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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

It's beautiful. But also pretty unsatisfying in a way. Roads don't make sense. Rivers barely make sense. There's no higher-scale structure - the reason why most games with incremental procedural generation usually feel stale after a while, and always static. Every planet is different, yet feels the same.

(Dwarf Fortress is the one procedural game I know - besides maybe its more faithful clones - which isn't static. But the procedural generation there is also mostly not incremental, it generates the whole world beforehand and only some of the fill-in details are incrementally generated).

The holy grail has to be a graph-based refinement/embellishment system, where it generates just the nodes, temporally and spatially, which matter for the situation the player is in.

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That's a general problem with procedurally generated content.

Remember that wave function collapse focuses on local optimization. The algorithm can’t take a step back and look at the whole map. That’s why you won’t get a sensible road network. Rivers are only slightly better when the follow height gradients.

What you can do, and this is also a general advice for procgen, is to mix in some templates before WCF runs. Often, a bit of post-processing is needed as well.

The templates can be hand-designed, or generated with simpler procgen code. Place a few towns on the map, connect them with roads, and then let WFC fill in the gaps to create a more interesting landscape.

> Roads don't make sense. Rivers barely make sense. There's no higher-scale structure

It feels a bit like the graphical equivalent of Markov chain text generation.

I think it helps in Dwarf Fortress that you are not really exploring the world (well, unless you play adventurer mode, but that seems far less popular), you pick a site and settle and start building. You see far less of the world than in something like Minecraft. Yes, you get to see more of the world over multiple runs, but it is still far more limited.

Rimworld is interesting here, as it is what I would consider a DF style game. And I would have said the same for it, except that the latest expansion (Oddessy) added space ships that you can build, and fly to another area. While fun this has made the procedural generation show its weaknesses.

(That said, DF world gen is top notch, but probably not quite as good as it may seem due to what I mentioned.)

As I recall, a lot goes into DF's world generation, including erosion simulation and the like to achieve a realistic result. That game is the embodiment of over-engineering, after all.

Situation-adaptive generation also gets predictable and boring once you can read it easily. Classic procedural generation is good for perceived variety and breaking small patterns, but it doesn't introduce novelty on its own, it just shifts it from the asset design to the algorithm design.

Noita is also procedural, but not static, although I'm not sure if that's what you're talking about.

Noita uses herringbone wang tiles where each wang tile pixel is 16x16 simulated in-game CA pixels, with tiles selected from a per-biome pool and the ability for biome-specific scripts to override certain areas too. As part of expanding each wang tile pixel into 16x16 pixels, some noise is applied to terrain to add the curvy look, with another layer of (thresholded perlin?) noise that controls which bits of inner terrain get variations (gold veins etc).

Source: working on a Noita-like so have spent a bit of time looking at prior art. Noita wiki.gg will explain a lot of it though (warning: many spoilers).

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