without making the game too easy? With a procedural generator, it's difficult to determine what accomplishments will be hard and what will be easy.

There are geometrical properties that let me tune how hard certain combinations will be to find, statistically.

EDIT: Also, almost all benefits will come with some kind of penalty or incompatibility. It will be impossible to build a perfect ship that does everything well. Instead, you will be able to easily build a ship that does one very narrow thing rather well, one thing badly, but generally sucks otherwise. Also, you should be able to make something that does 2 things above average, one thing non-sucky, but otherwise sucks.

I was going to suggest some form of automated testing during development and monte-carlo simulation of games to run a batch of "10,000 playthroughs a night", paired with a cost-function to "evaluate" the strength of a character-build (it can be as simple as "total damage" or "total DPS") and see if some outlier(s?) appear.

That's probably a good idea.

But you can also pre-empt a lot of problems by designing the system around physical limitations. Many games have done that for a long time. E.g. I believe Terminus included things like mass for components, so adding all kinds of extras had a cost in fuel usage and maneuverability. So if you did build a ship loaded with the most powerful weapons, you could, but it'd also be a slow, hard to control, big target.

Mass, volume, energy expenditure, waste heat - there are lots of factors you can add to make it hard to exploit. Of course, you need to tune those factors, but it makes it less likely for really extreme effects.

I totally want players to have extremely powerful effects -- but coupled with really big penalties.

Yeah, that makes sense. Powerful is fun, but not if it becomes unbeatable.

Yes, but even well designed games (from a gameplay pov) can have unexpectedly powerfull builds, like what happened with Starcraft 2 and the genetic-algorithm build order[0]. So simulating builds/gameplays can give you another edge at detecting strange/powerful scenarios.

I also think you should rely on player feedback and community to spot this kind of things, but that could become time consuming if you're a lone developer.

[0] http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/11/using-genetic-algorithms-to-...

Absolutely - you can't get away without testing, and I agree simulation is probably a necessity given the complexity no matter how much the design tries to counter it.

If you go too far into that direction you might end up with the same problem as "Inside a star filled sky".

If you have three attack upgrades you are very powerful but only have one live. If you die one of your upgrades will be replaced with a health upgrade ruining your build. Therefore if you want a three attack upgrade build you need to make sure that you don't die. The only reliable way is to just have two range upgrades and a bounce upgrade. Most enemies can't get into your range but it's still possible to get hit by being overwhelmed from too many enemies. If you die you get a health upgrade which also happens to solve this weakness of the build. It turns out if you want to get good at the game this is the only viable build despite there being thousands of possible upgrade combinations.

No, I still don't. Games to me are about interesting choices. I don't care about rare "loot", or about finding yet another key to open this lock, or about improving some score by 0.35 angstroms. I care about "do I castle kingside or queenside? Because if I castle queenside then my rook will be opposite his queen and blah blah blah but if I castle kingside then I won't have to worry about a quick a5 strike with the potential to undermine my b pawn." These choices (with chess only as an example) are interesting because they have serious consequences that can be reasonably foreseen but are not totally obvious.

It's sometimes the case that the space between reasonably foreseeable and totally obvious is a very fine narrow one, but then your game might be lacking in depth. Adding procedural puke special snowflake enemies doesn't add any more depth than "rare Blatovian power generators" does, unless the tradeoff over using a "Snargglemoofian power generator" is that your ship can no longer turn left or something.

No, I still don't. Games to me are about interesting choices. I don't care about rare "loot", or about finding yet another key to open this lock, or about improving some score by 0.35 angstroms.

That's totally not what I was getting at. It's more like, "do I castle kingside or queenside? Because if I castle queenside then my rook will be opposite his queen...?" The low inertial penalty is probably the rare (actually statistically, as opposed to "rare") quality of that particular item -- and it would still come with some other form of penalty. (Like a really PITA set of compatibility requirements and high fragility.)

unless the tradeoff over using a "Snargglemoofian power generator" is that your ship can no longer turn left or something.

I hadn't thought of "your ship can't turn left." It might be a great tradeoff for something that would otherwise be an overpowered weapon, combined with another kind of movement penalty. I have thought of things like a shield upgrade that gives you really high resists across 120 degrees of arc, but which isn't configurable. "Your ship can't turn left" might be a really good penalty for a high resist/partial arc shield augment that mostly covers your right side.

EDIT: An even better idea: you get high resists over a 120 degree arc, but then you also get a susceptibility penalty over the rest!

My point about chess is that the benefits and tradeoffs of a particular move are not always immediately quantifiable. I think too many computer games have this habit of presenting a whole bunch of quantitative information to the player and then letting them go nuts with comparisons. In a lot of these cases, it comes down to the player deciding "I prefer to maximize armor at the cost of cold resistance because none of the enemies in this area use cold attacks" and then all equipment choices are no longer meaningful, they're merely a continuation of that original choice which in itself was fairly obvious once the player had access to the data.

With chess, on the other hand, the choice of 1. d4 vs 1. e4 is a huge one with TONS of implications, none of which are immediately obvious at a glance, but which are so rich and diverse that you have players literally identifying themselves as "d4 players" or "e4 players".

I hate to keep leaning on chess examples but they're the easiest since almost everybody knows about chess. I'd have slipped in a Battle Line example but almost nobody knows about that!

So basically, you want the challenge of dealing with highly nonlinear, even chaotic, emergent effects. I'm all about such emergent effects. Hell, my project is called "Emergence Vector." The specific point is to see how many emergence fostering features you can workably combine into one massively multiplayer online game. The point being: that I find most MMOs insulting to my intelligence. Their power seems to come more from variable schedule of reward than from any genuinely intellectually interesting complexity. I really want to change that.

Sounds like a really cool project. Can you share what your tech stack look like? (Assuming you've gotten beyond conceptual planning.)

I'm writing the game servers in Golang, with the client in Javascript in browsers. I have a cluster of server processes that currently runs on the same AWS EC2 instance, but which could easily run on different instances. I currently have the procedurally generated universe up. If you are interested, I can let you log on. It is very much a work in progress. (My email is in my HN user profile.)

How does making rare item combinations available based on willingness to grind them out become intellectually complex? The original Star Wars MMO had some cool crafting mechanics, but I don't know enough about them to really explain.

Eve Online has emergent gameplay but most of that is space politics and metagaming - almost despite the game itself rather than because of it.

Heck, vanilla minecraft has incredibly complex outcomes from basic rules - vis a vis redstone and automation and so on.

I've played hella grindy Korean MMOs, they were just a case of spend x time get y thing. No real challenge, just a willingness to keep trying until complete. I'd strongly suggest highly complex systems restrict player innovation and emergence, in a way simpler rulesets do not.

How does making rare item combinations available based on willingness to grind them out become intellectually complex?

One ethos of my game is going to to be "work smarter, not harder." The kind of player who feels entitled to succeed just because they've spent enough time mindlessly grinding resources, so feels entitled to have awesome stuff dropped -- I hope those people spend their time elsewhere.

The player will be able to find very pointed capabilities that come with big disadvantages. The point will be to improvise around those weaknesses while exploiting contextual advantages. Others may choose to exploit in-game scripting and manufacturing capabilities to automate the search for certain technology combinations, but this will entail maintaining installations and the combat force to defend them.

I think this is a really good example of "Calculation" vs "Choice", as defined in this Extra Credits video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg8fVtKyYxY

TL;DW

"Calculations are decisions based solely on reason, with a clear correct answer." That'd be the decision to chose armour instead of cold resistance.

"Choice is overcoming internal conflict. Without conflict, there is no choice, only decisions." This actually is a good example for the "only turn left" gun, as there's a conflict between maneuverability vs firepower, which are rather incomparable.

Star wars galaxies was a game with some rather complex economic models that truly did effect your outcome in battle. For example only certain players in the galaxy (it was an MMO) had the skills to craft the very best items. They could do that because they knew where to mine or buy the very best materials (randomly generated in those areas).

So I as a budding star ship pilot had to seek out the best vendors in order to buy the right equipment to competitive.

There was a lot more to it but it was the complexity of the emergent gameplay that gave the psuedo randomness of some aspects a real role, and drove your personal story.

"I managed to find a vendor who has access to large amounts of high grade titanium, and he crafted me this engine with 10kj/s faster recharge time, which allowed me to escape that bounty hunter.." was a story that emerged and happened to me in the game, for example.

In some ways the randomness was abstracted away enough to not be obvious, and I think that helped sell the feeling.

For example only certain players in the galaxy (it was an MMO) had the skills to craft the very best items. They could do that because they knew where to mine or buy the very best materials (randomly generated in those areas).

I am going to have a procedurally generated tech tree in my MMO. I'll only know statistically that certain powerful combinations in crafting are possible, but even as the dev, I won't know precisely where they will be, what they look like, or exactly how to get the components for them.

You are right sir. Playing in procedurally generated world is like going for a walk in the forest. Trees you see are unique and rich in detail but since they have no use for you you don't care about how different they are.

If you ware a primitive man from long ago when those different kinds of trees were unique resources to craft the specific things that your existence depends on then you'd notice the difference between them and you'd care.

Joerg Sprave of the "Slingshot Channel" might be interested in how the grain is formed in the crooks of certain branches, because those might make for good slingshots. Most of us wouldn't even notice.

That kind of assumes that trees can't be resources for other kinds of value than tooling. For example, aesthetic appreciation, healing contact with nature, etc. These things are subjective - I certainly don't necessarily seek forests for those exact reasons, but they, and others, do exist. Pretty much none of these values is extractable from a fecking random polygon.

Even random lock/key puzzles become boring quickly. Procedural tools is a great way of amplifying artist creativity, but don't generate fun games on their own. Not until we solve "hard" AI, at least. Once we do, I expect that will be what they do to keep us pets happy.

Borderlands is another good example of this. Procedurally generated guns, but they fall into buckets of terrible->ok->good->amazing, and the particular uniqueness of that weapon becomes stale after a few minutes. I enjoyed about the game until about halfway through until it started turning into a slog. (Although this is probably a matter of MMO mechanics not meshing well with FPS).

Remember randomness doesn't add content. It just spreads it out. You still have to create good base content yourself.

A lot of games basically have useless 2%-5% modifiers. Nobody cares about the difference between 0.025 and 0.027 inertial penalty. It just wastes the time of the player checking their loot. In the real world a weapon or armor is either effective or useless. Nobody takes down tanks with a glock.

I would recommend you to have several types of items even if that means the items have fixed statistics instead of having one item type with flexible statistics.

Nobody cares about the difference between 0.025 and 0.027 inertial penalty.

I was thinking more along the lines of the difference between 0.025 and 2.5. There's also stacking.

I would recommend you to have several types of items even if that means the items have fixed statistics instead of having one item type with flexible statistics.

Darn. I was going to have just one type of item, called "Object." Everything would be a variation on that, and inherit behavior from it.

But seriously, I am going to have very specific functions for a set catalogue of items. The procedural generation is all about their potential for interaction when incorporated into a crafted item.

Definitely agree. Binding of Isaac does procedural generation great because of its mass amount of items. Seeing the "same room" and enemies doesn't bother most people since there will be something different gameplay-wise when encountering that again and again.

Same thing with Spelunky. Its impressive how much emergent behavior you can get by putting some mario-style platforming on top of the procedural generation.

If you liked spelunky, then try rouge legacy. I liked it a lot.

I played through that game so many times that I got to New Game + + and all enemies were minibosses. Remix boredom set in at that point though, since with the majority of enemies gone things got a little samey.

Beyond New Game + + it's just about finding the bosses with your invisible ninja and teleporting with your favorite class to defeat them.

Speaking of procedurally generated platformers, there's Cloudberry Kingdom.

I can see how you could experience remix boredom in Cloudberry Kingdom. However, every so often it produces novel gameplay that actually feels new. And it's so good at tuning the difficulty to gradually escalate that it manages to achieve flow quite effectively.

Cloudberry Kingdom actually did feel like it created new stages every single time. It did a great job of mixing up gameplay just by tossing in little modifiers every few stages.

Unfortunately, it's fairly rare for people to beat that game. The difficulty becomes basically absurd right up to level 320. At that point you essentially have to turn on all the powerups because there's no way you can get through without them.

I definitely know what you mean by remix boredom. Can you elaborate a bit on specific instances of what you mean by "player-significant emergent effects" for example in Minecraft?

I'll instead answer you in regards to the original Elite. In the original elite, there was a simple emergent effect with regards to highly profitable but short "milk run" trade routes. Pretty shallow. (I may add to this answer later.)

And if it wasn't for them, you couldn't improve your ship and be able to explore the galaxies.

For minecraft: finding a cave or a trench that results in easy mining of "valuable" resources is often pretty exciting, especially for new players. No Man's Sky sort of just had everything everywhere so special features didn't seem so special.

Could you expand on the (1) player-significant (2) emergent effects in Minecraft and in Elite?

One review damned NMS for lack of player-significant effects, but appreciated the prettiness of some of the results.

There's a property I enjoy, of a kind of global dependence (though mediated locally), instead of isolated randomness. e.g. instead of trees appearing randomly, they are dependent on rain, sunlight, latitude, altitude, soil coarseness and nutrients. And they are dependent on other trees.

This is surely includes under "emergent", but that term seems unnecessarily broad to me.

Rainfall in turn depends on local and wider topography (mountains, evaporation water sources), and wind patterns... which in turn depend on local topography and latitude etc.

Even a river's path is affected by its watershed (and rainfull etc), and all the preceding terrain, especially steepness (higher velocity carries more sediment, which abrasively erodes even faster) and soil finer-grained erodes more than coarser). River change course from time to time due to erosion.

It seems iteration is the only way to capture these dependent effects, but its computationally very expensive. NMS already has very long planet-generation times ("travelling"), so it's probably not feasible for that style of game.

Earth is a computer after all.

One thing that springs to mind for me in vanilla Minecraft: encountering a cool cave. It might have a mob spawner in there, or a lava pool maybe with some diamonds that will require careful mining, or an "old" mineshaft. The emergence here I guess is that the cave feels "real", with lava in the depths and coal/iron higher up as rewards. I imagine that caves originally were an emergent factor from the world generation, then got their own hard coded cave-specific generation paths added to make something much more playable. Much like rogue-like games that have hard-coded rooms in them that are randomly spread through the dungeon, the caves have hard-coded set-pieces that can join together in new and interesting ways.

Elite is really primitive compared to today's games, but it had a huge galaxy to explore (even if all the systems were essentially the same 1-star-and-planet), then eventually you find out there are 8 such galaxies. It was fun to find good trade routes between the worlds, risk going to a slightly more lawless planet to beef up your credits or ranking. The emergence here would be the fact that the economic type of a planet was dependent on its seed value, and together with other nearby generated planets created "trade routes". These routes were not coded into the game, they emerge as a property of the way the procedural generation works out.

I think the problem with making so much procedural is that it misses the point that the game should be fun to play. What's the game-play difference in having random trees or dependent on sunlight and rain? In the end, they are just a bunch of trees :-P

> I think the problem with making so much procedural is that it misses the point that the game should be fun to play. What's the game-play difference in having random trees or dependent on sunlight and rain? In the end, they are just a bunch of trees :-P

Because when things "make sense," players pick up on it and use it to their advantage (and feel very clever). Given a procgen survival game where you are in a desert, trees might only grow near water, so if you are thirsty, you might look for vegetation.

>The reason why we don't feel that way about the real world, is because the real world doesn't just have "remix procedural."

Coming from a non-game developer this may be completely out of reason, but it occurs to me, what if you could determine the fit of creatures and evolve them in accordance with their environment? Perhaps not a lot of generations would be required to get a plausible, not completely random-looking scenario. Granted, we might still be talking about thousands of iterations, and so this would be too computationally demanding for a game design such as No Man’s Sky. But perhaps for a pre-computed (vast) world it would be viable.

The issue is mainly generating the different creatures automatically in a way that doesn't look repetitive.

I remember reading that in the original Elite they artificially limited the procedural content. They could have had more but worried that people would get bored or just see it for what it was.

It was the number of galaxies. Braben and Bell wanted a huge number (something like 2^48) but AcornSoft thought it'd make it too obvious that the content was generated, so they settled for "just" 8.

I think it's really about the appropriate scale and density. It doesn't matter if there's only 4 or 5 distinct areas of you only need to visit those 4 or 5 to have a complete experience. That's really what minecraft got right. You have a fun game even if you never leave the first biome. You don't have to necessarily move around enough that you get bored.

NMS, otoh forces you to go from planet to nearly identical planet.

Procedural generation still depends on how many game elements are designed by hand. If you have X game elements and add a layer of random noise, given enough measurements you will arrive back at X game elements. It's kind of like adding a random delay to an algorithm that is vulnerable to timing side-channel attacks.

Naive question: one of the things that makes a game like Dark Souls so strong is how tightly-integrated the map is. It feels crafted. How difficult would it be to procedurally create something like that (I assume it would be very)?

Something I wish they would have done with minecraft: let players structure across the world influence each other games.

Players are already constructing crazy structures in the game. Why not implement that in the game for everyone?

Because of the huge logistical challenge of filtering out all the swastika penises spelling out "kill urself"

Minecraft has a very young demographic, and griefing is a common pastime among bored kids hungry for attention and relevance.

You could have had a webpage were users would have upvoted structures : o

If you can't enforce against it, then as an MMO dev, the transcendent move is to co-opt it!

Everything offensive can be flagged, and if it's a legit flag, then that item or location will become "infected" by one of the most hated, but most profitable to kill, enemies in the game. But my plan is to rig the spawning of player installations, such that players will only be able to do this by their own creations. So young people making penises in my game? Inevitable and co-opted to be a mechanic!

> the transcendent move is to co-opt it!

…which is a large logistical challenge that most game devs can't fit into their game or don't want to spend resources dealing with. Specifically "if it's a legit flag" is a requirement that implies a large team of people working around the clock.

But I completely agree with you - figuring out a way of working with the grain would be so much better. I would love to see more attempts toward it.

Also. I think young people find penis and swastika funny. This is mostly us grown up who start finding that offensive for "reasons".

What do you think about using Gaussian distribution for random generation to make it possible to discover rare species (or whatever you generate randomly)? Could a Gaussian distribution "spice things up"?

Well if you are going to do that you may as well give them a reward every 10th planet they reach.

> The danger with procedural generation is "remix boredom." The user can feel, "Oh, this is just a remixed variation of the same stuff."

aka no man's sky.

> The danger with procedural generation is "remix boredom."

Surely AI could solve that problem...oh wait, there is no such thing yet.

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