GPU-Based Procedural Terrains in Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass [pdf]

I've been going through the GDC 2019 presentations, and this one stuck out. It seems like this game, "Serious Sam 4" is a combination of procedural generation + quad-tree based hand-edits to the procedural generator.

The specs of the engine are quite impressive: each triangle is modeled to be ~1.5cm in size, yet they plan to cover 128km x 128km square region for the game ("Background is not a special case"). This was estimated in the talk to be 100TB of information if done traditionally.

Instead, they have a rough 32m x 32m tileset (only 200MB or so) that has been handcrafted. They have a procedural-generator for converting the "rough" tiles into detailed 1.5cm chunks, and allow another set of hand-crafted data (Quad-tree) at the 0.25m (25cm) size for areas of interest (towns and landmarks).

All in all, it seems like a nice combination of "procedural" and "hand-crafted".

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The section on "vegetation", was my favorite read. Procedurally generated "impostor trees" (2d quads that look like a tree from a distance) + a procedural geometry shader to create literally every (nearby) blade of grass