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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...)
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
That's great and all, but whatever happened to, you know....just skipping the articles that don't interest you? You on a 300 baud modem or something?