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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver.

Yes, this is a wildly uneducated perspective.

Procedural generation has often been a key component of some incredibly successful, and even iconic games going back decades. Elite is a canonical example here, with its galaxies being procedurally generated. Powermonger, from Bulldog, likewise used fractal generation for its maps.

More recently, the prevalence of procedurally generated rogue-likes and Metroidvanias is another point against. Granted, people have got a bit bored of these now, but that's because there were so many of them, not because they were unsuccessful or "failed to deliver".

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Procedural generation underlies the most popular game of all time (Minecraft) and is foundational for numerous other games of a similar type - Dwarf Fortress, et al.

And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it (Stardew Valley mines).

What procedural generation does NOT work at is generating "story elements" though perhaps even that can fall, Dwarf Fortress already does decently enough given that the player will fill in the blanks.

> And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it (Stardew Valley mines).

Apparently Stardew Valley's mines are not procedurally generated, but rather hand-crafted. Per their recent 10 year anniversary video, the developer did try to implement procedural generation for the mines, but ended up scrapping it:

https://www.stardewvalley.net/stardew-valley-10-year-anniver...

They're quasi-generated with random elements and fixed elements - similarly to early Diablo procedural generation.

That’s not the same procedural generation as GPT or diffusion and you know it.

It’s not even in the same ballpark as Elite, NMS, terraria, or Minecraft.

The levels are all hand drawn, not generated by an algorithm, even if they’re shuffled. Eric Barone, the developer, has publicly said as much. Are you calling him a liar?

It’s like the difference between sudoku/crossword and conways game of life

The parent comment didn't seem to say anything offensive. Why so hostile?

Honestly, just white knighting for one of my favorite developers and biggest inspirations.

Someone lying about the pseudo randomization of the hand drawn efforts to make it seem entirely algorithmically generated rubs me really wrong, especially when that dev has publicly broadcast the reasoning of the decision to eschew procedurally generated mines.

I think that's what I was confused about: I don't see the lie in the comments above. optionalsquid said "[...]did try to implement procedural generation for the mines, but ended up scrapping it"

bombcar said "They're quasi-generated with random elements and fixed elements - similarly to early Diablo procedural generation." (which is true - you confirmed as much in the very next comment - "The levels are all hand drawn, not generated by an algorithm, even if they’re shuffled.". That's all early Diablo was doing.)

"Quasi-generated" seems like an appropriate descriptor here - stringing together level building blocks algorithmically is still "generating" a level in a sense. You're right - it's not correct to say that they were generated in the same way that an LLM generates things, but a) nobody claimed that and b) there is an undeniable element of procedural generation here.

And here I thought the most popular game of all time was Soccer or Super Mario Bros 3

Quality is the same thing as popularity. That is why mcdonalds has 12 Michelin stars.

I think they meant videogame, ruling out soccer.

It looks like the Super Mario Bros series has a good showing, but it is the first one. I bet 3 falls into an unlucky valley where the game-playing population was not quite as large as it is now, but it isn’t early enough to get the extreme nostalgia of the first one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

Of course this assumes sales=popularity, but the latter is too hard to measure.

I dunno: I think SMB 3 gets plenty of plaudits and is widely agreed to be the best SMB on the NES.

Frankly, all three of the NES games hold up well even today, but 3 is for me the pinnacle even though very late in the life of the console, particularly in North America and Europe. This wouldn’t have helped sales with the SNES about to drop but it nevertheless was very successful.

Absolutely one of the greats.

Almost every 3D game in the past 20 years uses procedural foliage generation (eg SpeedTree and similar). Many use procedural terrain painting. Many use tools like Houdini.

So procedural generation is extremely prevalent in most AAA games and has been for a long time.

Roguelike/lites are is of the most popular genres of indie games nowadays. One of it's main characteristics is randomization and procedural generation.

While there are many Roguelikes with procedural generation, I think the most popular ones do not. Slay the Spire, Risk of Rain 2, Hades 1/2, BoE etc are all handmade stages with a random order with randomized player powers rather than procedurally generated.

I've seen a couple roguelike developers report that they played around with procedural generation, but it was difficult to prevent it from creating dungeons that were bad, unfun, or just straight-up killscreens. Turns out it's often easier to simply hand-draw good maps than to get the machine to generate okay-to-good ones.

Procedural generation is good when variety matters more than quality, which is a relatively rare occurrence.

That says more about the developer than procedural generation as a whole. Using procedural generation IS difficult, it requires understanding how to set up constraints on your p-random generated elements and ensuring the code validates that you have a "good" level/puzzle/whatever before dumping the PC into it.

I’m a hard core rogue-like player (easily over a thousand hours at least in all the games I’ve played) but even so I can admit that hey have nothing compared to a well crafted world like you’d find in From Software titles or Expedition 33, or classic Zelda games for that matter. Making a great world is an incredibly hard task though and few studios have the capabilities to do so.

It’s a different type of thing, really. I like rogue-likes because they are a… pretty basic… story about my character, rather than a perfectly crafted story about somebody else’s.

Even when I play a game like Expedition 33 or Elden Ring, my brain (for whatever reason) makes a solid split between the cutscene versions of the characters and the gameplay version. I mean, in some games the gameplay characters is a wandering murderer, while the cutscene characters have all sorts of moral compunctions about killing the big-bad. They are clearly different dudes.

Rogue-like games use the most simple randomisation to generate the next room, and I burnt hundreds of hours in Mines of Moria before I forced myself to quit.

Now with an LLM I could have AD&D-like campaigns, photorealistic renders of my character and the NPCs. I could give it the text of an AD&D campaign as a DM and have it generate walking and talking NOCs.

The art of those great fantasy artists is definitely being stolen in generated images, and application of VLMs should require payment into some sort of art funding pool. But modern artists could well profit by being the intermediary between user and VLM, crafting prompts, both visual and textual, to give a consistent look and feel to a game.

The essay author is smoking crack.

Artists want to create. They do not want to tweak prompts and click "Generate" repeatedly until the output matches their vision. I would find this maddening.

But this wouldn't make sense anyway. Game companies won't foot the bill for real-time renders of your character, let alone a world of generated NPCs. If/when costs are low enough, and players accept a recurring subscription to play games, then this could happen, sure. No way in hell will artists be available in real-time to keep the generated imagery consistent.

Why would game companies be paying for rendering on my computer? My computer can fantasise player specific details, in a palette created by game artists, and render them itself.

Game artists could indeed be working in real time in MMORPGs to tweak the world, impresarios of the shared experience. Paying for live human shaped performance art is a great way to keep human creativity central to the experience.

Is it wildly uneducated to not know any of the games you mentioned? I didn’t realize education covered less known video games? Wouldn’t a better example be No Man’s Sky, if we’re talking procedural gen and eventually a good game.

In any case, I agree that gamers by and large don’t care to what extent the game creation was automated. They are happy to use automated enemies, automated allies, automated armies and pre-made cut scenes. Why would they stop short at automated code gen? I genuinely think 90% wouldn’t mind if humans are still in the loop but the product overall is better.

> Is it wildly uneducated to not know any of the games you mentioned? I didn’t realize education covered less known video games?

Yes. It is "wildly uneducated" to have, and express, strong opinions about ANY field of endeavour where you are unfamiliar with large parts of that field.

Large? That's your opinion

Of course it is.

Then it is "wildly uneducated" to have, and express, strong opinions about ANY field of endeavour where you cannot substantiate your claims.

Honest question: are you enjoying this? I looked at your comment history and you don't seem like a troll. What is going on right now?

The person you’re replying to has only posted two short comments in this thread.

The reason a few different people are arguing this point is because it is in fact wrong, or at least poorly expressed, to refer to someone’s unfamiliarity with some aspect of a field like the gaming market as “wildly uneducated.”

Ironically, the person using that phrase is demonstrating a lack of understanding of its common meaning, suggesting that they may be a better fit for the word “uneducated”. See e.g: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/uneducated

> What is going on right now?

As Wittgenstein put it, we’re playing language games.

> The person you’re replying to has only posted two short comments in this thread.

FYI: You can click on the user name and from there see their full comment history on hacker news.

Wild that you even mentioned this, considering the context.

> As Wittgenstein put it, we’re playing language games.

Yes.

I can see how you allowed your own stalking tendencies to confuse yourself, but I wasn't referring to that.

Your comment made it sound as though they were being unreasonable in this thread. I don't see that in the two short comments you responded to. Perhaps you were having a bad day.

If you haven't heard of the modern roguelike genre you've probably been living under a rock, it seems like every other game these days at least calls itself such. Usually the resemblance to Rogue is so remote that it strains the meaning of the term, but procedural generation of levels is almost universal in this loosely defined genre.

Elite is a bit more obscure, but really anybody who aims to be familiar with the history of games should recognize the name at least. Metroidvania isn't a game, but is a combination of the names of Metroid and Castlevania and you absolutely should know about both of those.

Powermonger is new to me.

And while the comment in question didn't mention it, others have: Minecraft. If you're not familiar with Minecraft you must be Rip Van Winkle. This should be the foremost game that comes to mind when anybody talks about procedural generation.

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