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On Randomly Generated Content In Games
Thanks to Skotos.net for their article discussing randomly-generated content in videogames, in which the author discusses pioneering games with random elements, suggesting: "One of the reasons [classic RPG] Rogue was so popular (and spawned so many children) is due to its generation of random content." But he goes on to point out: "Computers don't have the imagination to make good puzzles... asking a computer to create an interesting puzzle is very similar to asking it to tell a story, make up a joke, or create a riddle." The suggested answer is game elements "placed randomly within the [linear] structure", but with recent random level-generating games such as Toe Jam & Earl III striking out, how far should randomness be taken in games?
Try Diablo and Diablo II.
Some of the dungeons were all consistent in feel, but almost always random each time you played the game. Though they're just crawlers.
There's an old saying that goes, Art hung in restaurants is usually as bad as food served at museums.
Paraphrasing, asking a computer to do level design is as bad as asking a level designer to do math.
This is one of those features that the marketing department loves ("Infinite Gameplay!"), but in practice almost always sucks. It's the rare game (Populous?) where random numbers can deliver a enjoyable level.
What were you expecting?
One of my two "main" programming projects at the moment is a Rogue-like that tries to do for plot what Rogue did for level generation. I put "main" in quotes because it has since been overshadowed by the other main project I'm doing, but I still hope to get back to it someday.
;-) )
For anybody else who would like to take this up, since you could probably finish at least a "0.1" release before I turn back to this project personally, I would point out what is probably "the way" to do that sort of thing. The fundamental problem with modern roguelikes is they are too low-level, where "the dungeon" is an array describing what is there, and "the engine" just manipulates this. Thus, "the engine" is only capable of generating really low-level events, like "X killed Y".
To get a "plot" in place, you need to generate a much higher-level representation of the world to start with. You need to start with what "groups" are in place (cities, towns, nations), maybe run through a routine that does high-level generation of the map (placing these groups in cities, etc.), then iterate down to the next level where the groups are given relationships and placed in actual buildings, then iterate on the landscape again, then build actual people in the context of the groups, then build the place for the people, etc. When you're done, you'll have not only a map like a current Roguelike does, but also an engine with a much higher-level understanding of what the map actually has on it, allowing quests like "Get X out of the evil henchmen's building and return them to Y", etc.
(Alternatively, you can try to "grow" the land, starting by placing down the general landscape, then adding settlements and using some basic economic rules to govern how they grow and interact, then try to create the "game" at the end.)
Obviously in a Slashdot post I can't explain too much, but IMHO at least in the Open Source efforts I've seen (and even many commercial ones) this is the fundamental mistake I've seen made at the architecture level that prevents this stuff from working. It probably seems obvious after you've thought about it for a while but it apparently isn't. From here you can probably fill it out too. (If not, perhaps you should be thinking of something else to do.
One warning: You're going to need (or really wish you had) some actual Computer Science to pull this off well, specifically the study of expanding unrestricted grammars into final statements, which is essentially what this is, especially when it comes time to add links between the entities (for instance, antagonism between a "legitimate government" of a town and the underground theive's guild). It's not easy, but IMNSHO it's the only way likely to work.
I'm quite certain this is possible and I have a design half-sketched out, I just haven't had time to implement it until my other project becomes at least self-sustaining.
My only complaint with Doom was that the levels were the same every time... it would be much more challenging and realistic when you didn't know where everything is when you entered a room. Of course, then you would also have to make the "secrets" much easier to find.
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Dave Chess wrote an automatic level generator for Doom, called SLIGE. Search against "SLIGE" and "doom" and you'll find it on top, add "chess" if you wish.
I've never actually tried one of these levels myself, but it is automatically generated content for a game, pertinent to the thread. Imagine a pseudorandom (deterministic, repeatable) in-game SLIGE based on x and y coordinates, a garbage-collecting in-core map, and you could have infinite space to play in. The map keeps expanding in your direction of travel, and it gets thrown away behind you. (There would be some problems of course, especially with switches, objects, and monsters.)
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The games I have the most fun with are those with decent random content generators. Done right, they can really add to the replayability of a game. Port Royale has suitably 'open-ended' gameplay (within the confines of its environment) through random mission generation and all the fun of trading.
The thing that really gets me, though, are games that are billed as 'open-ended', infinitely replayably, etc, that are instead cripplingly linear. (Republic : The Revolution is a great example of this - a game *crying out* for decent random mission generators, but instead has a lockstep set of objectives that you have to complete to advance ).
I've had plenty to deal with over the years in randomly-generated OS behavior in Windows, with Blue Screens showing up at very inconsistent moments, and unexplained slowdowns and file corruption.
I guess it is all a game?
I've been playing Nethack seriously now for the past 6 months, and not serious for the past, what, 15 years?
That game is such a classic, and it's mix of randomness and expected elements make it a fun, different experience every time. And while there exists that element of randomness (what will that scroll labelled FOOBIE BLETCH do?), you can always expect to find the Oracle and this level, or the entrance to the mines on one of these levels, etc.
In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts.
Thank you.
The random map generator in Soldier of Fortune II was pretty dope IMHO. For multiplayer. Some of the best CTF times I've had in an FPS were in that game because it was a different experience literally every time. Single player was not as good, however. Can anyone derive any useful insights from that?
Reading the article, as I read about the trap doors, the randomly enchanted/cursed objects, the randomly generated levels/monsters/drops, Castle of the Winds immediately came to mind. I'm frankly extremely puzzled why they didn't list this on the site -- it's not exactly a new game.
We played rogue because it was the only "game" in town. Now some games just make you "do" the dungeons to advance the plot and such - you wouldn't play these without a plot (remember a DC/GC release called "Evolution"? thought not).
Now some games (I guess like Diablo) are good enough so you're having fun as you're playing, rather than suffering for the sake of a later payoff. These are the kinds of games that can pull off random dungeon generation.
But talk to almost any serious RPG gamer and you'll hear randomly generated stuff sux. It's OK in the 50-floor-tower-of-leveling-up, but not in the main game.
one of the games I was really impressed by its randomly generated stuff was no one lives forever, every time you reload a game, enemies and puzzle items are randomly positioned through out some parts of the level, requiring different strategy to solve the puzzles every time!
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F-Zero X on the N64 had a cup called the X cup, which consisted of randomly generated races. Unfortunately, most of the races were really bland. One time though I was playing multiplayer, with 1 other person and 2 computers racing. Shortly past the start was an almost 90 degree turn. The road wasn't level either, which made it harder to realize how bad the turn was. The two computer cars went flying off immediately. My friend and I just barely managed to stay on the course. That one race was a lot of fun, but otherwise the random courses don't offer much challenge. The only thing that makes them hard is you'll get random patches of track without any railing on the side, making it easy to fall off the course.
Take Ancient Domains of Mystery - This is a roguelike game in every sense of the word, and the only maps that are static are the world map, towns, and a select few dungeon floors.
There is only one pure level-up dungeon, the rest all have limitations and hard-coded stuff - ie the first dungeon will always have 7 floors, and it's associated quest will climax at that point. The floor layouts are always random, and in a roguelike game (where death is permanent) not having the same floorplan all the time is a GREAT benefit - I doubt I'd have half as much fun with it after the first 5 times through the beginnings of the game.
If I wanted to play games that appear randomly, id get a girlfriend.
Computers can't be creative, at least not in the way humans _can_ be. The randomness of the Rogue levels was rather successful in making the game continuously challenging, but at a rather superficial level.
Compare this with a table game with five players and a DM for an ongoing game of AD&D (or other, insert your fav here) and you'll notice a truly _huge_ difference. Between the DM and the responses/actions of the other players, you have six people tossing out so much randomness a good DM actually spends a fair amount of energy keeping the game focused.
Perhaps one way around this problem for developers of computer-assisted (or just computer games, whatever) is to build into the game resources which mimic the random creativity a DM would supply during a table-top game. One way might be to supply with the game a database of random elements which could "happen" during any particular part/level/area of a game. Have the game engine check for triggers (events/times/states) which would allows for possible "random" insertion events.
For such a method to be successful though, the database would have to be large enough to seem truly random to the player (say BIG as in many,many possible random events.)
The Baldur's Gate PC game did try something like this in that when moving from city to city you might often be waylaid by some nasties, but that was mostly an annoying failure because it didn't seem to be random at all, IMO.
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I was thinking about this problem the other day, as it relates to open-source game development. One of the main problems with small-scale game development is the creation of content (it's a lot of effort), and algorithmic content would make it easier for a smaller-group of developers to build a good game.
But a problem with random content is that it can suck, like impossible nethack levels, etc., as the algorithms have no great sense of athstetics or any of the other abilities require to make 'good' levels. Designing algorithms to test for athstetics is also difficult, and probably only worth doing for a few cases.
The conclusing I came to was that algorithms could be used to pre-generate content (like maps, etc), in the sense of the "millions-of-monkeys" problem, except with a bit of focus. Algorithms would generate content (maps, shapes, etc.), and then the work would be filtered by the developers, and the good stuff made part of the game. The algorithms could also use some sort of learning to improve the generation process, similar to spam filtering - "this is spam" vs. "this is not spam" user-initiated filter improvement.
This sort of approach would really make small-shop game development easier, as would improving (and standardizing) content-production tools and processes.
mx
how far should randomness be taken in games?
..stupid answer : "As far as possible!"
It's a scroll of enchant weapon. :D
I love NetHack.
The game uses a randomly generated battle zone, with the random seed based on the name of the zone. The player selects the name of the zone by picking three keywords from three separate lists. This can be seen in more detail on gamefaqs .Hack keywords effects
While the zone weather, day/night, and element type are determined from the keywords, while the locations of enemies, scenery, and the dungeon entrance on the map appear to be random. They are consistent for each visit to the zone, so the RNG must be seeded from the combination of keywords. The dungeon maze within the zone is also randomly generated, by connecting various prerendered rooms by matching up doors. The level generator only needs to connect rooms so that the doors match up and rooms don't overlap. Rooms may have multiple doors, allowing for loops and dead-ends. Dungeons are multiple levels deep, controlled by the difficultly level of the zone.
Some keyword combinations are "special" and contain plot elements and bosses and/or cutscenes. These keywords combinations are revealed within the game, or by watching the related anime series.
That game was quite fun, and all the rooms where randomly generated each time you played. In addition, it was always possible to beat the game.
Toejam and Earl III's random level isn't a new feature, because the first Toejam and Earl was doing it way back near the beginning of the megadrive. Sure it's got slightly more advanced, but having played the original the "feel" of the way it makes maps is very similar. Interestingly (or not) Toejam and Earl II didn't have randomly generated maps, possibly because it was side-scrolling and I imagine making interesting maps would have been harder (because you are much more restricted on what it is possible for a valid map to look like)
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
It didn't really feature any random generation of levels.
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Consider playing chess against a machine. Sometimes it can really feel like their is a plot-line behind the moves the machine is making. It seems to me that the same might be true of levels in games if people put as much effort into a random level generator as they put into the rest of the game. In fact, it could be done along the lines of chess: with a machine playing out possible strategies that could be used against a level and then adapting it in response. That way a level could eventually be generated that in fact looks like it was cunningly devised by a person. Not easy, but also not beyond the bounds of plausibility.
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Let's say you make a program which will generate a random level for, oh just for argument's sake, Doom. Let's say you don't really put that many restrictions on what it can and cannot do, just that it must make a level which is contiguous (or connected by teleporters) and doesn't have any passages smaller than the player character.
Most of these are going to be duller than a chisel made out of Play-doh. Some of them will be exceedingly bad or overly complicated. Some of them will be enjoyable, and a very few will be excellent.
The thing is, when you're dealing with randomly generated levels/other content, you're always dealing with a finite data set (regardless of claims of "Unlimited gameplay!"), and most of that data set is going to be garbage. A lot of it will be virtually indistinguishable from other bits (Here we have the jungle. Here we have a different jungle, but this one has a blue stump in the middle of the third area.) The trick is inserting a quality filter, and then you get down to the dirty business of quantifying quality, so that a computer can understand it.
Randomly generated content is only as bad as the quality filter used on it. Unfortunately, such a thing is a nightmare to program.
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This game killed tons of my grade school hours... and still I don't think i explored all of germany
There has been much talk about design, or puzzle creation, or tasks that require a "human" mind. I would like to bring into question exactly what random content (specifically randomly-generated dungeons) brings to games as far as gameplay is concerned. I believe that using AI to extend and replace the capabilities of random content could create a better gameplay experience, even if at this point it lacks the ability to design, etc.
.Hack is the feeling that my abilities do not possess any control. That is to say, I want the world to test my skill, and perhaps adapt to my actions, thus giving the feeling that I am somehow altering the world indirectly through my own actions.
So, what does random content bring to a game? At first glance, I would say not a whole lot. After all, this only creates different content on each run through, but it doesn't alter the basic gameplay. However, it is a fun feature in that it almost forces the player to actually "play" the game. Randomly generated dungeons force exploration. In general, random events force a sort of "trial-and-error" routine that the player must go through in order to progress through the game. You aren't allowed to memorize the map, seek out the best items immediately, or follow the walkthrough; you actually have to play the game.
So, it's not just a marketing ploy; it does have consequences on how the game is actually played. However, it kind of drops off there. Sure, you can create more complex, or deeper levels of randomness...perhaps even throw in a simple puzzle variant or two, but it pretty much ends there.
A big point to consider would be what is the player's perception of their abilities within the game's world. One of the things that really kills the gameplay for me, personally, in games like Nethack, Diablo, and
Of course, there do not exist many games that accomplish such a feat, but those that do, even in the most trivial ways, give something more to the formula than Explore, Kill, Collect, Explore, etc. And this is pretty much my point: Random content in games has some use, but by using AI, we can create dynamic content that not only seems logical but can also adapt, or otherwise be extended, to accomodate a player's capability or skill level.
Therefore, I respect random content, but I believe that the future lies with AI-controlled dynamic content.
Sure, the "deterministic logic-cruncher" theory of the mind fits the data well- as long as you have deterministic psychologists and physiologists selecting the data which are to be fitted and what constitutes fitting the data. The reason the deterministic-reductionistic thesis has been held to so firmly in fields such as those is because it is an article of faith for the fields, not one of their theses but one of their presuppositions. After all, if human actions really are underdetermined, why should one be fully committed to finding neurological/psychological causes for them?
That the theory has not of course been thoroughly disproven shows nothing, not only because plenty of theories which nobody holds to be true have not been thoroughly disproven but because it is difficult to imagine any evidence which would convince any real "mechanist" or determinist that their position was wrong (this is partially because proving that something does not exist is a lot harder than proving that it does).
A brief disclaimer: I, as well as anyone else, will agree that psychology and neurophysiology have made vast contributions to our understanding of the mind, and the claim that human actions are underdetermined in no way denies that the range of real alternatives has been severely limited by determining psychological/neurological factors.
Did Worms have the ability to specify some general characteristics for the maps like Scorch did?
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> Computers can't be creative, > at least not in the way humans _can_ be. Human creativity is nothing more than random ideas that are filtered for quality!
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The random content (continents actually) generator in Seven Cities of Gold made the game. Of course, waiting 10+ minutes for it to complete was annoying, but this wasn't uncommon in 1984.
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The brain is at least as powerful as a turing machine. How do I know? Get a piece of paper out and use your brain to simulate one:
"Let's see... I'm in state 4, my input is a 0, that means I move left and change to state 12..." and repeat.
Thus your brain can emulate any turing machine, thus your brain is at least equivalent to a turing machine.
Atari did have an excellent "randomized" game--mode 3 on Adventure, if memory serves, would scramble the basic elements. Admittedly I think the level layout was constant, and there weren't THAT many items to scramble, but still, when mixed in with the chaos provided by the bat, it had the makings of some interesting gaming.
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I have a project in which I am trying to completely generate a MUD and then run a massive simulation to have a dynamic world.
:)
It isn't about whether or not the output is "as good as" what a human can do. It's about the fact that games and art in general are patterns of symbols, and using computers to record and playback symbols and patterns that people create isn't very interesting to me. It's not that I think taking pictures or recording music or writing a story is bad, it's just that computers can do so much more than record/playback, and I want to see what they can do. It's much more interesting to try to teach the computer to generate those symbols and patterns. And I'm back in school studying AI now.
I think the main issue with randomly generated content is that people don't take it far enough. It's hard to create systems that will generate content, so I think people give up. The other issue is that once people understand the underlying pattern for how the content was formed, the value of the content is reduced to that pattern, so it has to be so complex that people can't figure out how it was made, or at least so they can't be sure how it was made. I am an optimist and I think it will eventually get good.
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Actually, this looks more like fractally-compressed content.
On the TRS-80 Color computer, Dungeons of Daggorath.
5 levels.
The total game was 8k. Not enough room to store all the information in there.
The dungeon was around 40x40. 5 floors.
each room taking one bit (is there a monster, is there a door north, is there a secret door north, etc), that would have meant 7.5k on a 8k cartridge.
Not very practical...
So instead, using a feature of the coco's random number generator (seeding it with a negative number, reseting the pointer to a specific location), it always generated the same list of numbers.
Worked pretty well.
Every year I'm more and more amazed by that game.
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