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

Re:yawn.

[mark-t]

The algorithm is new... or at least it's one I've never seen before, and I've been a fairly avid follower of game programming algorithms since the early 1990's, and reading rec.games.programmer every single day.

Using steering behaviors or a physics engine to separate randomly generated rooms is a different approach from anything I've ever seen for dungeon generation.

I'm not convinced that the approach is necessarily superior to anything else that has been done so far, however. It is innovative, yes... interesting, even. Useful? I'm not so sure about that.