All puzzles in ZEN and ZEN II are procedurally generated. There are 10,000 puzzles in each game and they are all guaranteed to be solvable.
The Sentinel is another good example of procedural generation to produce levels.
All puzzles in ZEN and ZEN II are procedurally generated. There are 10,000 puzzles in each game and they are all guaranteed to be solvable.
That is the exact problem. I used to make a lot of generative music on modular synths back in the day, and it's extremely difficult to set up a situation where startlingly unexpected and pleasing things happen, without losing all structure.
Thank you for this, being able to see the source code and figure out how the game worked its great.Einar Saukas wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2018 4:19 pm
All puzzles in ZEN and ZEN II are procedurally generated. There are 10,000 puzzles in each game and they are all guaranteed to be solvable.
The Sentinel is another good example of procedural generation to produce levels.
Are you a banana plug type of guy or more of the 1/4" jack persuasion? If I had won the lottery I always wanted one of these bad boys. http://www.vintagesynth.com/misc/buchla200.phpSeven.FFF wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2018 7:15 pm That is the exact problem. I used to make a lot of generative music on modular synths back in the day, and it's extremely difficult to set up a situation where startlingly unexpected and pleasing things happen, without losing all structure.
I used to describe it as a logarithmic fractal scale of similarity or unexpectedness. Most of your nice random variations and feed-back selected choices have a similarity of 1, where the sweet spot is 3 or 4. Most of the interesting stuff happens where you have a few orders or magnitude of differences, and it's very hard to get in that zone with algorithms.
There's an xkcd about cuils that kinda captures how everything gets too similar after a few levels of abstraction.
There was a really nice documentary made in the early 90s all about fractals. I'll see if I can find it on youtube. Yes fractal geometry is such a rich area for study. But to be honest I don't really understand it enough to be able to use it. I agree with you about having a strong story to be the backbone of the game. It's like generative stuff should be the icing on the cake but not the whole thing. As you say - it should be to enchant an already good/solid game and add depth/extra tasks/behaviours.Joefish wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2018 7:21 pm You're right about games not having so much depth. Although there's been a big update to No Man's Sky that makes it worth exploring. LEGO Worlds uses procedural levels and quests but they do all start to look the same. The problem is that in a purely procedural game, there might be plenty to do, and there might even be grand objectives, but simply knowing that it's random makes you question what the point of it all is.
What I'd suggest would work best is one main plot that's written specifically for the game, and just use the randomness to generate the environment. And maybe some unimportant side-quests. You can record which ones you've done, but it wouldn't kill the atmosphere if you left an area and the game forgot about it, then presented the same quests if you go back. Perhaps a quest generator that just records the types of quest you've done recently, and always offers up something different wherever you go.
A map generator that can interpolate or fill-in around data you fix yourself would be the most useful. You wouldn't use it to generate lots of different games; you make one game that you've tested and are happy with. The randomness just allows you to present a vast world without having to specifically program every little bit of it.
I'd love to be able to understand the 'fractal' code that went into something like Rescue on Fractalus or The Eidolon to generate the scenery. That was adding pseudo-random features to simple structures in real-time. And the features would scale up as you got closer, which is hard to achieve with random data.
I waisted hours in that game it had its limitations but I still remember forgiving them because it was so much better than anything before. I have to admit I much preferred morowind. It was always a head to head for me between darklands and dagerfall. I liked aspects of both games.Ralf wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2018 7:36 pm When you say auto-generated game I immediately remember Daggerfall, a very famous game from the 90s if you somehow missed it:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/elder ... daggerfall
"Famous" doesn't mean "great" unfortunately. Daggerfall was an incredibly ambitious project which sadly failed in many areas.
It has really huge world but it's mostly randomly generated and it's a weakness. You end with hundreds of towns which look the same as you enter them and thousands of people who also look the same and have names built randomly from some smaller parts. They give you some random quests, somethimes very stupid if you think more.
I remember an example that a game generated a quest to kill some giant spider dwelling in the guild of warriors. You get it, this spider wouldn't have a chance to survive a second in a real guild of warriors
Add hundreds of autogenerated 3D dungeons looking all the same. And tons of bugs, some of them probably coming from the game complexity.
Some people loved it, I didn't like it.
I don't want to play dozens of random but similar levels. I want variety in the game.
Mostly painless.Lol heres my little ditty with it in Beepola..
I'll get me coat structure of the 'tune' ideally would have gotten a lot more love. the main channel, second channel and drums are all using that sequence. (Lol just to show it could be done if it was 'legit' I would have used a more conventional drum track.) The mod5 pattern might be good to spice things up a bit. I would have to have a play.
Not quite sure how I missed this. hmmm well for tables where there is lots of continuous repeating data bytes this would be all kinds of awesome. So if you had like a sparse array with tons of 0's this would be really sweet.Seven.FFF wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2018 4:16 am I’d like to see a sf epic where all the alien races and planets were west country villages.
I don’t think this is suited to your strings, but runtime RLE reencoding is interesting.
http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming ... -encoding/
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