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Building a Procedural Dungeon Generator In C#
Nerval's Lobster writes Procedural dungeon generation is a fun exercise for programmers. Despite the crude interface, such games continue to spark interest. A quarter century ago, David Bolton wrote a dungeon generator in procedural Pascal; now he's taken that old code and converted it to C#. It's amazing just how fast it runs on a five-year-old i7 950 PC with 16GB of RAM. If you want to follow along, you can find his code for the project on SourceForge. The first part of the program generates the rooms in a multilevel dungeon. Each level is based on a 150 x 150 grid and can have up to 40 rooms. Rather than just render boring old rectangular rooms, there are also circular rooms. "There are a couple of places where corridor placement could have been optimized better," Bolton wrote about his experiment. "However, the dungeon generation is still very fast, and could provide a good programming example for anyone exploring what C# can do." For C# beginners, this could represent a solid exercise.
I remember when getting first post was a major acheivement.
in shitcock#
Have we slipped so far down the performance-orientated slide that we are impressed by *how well a dungeon generator runs on an i7 with 16GB of RAM*.
I am genuinely curious. That is an outrageously high spec for a dungeon generator.
Alternate link
It's amazing just how fast it runs on a five-year-old i7 950 PC with 16GB of RAM.
Yep, almost as fast as the original's code on a i386 with 4MB of RAM. Impressive.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
NetHack has had procedural dungeon generation with available source for .... gosh a long time.
These kids nowadays, with their fancy processors.
c# is dead
killed my microsoft themselves
the sooner you face this fact, the better
I foresee a sudden rush of crappily made dungeon crawlers, all sporting the Unity3D free/indy badge clogging up kongregate for months to come.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Another shitty dungeon generator.
Why not post this in /r/cartographersguild or something?
There are already lots of shitty dungeon generators, you're probably not doing anything useful like using features that are in sourcebooks, and dungeon building is almost certainly something you should be doing by hand anyway. Even if your party is a bunch of mindless murderhobos. Good dungeons make enough of a difference that people will actually pay real money for them. If you want story on top of an interesting tactical scenario then you have to do it yourself, and this is not likely to be a good place to start. You should start with a line diagram connecting *encounters* with each other (straight lines, branches, loops), and then come up with the layout. Doing it the other way around makes for shitty dungeons. There are books and papers on this topic that would be much more useful.
And another thing, as long as I'm ranting: don't use traps. They slow the game down and decrease player resources without actually giving them agency. They serve no narrative purpose. If you must have traps, have them [a] sound alarms or otherwise summon foes, or [b] make it a risk / reward situation: make their choices interesting. If, given complete knowledge of a situation, you would always want to choose one action, you're not being given a real choice. Choosing to avoid a trap isn't an interesting choice. Choosing to walk into a trap because the danger is worth the shiny thing you might get out of it is far more interesting. See also FPS map design, good example would be Unreal Tournament's DM-Pressure, where there's a powerup inside a room, and a button other players can hit to kill anyone in there. Risk vs reward. There's actually quite a bit about FPS map design that's applicable to PnP RPGs.
tl;dr
This is not a way to generate maps that people will want to play. If you have to use a generator, there are better options. If you want to learn about how to make good maps, there are better resources. If you want to pretend that something you wrote decades ago is full of important lessons for other people, fuck off.
It's amazing just how fast it runs on a five-year-old i7 950 PC with 16GB of RAM.
Yeah, it's five year old, but even today a very fast CPU. Has a CPUMark of 5600. High TDP of course.
Oh, it's just some Dice Slashvertisement, just to remind us that they own this shithole.
Why is it "amazing" that a piece of code, written 25 years ago, on a processor 100,000 times slower, runs quickly? o.O
I really don't understand why this article is a thing. For 1, it's a really shitty way to generate dungeons as there are vastly superior ways of doing it: cellular automata http://www.futuredatalab.com/p... for example can product cave like dungeons, regular rectangular dungeons, etc and not just something made with ASCII that needs to then be converted. I've even seen KDtree's drawn out to represent rooms and such for muds. This article fails on a multitude of fronts. First being the DICE ad tracker embedded in the link to the article. Second, being the fact that he is "impressed" with how fast it runs on a Core-i7. Third, the use of SourceForge, where projects go to die. And finally, the fact that the article says it's geared towards beginners, teaching them bad coding practices and the like with the shitty code that's on sourceforge.
Call me when he re-writes Dwarf Fortress, which doesn't just build the dungeon but also the countryside around it along with a few more continents and oceans as well as a thousand years of history for each of the major civilizations living there.
Is this similar to what the RPG Diablo from Blizzard was doing with its dungeon random generation (with a few exceptions) back in 1996?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_(video_game)
Its Dead Jim but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know it
Its Dead Jim but not as we know it, not as we know it Jim.
Its alive Jim but not as we know it, not as we know it
Its alive Jim but not as we know it, not as we know it
Not as we know it JIM.
#had to compress the fucker as the compression filter sucks balls
So I had a crack at this a while back, but assuming that it would be too sane in C#, I thought I'd do it in Excel for a laugh. ;)
http://www.frayn.net/games/ddxl/index.html
It builds roguelike dungeons and cellular-automata-based cave systems. With a procedural terrain generator too. And all wrapped in a fully-featured RPG with skill systems, equipment, inventories, randomly generated towns, merchants, mercenaries, magic, crafting...
It doesn't seem to work properly on Win8.1/Excel 2013, but YMMV. I really must get back to fixing that at some point.
Don't look too closely at the code, as it might make your eyes bleed. Sorry - I hadn't written any VBA before. I have no intention of quitting my day job. :)
I've had some fun with this..
;)
Cave Generation
http://i.imgur.com/grPvlNp.jpg
Classic with random room shapes.
http://i.imgur.com/Hjh1dSw.jpg
Maze generation.
http://i.imgur.com/36p9jR0.jpg
I can do a 640x640 map under 2 minutes on an i5 1.2ghz with 4 gigs ram. My dungeon rooms are all done with procedures and my rogue maps do boxes, circles, triangles, diamonds, H's, doughnuts. I wrote this in Java for fun and here are some of the references I used.
Rogue
http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Simple_Rogue_levels
Maze
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
http://www.math.cornell.edu/~lipa/mec/lesson6.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/
Cave
http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Cellular_Automata_Method_for_Generating_Random_Cave-Like_Levels
Lots of room for improvement obviously, but I don't think I did too bad for my first dive in to map generation. I did start with recursion to generate these maps but they took way too long and ate up a lot of memory. I changed to a different method and avoided recursion. Still it was fun to dabble in recursion for a short time.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
For each project you could generate a parser for a new programming language with procedurally generated characteristics, and use that to write your program. For example, it could make up a object oriented language where all variable names are required to be nonalphanumeric, and all of the operators are letters. Or a language where every variable is really just a FIFO queue. Or a language where you have to use sockets instead of function calls, with recursion being performed via the loopback interface. Maybe there is a builtin language keyword for reading from a database connection and posting the result to a twitter feed. The possibilities are endless.