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.

Comments

Yesteryears Algorithms

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree that the animations are nice to look at fore a minute, such concepts have been around for 30 years, since the early days of Rogue and Hack. Why is this on Slashdot in 2015???

Re:Yesteryears Algorithms

[Sloppy]

Damn, what a sad attitude to see.

Say there's some 11 year old newbie programmer. She hasn't done any of this yet, and hears, "a lot of people who are into the stuff you're into, are on a place called Slashdot." Yeah, let's agree that our position is: fuck off, newbie, go get your learning and inspiration somewhere else.

I remember reading articles kind of like this, a few decades ago in "COMPUTE!" magazine and similar things. The topics were even old then, and some graybeard from the 1960s might have scoffed with "oh, I was doing that 10-20 years ago." Well, guess what, 1960s graybeard: maybe you didn't leave enough accessible notes, much less, code. And yes, someone can look at (or imagine) results, and make up how they'll do it, without needing to know how you did it. But maybe some kid wants to learn from your mistakes and successes.

Anybody who writes up decent problems and solutions is welcome, IMHO. I don't give a fuck if it's stuff we were doing decades ago. And honestly, most of that source code isn't around anyway. And when I think of my 1980s code, even if I had my old source, you sure-as-fuck wouldn't want to try to read it.