Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length

 
Advanced search

891148 Posts in 33525 Topics- by 24768 Members - Latest Member: Stome

June 19, 2013, 03:12:19 AM
TIGSource ForumsDeveloperTechnical (Moderators: Glaiel-Gamer, ThemsAllTook)Procedurally Generated Content
Pages: 1 2 [3] 4
Print
Author Topic: Procedurally Generated Content  (Read 19706 times)
butzopower
Level 0
*


View Profile Email
« Reply #30 on: May 04, 2008, 03:10:14 PM »

For those interested in procedurally generated imagery, I found this today:

http://www.processing.org/

Example of it in action:

http://www.vimeo.com/935317/

A bit late on this thread, but I was wondering if anyone ended up checking Processing out.  The guy who wrote the book on it, Ira Greenberg, gave a talk at my school about procedural generation and did some really cool things with it.
Logged
Klaim
Level 10
*****



View Profile WWW
« Reply #31 on: May 04, 2008, 03:16:32 PM »

I read the examples on the sites and it's verry interesting. I'm not sure how it would fit in a real-time game but i'm interessted in the book now...
Logged

http://www.klaimsden.net | Game : NetRush | Digital Story-Telling Technologies : Art Of Sequence
joshg
Level 4
****



View Profile WWW Email
« Reply #32 on: May 04, 2008, 05:04:12 PM »

I've done a bunch of stuff in Processing. I think it's ideal for the compo - it isn't game-focused, but it's primarily aimed at artists who are coding up their own procedurally generative visuals which overlaps a lot with procedural content in games.

The only thing Processing is a bit weak at is trying to do procedurally generated audio - there are other environments which do that better, such as PureData.  But if you just want to use regular sampled audio in your game, Processing will handle that just fine (use the ESS library, I think it's called).
Logged

these are from an actual radio shack in the ghetto
butzopower
Level 0
*


View Profile Email
« Reply #33 on: May 04, 2008, 05:34:32 PM »

I read the examples on the sites and it's verry interesting. I'm not sure how it would fit in a real-time game but i'm interessted in the book now...

Greenberg was defining it as this weird code art thing, and how he moved from canvas art to code art by seeing that the procedure is what his art was.  Pretty interesting, considering it was a CS lecture.

He also said that since it uses Java, you can also use any Java library along with it.  I can't confirm this, but maybe someone else can.  If so, then there shouldn't be too much from stopping anyone from making a full game with it, although it might be hard to package up into an executable?
Logged
Hinchy
Level 3
***


zach@hinchy.us lbhinchy
View Profile WWW Email
« Reply #34 on: May 04, 2008, 05:39:50 PM »

how exactly, in game maker, would I go about extracting characters from strings and getting their ASCII codes? i'm not that familiar with GML functions, although I know the syntax and whatnot.
Logged
joshg
Level 4
****



View Profile WWW Email
« Reply #35 on: May 04, 2008, 08:23:14 PM »

He also said that since it uses Java, you can also use any Java library along with it.  I can't confirm this, but maybe someone else can.  If so, then there shouldn't be too much from stopping anyone from making a full game with it, although it might be hard to package up into an executable?


I can confirm this.  You can import whatever Java libraries you want into Processing code.  It scales incredibly well from super-simple code to functional code to object oriented to full blown Java.  (Which is one of the reasons why I seriously recommend it as the best IDE/language I've seen for anyone to learn how to program for the first time.)  If you get to a point where you want to profile your game or do crazy advanced debugging or whatever, you can even get Processing code to run in Eclipse with just a little bit of hassle.

It also has built-in publishing to standalone executables in Windows, Mac and Linux formats, dead simple, as well as publishing to a Java applet.
Logged

these are from an actual radio shack in the ghetto
Cthulhu32
Level 6
*


Brawp


View Profile WWW Email
« Reply #36 on: May 05, 2008, 08:46:51 AM »

One of the core concepts I see overlooked a lot of times is the art of fuzzy logic for procedurally generated games.

Take a read on Wikipedia if you haven't read up much on it, but Fuzzy Logic can be a huge benefit when it comes to procedurally generated content.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic

If you use a simple fuzzy logic engine (you don't need all the fancy curves and graphing abilities), you can get away with doing some really cool Spore style character/pattern generations with a pretty simplistic algorithm to cover it.

Lets say you wanted to make a series of enemies in a gauntlet game using a procedural concept and 5 body parts: head, body, arms, legs, magic amulets/pieces. You could have a list of predefined AI behaviors and attack patterns, and use some basic rules of fuzzy logic to create a HUGE array of creatures that are seemingly procedural but will follow the same set of rules defined in your fuzzy logic table.

Now, fuzzy logic is a much stricter idea of "procedural" but you can totally combine this in with a genetic algorithm and get all sorts of interesting results. You could have mating monsters that create children based on their attributes, but who also inherit certain characteristics or use fuzzy logic to define some aspect of their characteristics. Lots of fun things here.
Logged

Melly
Level 10
*****


This is how being from "da hood" is like, right?


View Profile
« Reply #37 on: May 05, 2008, 10:59:47 AM »

Man, I can barely understand what that wikipedia article is saying.
Logged

Feel free to disregard the above.
Games: Minus / Action Escape Kitty
increpare
Guest
« Reply #38 on: May 05, 2008, 12:40:44 PM »

Aaaah I'm having irritating tree troubles.  Stupid friggin' treeeees.  Grrrrr.  Stupid friggin' procedurally generated content.
Logged
nayon
Level 5
*****


dickfish


View Profile Email
« Reply #39 on: May 10, 2008, 11:52:13 PM »

I'm not sure I completely understand procedurally generated content, what's the difference between that and randomly generated content?
Logged

Sar
Level 3
***


Likes Violins


View Profile WWW
« Reply #40 on: May 11, 2008, 12:38:01 AM »

I'm not sure I completely understand procedurally generated content, what's the difference between that and randomly generated content?

Sometimes, nothing. A good deal of procedural content uses random determination.

The main difference is that when people say "random" in a game context, most people will think of random-positioning/timing/etc. of pre-existing assets, where when people say "procedural" in a game context, most people will think of asset-generation.

The other thing, I guess, is that a lot of people will equate 'procedural' with 'deterministic', so with an entirely random generation you'll get a different thing every time, but with a procedural approach you'll get the same thing every time.

(Of course, since a computer's random number generator is itself procedural, it's not an entirely clean distinction, and as you can see in the PCG competition threads popping up a lot of people are going for "random generation with arbitrary RNG seed", which will end up being deterministic.)





Good example of procedurally-generated content: fractals. The process for generating the Mandelbrot image, for example, is to represent a given pixel as a complex number, real in one axis and imaginary in another; to repeatedly square that value and add the original number; if it goes outside of a certain threshold (there are no members of the set further than 1 from the 0+0i value, IIRC) then discard it, otherwise it's in the set. Most fractal visualisations will colour the pixel based on how many iterations it takes to discard, and colour an 'inside' colour if that particular number doesn't go outside the threshold before a certain number of iterations (the higher the count, the more detail the edges of the set will have). So it takes a handful of lines of code to generate a Mandelbrot fractal image, but that image might occupy megabytes of memory once generated.)
« Last Edit: May 11, 2008, 12:47:52 AM by Sar » Logged

Currently working on: Chronicle of Mars
Previous Projects: [Käfer|Tristan and Iseult(TIGS)]
moi
Level 10
*****


i disagree


View Profile WWW
« Reply #41 on: May 11, 2008, 01:23:50 AM »

When you think about it all games have som degree of PCG don't they? Wink
Logged

lelebæcülo
Sar
Level 3
***


Likes Violins


View Profile WWW
« Reply #42 on: May 11, 2008, 01:40:08 AM »

When you think about it all games have som degree of PCG don't they? Wink

Unless you're talking about mipmaps or AI behaviour, I'm not sure I understand. ;-)
Logged

Currently working on: Chronicle of Mars
Previous Projects: [Käfer|Tristan and Iseult(TIGS)]
moi
Level 10
*****


i disagree


View Profile WWW
« Reply #43 on: May 11, 2008, 09:48:41 AM »

well "procedurally generated" is a very broad term.
Logged

lelebæcülo
Crackerblocks
Level 1
*


jus_10s@yahoo.ca
View Profile WWW
« Reply #44 on: May 11, 2008, 10:21:00 AM »

seems like a lot of the games in the competition are just randomizing something that isn't normally randomized and calling it PG.

it would be a fun challenge to make a PG game that never used random.
Logged
Pages: 1 2 [3] 4
Print
Jump to:  

Theme orange-lt created by panic