Generated vs. Crafted.

I''m working right now on practically randomly generating everything, setting wise, for a SF RPG. Random star systems, planets, cities, interiors... Randomization can be great if you need *alot* of different things.

If you go the random route be forwarned that it''s going to be difficult to get things right. I just recently finished my random solar system generator, and I still can''t get a Titan like moon around Jupiter!!! (Earth-type worlds form nicely, though ). Depending on what it is, you''ll need to work to understand why something looks the way it looks, then figure out how to break it up into parts.

You *can* lose some of the specialness that you get with handcrafted content. I''m not sure if this is a global rule, but from talking to folks here I get that the more complex the thing is, the more it needs to be composed of well designed parts. Some things, like level secrets or goodies, maybe need to be hand placed, I''m not sure yet (haven''t gotten into designing building / starship interiors in detail yet ).

Another things some folks were pointing out to me in another thread is that there should be a compelling reason for randomizing something (rand() for rand()''s sake is a no-no).

And it probably goes without saying that the randomized thing should look as good as or better than the predesigned thing.

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Just waiting for the mothership...

I think that one of the main differences between conventional randomly generated levels, and some designed levels. Is that every item in the designer level has a reason for being there. Ie. The bear's head on the wall, is there because the NPC had a vicious fight with the bear.

I think that (small) areas of randomly generated content can add excitement to a game. For instance when a player goes through a game that they have played before, they know what the layout of the level is, and where the monsters are positioned. This makes replaying that section of the game a far more sterile experience for the these players. There is little feeling of charting dangerous and unpredicatable territory, where the next step could be their last (although in a well designed game it probably won't be).

You could say that randomising the monsters positions would remove this sterileness that occurs, but I don't think that it would fully do so. The randomised monster positioning will add relatively new tactical considerations, but the player will still have the unchanged environment. There is an excitement that "random" settlements, cave systems, and special encounters will provide. Making every new step, a path along the road to discovery.

But as noted earlier, the randomly generated areas need to 1. be playable *. 2. It would help if these levels also had a reason for each object being there. Which could be achieved by using lots of rules, ie. the ecosystem + politics of this area will allow wolves, pigs, and harpies to coexist. But this regions e + p doesn't allow orcs because it is so near to the heavily guarded "hostile" human settlement. This would provide the random monster status of the area, then there would be a system which would allocate dwellings, and design them ie. this is a rich dwelling it can a have a store of papyrus, some small hidden gold stores, a quality duvet + a randomly chosen selection of personal items from a large list. If done wll tere wouldn't be much incongruity between the designed levels and the linking "randomly crafted" levels between them.

Ie. The system works like this, you are in a (designed) cave system, and are hunting for a Quarkette but as you follow it's trail, you are ambushed by a group of angry yeti which are annoyed because you are invading their territory and getting too near their young. Running away as fast as you can, you spot a fast animal, and jump on its back.. it runs off honking, and trying to buck you off it's back. It fails, and runs into one of the side tunnels, which leads down into somewhere you haven't been before... what will be in there? The area that you enter is (randomly generated).

Edited by - Ketchaval on September 14, 2000 8:10:51 PM

I think the idea of generating from states / attributes is a great idea and what I'm trying to do as well. The tricky thing becomes, "What stats to use?" These stats should some how describe the character of the area. For instance, a high law stat in a town might mean many guards. Or a high danger stat area might generate many monsters.

Keep in mind that you can recombine pregenerated items in a random way. The maps for Total Annihilation were made this way from what I hear. Precreated islands and hills and such were mixed and merged to create new and interesting terrain.




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Just waiting for the mothership...

Edited by - Wavinator on September 14, 2000 9:48:43 PM

In terms of MMORPGs, I seem to think both are good, though I put a twist on it. The Venusoft team is going to try and use a generator to generate a pile of content for our MMORPG world. Terrain doesn't really need to be hand drawn. We plan on using a scheme that was posted here a while back(or maybe gamasutra) where you take an image file and expand each pixel of the image to a larger section of generated 3D terrain.

From that initial generation of terrain we think we can save a pretty decent amount of time in content development. Enough to justify the programming effort to generate the terrain. Once the terrain is there, our 3D artist will then import that into their tool and make modifications to the terrain fixing generated errors in the terrain.(ie places where a player couldn't possibly get to, wildly erratic mountain ranges...)

Given the terrain layout, this will be handed off for custom design to our design team which will use prebuilt 3D objects to poulate the vast majority of the world. If we do it right, building areas for the world should be very dynamic and content creation should be easy enough for a legion of college students on co-op to help create. I am not sure if something like this has ever been accomplished before, but we seem to think that a world more detailed than anything out today, and much larger in scope could be created using this approach. We will soon see.

Kressilac
ps The real challenge, will be doing this while maintaining the look and feel of a custom designed world. (ie cities with unique look and atmospheres to them, varied styles of landscape, and ever changing eye candy for the user to enjoy.)

Edited by - kressilac on September 14, 2000 12:39:38 AM

I think random generation is actually going to become a new form of creativness. Probably called modified randomness or something like that. It has to happen in order to provide players with more interaction with the creative fields of a game.

I love Game Design and it loves me back.

Our Goal is "Fun"!

Our "4X space strategy" game will have both totally randomized scenarios, totally pre-made scenarios and everything inbetween. The scenario designer can choose which elements of his/her scenario are random, which predefined. Eg. he/she could design a scenario which was totally random except that the attributes of a single star system (but not location) would be predefined.

It all depends on your game''s style. Final Fantasy would not have worked with a random world. If you have a strong emphasis on story, it''s difficult to make a working random world.

-Jussi

One thing you have to be careful of when making random dungeons especially (but this could apply to the interior of starships, etc) is dead ends. Yes, i hate them.

You follow this path for ages, and then its a dead end. You go back a bit, follow a different path. It''s a dead end also. Eventually you go right back to the start and go the other way on the first turn you come to because of dead ends.

Admittedly this happens more in "maze" games rather than open dungeons like Diablo.

Just my little warning.


wise_guy

"I don''t listen to drug cheats" - kieran perkins

Wise_guy, that is an important point, as ideally it would be possible to have them follow good criteria like every (critical?) location can be reached by at least two paths (like Deus Ex game levels). And to include lots of vertical and horizontal loops in the level design.

My name disappeared in the post about pseudo-random generators.

At one point I wanted to generate everything. Cars, cities, houses, people, even tables, chairs and glasses. Everything. But then I realized how much time it would take to make all those generators work fine, when you could easily model a couple of cars in a week. Even generating a city is a bit stupid, because you can model a cool city in few weeks anyway, and making a good generator would take *lots* of more time. And what about the players that want to create their own cities and model their own cars? You''ve gotta have a good editor for them in any case.

You also don''t want to have different world every time you start a new game. That would be odd for players (there was a good article about this in Gamasutra, why not to make new map every playtime). And it would be harder to make a good storyline because it should be totally dynamic/generated then.

Few good places to use a generator:
1) Nethack/Diablo-games with dull endless dungeons that would probably look the same even if they were hand-drawn. And in nethack you can''t reborn/load a savegame, so it''s quite necessary to have a new dungeon every playtime. This kind of generator is very easy to make.

2) Star-systems. These are very easy to generate and there must be millions of these. Endless amount. Of course these don''t have to be physically & astronomically that correct because the players won''t notice it anyway.

3) Making a huge terrain for a CRPG. Because terrain-generating is very easy to do. But then again, you''ll need to use the generator only once, so this may be also pointless. Why not just draw the height-map with Photoshop using "render clouds" or other similar filters? If you distribute your game on a CD or DVD, disk space isn''t a problem.

4) For finer details in world that would take ages to place by hand. I can''t think of a good example right now..


-Hans {home page} {e-mail}

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The generators must of course be interconnected, but in a hierarchical sense.
>>>

Hierarchical: That''s a possible method that should be easier to debug and vary.

For a SF universe you''d have
Universe generation - just generates galaxies
==== Spiral
==== Oval
==== Spherical
==== Isolated
Galaxy generation - given the type of Galaxy && the balances between red:blue:yellow:white suns, generate a list of stars and their x,y,z locations
Planet Generation - given the type of sun, generate the different types of systems: blue will have a weighting of more gas giants and dirtballs, yellow will have more earth-type planets.
Resource Generation - given the atmosphere of a planet generate the resources

ZoomBoy
Developing a 2D RPG with skills, weapons, and adventure.
See my character editor, old Hex-Tile editor, diary, 3D Art resources at
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I used to think that randomly crafted levels were a poor idea, because I thought that they wouldn''t be able to stand up to the level of graphic design & expression, and gameplay / experience that professional level design can give.

But recently I have begun to doubt that it MATTERS as much as it seems. WHY? Because when playing X-Com, which uses a bunch of pregenerated buildings / fields etc. but seems to meld them together in a semi-random way. Even if there is? a preselected range of environments that they have chosen, the placement of the Aliens, Ie. Gameplay tokens, has a random element to it.

I realised, as I hunted down aliens and blew holes in walls to gain strategic advantages, was that GAMEPLAY MATTERED MORE THAN "CRAFTED" SEMI-LINEAR LEVELS. More gameplay could be given by giving a decent range of weapons, allowing for different strategies and giving each encounter semi-random starting positions. AND the X-Com is also a very atmospheric game.

So I think that it is possible to get the best of both worlds, by combining atmosphere and some good characters + situations, with random elements which affect gameplay and give interest to exploration.


If the generators for the terrain & token placement are well programmed, and they have a large enough list of interesting content that can be seamlessly integrated, then games can be both interesting places to explore & provide excellent gameplay.

A little bit of insight I''ve picked up from asking people about the random levels in Nethack / Rogue-likes: If the gameplay is really fun and addictive, and you''re engaged, then setting-- as long as it doesn''t detract-- may well become subconscious in terms of the user''s experience.

I think people are only intently focused on something being randomly generated if it 1) interferes with the gameplay, esp. to make it boring or 2) if they''re aesthetes who don''t like the idea of things not being hand painted.



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Just waiting for the mothership...

The other thing that interested me was an innocuous comment about combining Ultima Underworld (witty characterisation -Trolls that want to have Wormy Stew like their mothers used to make - warring Goblin tribes, clever puzzles, most objects have a reason for existing, a history for the action which extends into the level design etc.) with Nethack ( random content with interesting things that you haven''t seen before appearing in many games).