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Procedurally generated cities? Yes please!
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Oh god, if you could choose to play as either Godzilla or the Earth Defense Force I would be hard pressed to play any other game ever.
Yeah, but what about the fact that after playing L4D for a while, I'm well and truly finished with it? I played the maps eighty million times so now it's just more a matter of memorization than anything else. There are some random elements like item placement and where zombies appear, but otherwise it's just the same maps over and over and over. Even the VS stuff wears out because there are only a certain number of "good" places to do certain things. I didn't even bother picking up L4D2 because I knew it would be the same business all over again, just with a handful of new levels and a few new zombie types.
For procedurally generated maps, there would permanently be an element of complete surprise. A set of maps could have no horde events, could all have horde events, could string horde events together on a single map, etc. I think pretty much any sort of survival game would be immensely improved with random maps since a huge portion of the entertainment value is gone once you know the maps and events well enough. And while I agree that sandbox games like GTA probably wouldn't gain anything from random maps due to the directed nature of the game, they could still benefit from being able to completely destroy entire buildings. More importantly, full, complete buildings would be big, big step forward. Liberty City in GTAIV held no appeal to me because I knew 99.5% of those buildings were just big boxes with textures. If nothing else, being able to have filled, destructible buildings could take otherwise dead cities and make them feel properly alive.
I don't really think something like this would matter for an EDF game, though. I never really knew if I was fighting in different cities anyway, so why bother with a city randomizer? The hordes or aliens kept me way to busy to pay much attention to city layout.
A problem that arises in games where you can go into any building in a big environment is that you'll tend to just ignore all those random empty pointless buildings after you figure out that they don't have anything interesting inside.
It entirely depends on how you decide to develop your game. I figured it would work great for a zombie survival game. The player would want to hole up in a building to survive, but would need to regularly go out to explore other buildings for ammo, food, hardware, you name it. The focus would actually be more on the exploration of the buildings, making each one important. Stay in one area too long, the buildings around you will get emptied of everything useful. The gameplay could revolve around surviving long enough to get the supplies necessary to run a few blocks, where you hole up again and try to recuperate your supplies for another run.
A game that involves loads of NPC interaction, like Morrowind or Oblivion, could easily encourage lots of building exploration. Perhaps even a detective style game where you're searching for clues.
Beyond that, in an online game, a cops and robbers theme would do wonderfully. The buildings would provide a fantastic place to set up a defense.
It'd definitely be a huge leap, no argument there. I'd be surprised to see anything good in the way of utilizing procedurally generated cities to come out within the next five to ten years. That pixel city thing was worked on back in 1996 and to my knowledge, we've yet to see a AAA title that used random city generation to even create the groundwork for a custom city, much less a AAA title which uses entirely procedurally generated cities. Creating even a simple city without anything clipping or being stupidly arranged would be an extremely difficult procedure. Then add internal objects. And everything is destructible. "Complex" would probably be a very poor word to use.
Populating them with people wouldn't be too hard. The streets in GTA games have had randomly generated pedestrians and cars for ages; creating AI specifically for each building type (office, apartment, and so on) would actually be a helluva lot easier than actually getting to the point of procedurally generated cities. But how great would it be to be able to drive a car through an office building after flying off the freeway with people screaming and jumping out the way as you plow through one window, crash through some cubicles, and go flying off onto another overpass? And for once not have it all scripted and planned out by the developers?
Its the Designers job to make sure things are well balanced as a player goes through the game.
Saying that i feel certain games could use both. Lots of games have Single Player and others have an added multiplayer. So lets add procedural as a game mode. You have the well designed main game but also a always changing sandbox for whatever else.
Games not mentioned I think this would be awesome for.
- Racing, sorta like Burnout go so fast you can punch holes through the buildings
- Mirrors Edge, more like a parkour based game where your running through a city and its buildings
- BlastCorps (RF:G is similar in the whole point is to destroy)
- Katamari
There are many games that can be designed around NOT having to go back to an area you destroyed. Each procedural city would essentially be a level that you play and finish.
Really the best part of Procedural content is how Artists (and designers) can use a procedural city as a base and modify it to play very well. Thus allowing (good) content to be created faster and cheaper in this age of super high development costs.
Edit:
As some one posted above. APB (All Points Bulletin) is essentially a cops and robbers MMO could do well with procedural instances for fights. Basically the procedural city would be the Battle Arena for the day.
That blog is a really good read. Informative while being humourous, and he has a few other interesting articles/projects up as well.
The grappling hook in AUF redeemed the game. We played for hours just grappling everywhere and shooting.
It was such a shame that it was completely and utterly nerfed in Nightfire. EA had lightning in a bottle and wasted it.
Also the problem with these procedural cities is they always end up looking like New York.
In fact, you could probably use such elements are parameters in the generation in some (many?) cases, provided you're smart enough to understand what those elements are, and why they're important to the game experience.
I love the idea of a survival game where you need to periodically refresh your supplies, and that means venturing out of whatever fortified den you have created. As the game progresses, it naturally gets harder as you denude the immediate locale of supplies and have to travel further afield. It could produce all sorts of great decisions, such as whether to go for broke and head for the supermarket across town, Dawn of the Dead style, and create a new base there.
With a bit of thought regarding NPC behaviour, you could have roaming bands of hostile survivors, a la The Road or the aforementioned Dawn of the Dead. If you combine that with environmental issues, such as certain enemies being active during the day or night, and visibility issues due to weather, you might have a very interesting game.
No water and low ammo? Make a mad break for the supermarket on the other side of town. But daytime is dominated by a certain nasty enemy, and night is the domain of ambush killers. Can you get to the supermarket in the limited time at dusk, when the enemies are at their lowest numbers? Can you do it when the road and building layout changes every time, and there's great uncertainty there? Do you take the armoured car, knowing that the layout of the crashed cars blocking the roads etc changes and you might be a sitting duck for an RPG when you're boxed in? Do you risk going on foot, where you can stay out of sight more easily, but it will take you longer?
Sounds pretty cool, to me at least.
I have it on disc but afraid to load it due to Vista hating classic games.
If there was a game where all you did was grapple around like in AUF, I'd buy it.
Procedurally generated = PG
*Styrofoam walls may be nerfed in final version
*That video was just ONE company's tech demo, people could do it other ways.
*Someone brought this up earlier about having only one area (home base) be permanent while everything else is PG. Stop thinking GTA and start thinking Star Trek, you want to Make ST:V more interesting, try gunning down those assholes from the first season in a PG village.
*Godzilla, you have to kill a monster sent by aliens from planet Z and as it rampages through the city, you run and jump from building to building, trying to take it out.
*Not cities but spaceships, someone mentioned in the Space Sim thread about a PG space hulk game that let you blow apart the ship while taking care to preserve vital systems. 3 genestealers in the next room, blow away the room and walk on the walls to the other side.
Now that I've said that, I'm going to caveat the whole thing and say that this video was just a prototype, a proof of concept. This is not a game engine. Some guys threw this together to prove that it's possible. Of course nobody's going to ship a game like this, it's ugly and silly. I imagine it's possible to set different "materials" to different physics properties so that not everything is like "foam," and that it's probably pretty easy to program in certain procedurally generated qualities like putting pipes and slats and wiring within walls after you shoot holes in it and so forth. Furthermore, no art director would let any game get away with the kind of bland, lifeless, lacking in personality or really any direction at all that this prototype/proof of concept has; this is not a game, just a demonstration. So even if a game were to utilize something like this, the developer would hopefully put as much time and effort into art direction as it would need rather than art being an afterthought in this technical demonstration. Finally, if a game were to be made using this sort of tech, who is to say that it would not just be part of many facets of the game? There have been games in the past with game mechanics that incorporated destructive environments and many of them have been fun, but it's not all you do in the game. If it can be incorporated well, and used as needed within the context of the game and its mechanics, it could be quite an awesome thing.
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Or Valkyries.
Or Vertical Tanks.
Basically something large, mechanical, and shooty.
Also yes it looks bland because it is a tech demo, the purpose of the demo wasn't to show off amazing textures
I'll do you one better: import maps. Topographic maps, street maps, climate maps, elevation maps, subway maps, power line maps, population density maps, point of interest GPS maps... Any data that can be used to assign a value to a set area. Then feed it to a semi-procedural terrain and city generator: "semi" in that it doesn't build everything, but takes what it can find and fills in the rest. Make sure each location on the globe can calculate a set number seed based on latitude/longitude, so it always builds the same area if visited twice.
The result? XCom with an actual world-sized globe, and the ability to zoom from a view of the entire planet down to the tiniest hapless citizen in smooth, Google Earth-style. Areas won't look perfect if you're personally familiar with them (unless we get really future-fancy and throw in shape recognition and feed it google street view), but you'll nevertheless have a map based extensively on the real world.
Shamus Young is awesome. He did another commentary on procedurally-generated content just a few weeks ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhyyUiYQolA
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This is okay. This is not a bad thing.
I'd be pissed off if writers went over to some sort of procedurally-generated story system. I mean, uh whooooo the book is different every time I open it up!
It's good for an experience to end.
I see a lot of promise in procedural generation. Note that procedural does not mean random. Designers well and truly should build the system in such a way as to give focus to what they want.
I've been working on and off conceptually for a system for procedurally generated quest-based storylines in space games. Imagine instead of the random "Hey, I need you to take x supplies to x system for me." You had storylines of near Escape Velocity depth, but were different every time you played. Or rather, as you kept playing. The storylines end, but there are more things going on out there. Nothing kills an immersive experience like getting to the end of a storyline in an open world and all the sudden, nothing else happens ever.
Something that struck my mind is that you only really need to generate rooms the same floor as you or maybe on in each direction.
Also, how would you program in the random dispensing of shops or are we going to have a flashback of half life where instead of 2 hearts and 3 femurs popping out a dead body we get 3 teriyaki shops ina row on he ground floor of a mixed usage 5 story apartment building.
I consider it a bad thing for a game like L4D. Whatever story is there takes minimalism to the extremes and frankly, all I needed to know was zombies happened, these people survived, and now they're trying to fight their to safety. A bit of scribble on walls here and there was somewhat amusing at first, but ultimately added very little to the game. The "story" of L4D never got me to play, the gameplay did. And the gameplay was frantically trying to shoot through vast hordes of zombies on a handful of maps which were rapidly memorized. The most fun I had with the game was at the start when people were just figuring out all the places to go; having a game like L4D which did that endlessly would be utterly fantastic.
And even in actually story-driven games, randomization can be nice. Would it really be a crime if in something like FO3 that Megaton didn't have the same layout every single time? If the Capital Wasteland itself was new for each game and you had to actually talk to people to get directions? Hell, I'd be happy with randomized interiors so every "dungeon" isn't designed as "cave", "vault", "sewer", or "subway".
I'll be completely satisfied as long as the engine can tell when the building no longer has sufficient structural support, at which point it will promptly collapse into a heap of rubble.
Red Faction: Guerrilla was decent at the whole structural integrity thing, but it was spotty. Still much better than most.
Also, the forests in Oblivion were procedurally generated, if I recall. Granted, everyone was shipped the same product, but the devs had it generated before it was shipped.
This is the best idea. I'd buy a new Space Hulk game.
And the best part is you don't have to worry about people complaining that the terrain is different.
"Oh, you went back to a part of the Hulk you were at earlier, but it looks different this time? Well, that's warpspace for you."
Lol, red faction had the worst structural integrity. "There's a single tiny pole holding up the far side of this huge building? Totally holds the weight of the building, you gotta tap it with your hammer first".
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Well, it *is* Mars.
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It helps prove that this tech doesn't have to be used for lol new game every time sort of things. The devs could supply the seed used to generate the world and build content around that.
Use this stuff to create the huge city, then detail and add story elements to places that need it.
People could supply their own seeds to make new cities and build their own missions for others to play maybe.
Yeah, I think this technology will become more and more useful as gameplay options in sandbox games become more varied and powerful. (e.g. Prototype, Infamous, Crackdown...) Especially when you consider that it doesn't just mean that you can make a new city each time you play, but also that the city can be scaled exponentially larger with minimal effort. Giant megacities are somewhat necessary when you have the ability to level everything for a few clicks around with a shrug.
On that note, a Dragon Ball Z game would be another huge hit with this tech. Getting punched through 30 buildings hooooo
Also, I think you might be a bit off-track with that last paragraph.. The biggest weakness of procedurally generated levels is that they have a tendency to become repetitive-feeling, due to using the same base resources over and over to build an area. So I think a game doing that would more likely fall harder into the trap of 'cave', 'vault', 'sewer' and 'subway'.
Also was that gun firing tiny nuclear bombs or what
You've solved your own problem here.
"Crap, I've been in this city for 6 hours, and I still need to explore that whole district over there!"
"..."
BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM
"..."
Can't explore what's no longer there.
Or to slow down Godzilla so he focuses more on Ghidra and less on the frail human that just tagged him with the satillite gun.
PG cities + Shadow of the colossus + Godzilla movies/Ultraman = Japanese gold
Oh, shit! Shadow of the colossus in new york! I would play the fuck out of that especially if the colossi were ripping through skyscrapers
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yes, cloverfield the game. I can't tell you how much i want to run away from a stupid vague ass monster that for some reason always chases after me and have the only action really be fighting giant bugs that make your head explode. oh, and i'll probably only be able to see my character from a second guy's camera.
i'm gonna go preorder now.
YES
Can everyone shut up about Cloverfield? It wasn't even that good a movie!
In the case of Cloverfield, you could play as the monster and they could actually use the game to explain what it's doing in the city, you could play as the marines trying to kill it etc etc. People have ideas, let them run with tthem.
I agree with whoever said that it would take up too much memory to store the innards of each building (Special K maybe?). As the Fuel video pointed out, it's A LOT of memory to store, whether it's being called procedurally or not.
Also, another very subtle thing I noticed in the OP tech demo is that it's going to reintroduce pop-ins to games (check the final fly-over). A small price to pay I suppose but I can't help but feel like every game is suddenly going to go back to coming complete with omnipresent fog 500m around you in all directions.
Hey, if the gaming industry can survive a JFK assassination simulator, it can survive a blow random shit up in a crowded city simulator.
Anyway, this is a pretty awesome tech demo. What they've created thus far in the OP is pretty revolutionary as far as the level design process goes. Building destruction aside, (which is of course very rough, since it's basically a proof of concept video,) being able to explore random buildings in, say, a zombie survival game, or a game like Freedom Fighters would do a great job of making the environment more interesting and immersive. Remember wandering the streets of Deus Ex and only being able to enter two buildings out of all of New York? Those days are potentially behind us.