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An Algorithm To Randomly Generate Game Dungeons
An anonymous reader writes: Game developers frequently turn to procedural algorithms to generate some of their game's content. Sometimes it's to give the game more diverse environments, or to keep things fresh upon subsequent playthroughs, or simply just to save precious development time. If you've played a game that had an unpredictable layout of connected rooms, you may have wondered how it was built. No longer; a post at Gamasutra walks through a procedural generation algorithm, showing how random and unique layouts can be created with some clever code. The article is filled with animated pictures demonstrating how rooms pop into existence, spread themselves out to prevent overlap, finds a sensible series of connections, and then fill in the gaps with doors and hallways.
That, and many others. Procedural generation is not new.
I did enjoy the article, though. It was well written, well illustrated and fun to read. I have recently written some 2D game code that was generating a different kind of dungeon (not rectangular rooms, more organic / cave like environment. That was a fun project.
An article doesn't have to be about the cutting edge latest smart phone to be interesting. (I admit to have very little interest in smart phone news. I might read some articles when the time comes to buy a new handset...)