The Importance of Procedural Content Generation In Games

Gamasutra reports on a talk by Far Cry 2 developer Dominic Guay in which he discussed why procedural content generation is becoming more and more important as games get bigger and more complex. He also talks about some of the related difficulties, such as the amount of work required for the tools and the times when it's hard to retain control of the art direction. Quoting: "Initially, the team created a procedural sky rendering approach based on algorithms — which led to a totally unconvincing skybox that was clearly inferior to what a hand-authored skybox would be. 'We considered it to be a total failure,' he said. He explained that a great deal of focus must be put on the tools that surround the algorithms, to allow the systems to be properly harnessed. In the end, the game shipped with a revamped procedural sky system that ended up much more effective than the first attempt."

Comments

Re:Spell it out for me please

[Goodgerster]

You've obviously never read _any_ English literature...

Re:Procedural?

[kwikrick]

I guess its because the most used technique for these purposes is procedural programming, and perhaps some OOP, but that doesn't really help with writing algorithms.

It would be a good thing if other techniques, like functional and constrained-based programming were used more. But alas, most programmers will stick to what they know.

Re:Spell it out for me please

[MadKeithV]

"For" is indeed possible in that sentence position, but it does not mean "instead" like it the grandparent seems to intend.
Dictionary.com: For: by reason of; because of.

Re:Fractal Generation

[digitig]

Or The Netherlands, in my experience of driving (and trying to use satnav) there.

Re:Fractal Generation

[Five Bucks!]

You should check out St. John's, Newfoundland. You'd feel quite at home here.

All the streets downtown are remnants of the original cartpaths. Intersections of four two way streets and a one way street requires drivers to 'learn' how to proceed through.

Re:Procedural?

[kwikrick]

I'm waiting for you to get the clue and drop it.

You can write your content generator in Brainfuck for all I care, but it probably won't be any good, and nobody is going to think its a good idea. Of course programming languages and tools matter, why the hell do you think people bother with them?

For example, as remarked earlier in this thread, good special purpose languages for texture generation are functional languages.

So algorithmic content creation would be a better term than procedural content generation. But unfortunately, we're stuck with it, like I'm stuck with you.