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Procedurally generated cities? Yes please!
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Actually I was thinking of doing the mirror's edge thing with Godzilla eating tokyo, a little like the earthquake scene in the Red Hot Chili Peppers Californiacation video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFMLARtqxCY
Man, what isn't wrong with being a Christian?
But seriously, it's that he identifies as a devout Christian which gives me the heebiejeebies and the fact that he talks about his chuchgoing and so forth in his various posts. People whose comitment to churchgoing and fellowship and all that other religious social status nonsense are weird. He's not turn or burn insane, but that doesn't make it any easier for me to ignore. It's really the more minor issue of the two.
Secondly, he's made a few posts where he's been happy with people blasting "lefty thinking" and a big thing about how the left are tyrants of the same kind as the religious right and social programs are forcing people to behave in a liberal way at gunpoint that raised my eyebrows. Plus he thinks that everyone on the left is pro-Communism. The inability to differentiate between socialising government programs, socialism and communism is a prime red-flag for "this person is a wingnut".
Edit: He links to another blog, which gets half way through an effort to implement a procedural city using Shamus' design principles in XNA using modern tools. Then it has a post about performing mission in everyday life and "letting god into everything you do" and then there's nothing else. Clearly procedural city generation attracts evangelicals. I would forgive the new guy in this if he finished the accursed project.
I thought more about my "maybe this could be Sim City" post and I've decided that it would be neat to have instead a city management sim where you start with existing cities and try to maintain them instead of always having to start from scratch. Each city could have different issues, like high crime or something, or maybe your procedurally generated city is just a general piece of shit and your job is to embezzle as much money as possible in 5 years or something. Like Tropico!
Are you suggesting there are those who are even more athy than I am?
EDIT: Though I'm not really seeing your point. I never said that there was anything inherently problematic about posting stuff about religion, or politics for that matter. I'm just not religious and don't care to read about fellowship and so forth, I find it distasteful and cringworthy.
There IS something wrong with being a wingnut. Which he is.
However, on top of that, as a principle I don't expect Rush Limbaugh to find my hypothetical blog on atheism, social activism and coding assuming he developed an interest in coding.
Here's an idea, we procedurally generate a city from my childhood and do to it what 15 years of no government and warlords has done to it and make you, the player, escape with a group of orphens and nuns to safety vis a vis the american embassy or a ship/airplane. Random game each time, posted online for dozens of people to join a campaign of mercy!
No, wait, that actually sounds pretty boss. You just get a square and drop down where you want people to spawn and where you want the exits and where a handful of major landmarks should be and the rest grows like veins/fugus from the main points.
Of course, with anything like this, we need the option from Daggerfall where if something important is procedurally generated in a closed room with no exit, we can blow a hole into said room.
I'm interested in seeing the limitations of the generating indoors thing. It seems like it's impossible to destroy floors or walls that separate indoors from outdoors.
Well, using Fallout 1 and 2 as examples, I would really like Cells, with different amounts of PG (shacks -> villa -> village ->town ->City -> Metropolis) that would let me muck around in and have fun. I really just see it as a low level gimmick in some games where things will run the gamut from shacks to village, but in other games will run from town to metropolis.
Picture a merc game where you tool around the galaxy, getting more troops and supplies and upgrading your merc outfit from a band of hired guns to a full on army. Start dropping in small villages and outposts and as you move along in the game, you are taking out whole PG cities and engendering some large scale urban planning for your empire (K'Plah).
his reference to the political spectrum ran from 'hilary to delay'. anyone who thinks that hilary is on the left end of anything is nuttier than not.
A hole in the ground, perhaps. A salient point? It seems not.
Have the level designers pump out a thousand different rooms using a large library of objects (couches, tables, TV sets, beds, etc), separated into different economical cells. The slum townhouse living room is going to look significantly different from the one on the 99th floor of that luxury highrise, for example.
So the game can build apartments in each building by combining roomtypes from that specific economic cell, throwing in a few random factors (the dishwasher is open, the TV is on, there are some posters on the walls, the door to the bathroom is open and the light is on, there is food in plates on the table, pictureframes in a hallway, etc), and then each room has a slightly different feel that hopefully wouldn't become repetitive for a long time.
ANy developer who reads this and decides to use it, feel free to PM me to ask where you can mail the check 8-)
Say, having a mecha game take place in a city and the urban gunfire ripping through buildings and making entire blocks of buildings collapse. Or scale it up and make a colony fight. Furniture and room layouts matter a lot less when you're tearing shit up in a mech that's higher than any building bar skyscrapers.
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Well, that is an option (but so is an intelligent procedural generation system), but it's by no means a panacea.
Scaling things up leads to a number of other problems. What does a huge mech take cover behind? How do you run a stealth campaign with mechs the size of buildings? How would a game like Dead Rising work at a massively upscaled level?
These are the kinds of things that scale doesn't solve, but an intelligent procedural generation system greatly helps.
And I love the idea of a map that changes every single game. What I have in mind though is a tactical vs shooter like Rainbow Six. Too often those games come down to the lone wolves who know the map best; if the map changed every single game, it would force players to focus on teamwork and cooperation skills rather than straight map memorisation, and would make things easier for newbies.
You have a city... big as say, the state of Texas. Urban blight gone WRONG. You wake up... and you are the last person alive. Nothing but death, destruction and decay to set in for the rest of the game.
You spend your time foraging for food, and dealing with the encroaching wildlife. And figuring out how to do all the things you ever wanted to in a city.
Say for instance, you start out dead in the middle of the city. The overall goal could be to get out of the city. But to do so you would have to cross like a large states worth of urban enviroment. And you have needs like medical needs ( twist your ankle jumping out a window etc... ) and you have to keep up on good food etc.
There could even be needs such as shelter etc... And proper attire.
Just an idea. Also an alternative would be trying to make it out of a city that has suffered a cataclysm. Its been done before, but never on a huge scale.
I mean I know this is a discussion board and I guess that is a thing you can discuss and critique but I am guessing that art direction is simply not the focus of the video.
I AM LEGEND: THE GAME
I expect indie developers would apply such concepts before a major studio.
I would definitely love to see that kind of game with open city randomization though.
Mechassault 2 anyone? Seriously.. i loved the destruction in MA2. I would love even more to be in a light mech running point jetting from building to building.
Hell, give me a jetpack game set in a city scape like this. I would love to be sniping from a skyscraper, some fool sneaks up behind me, i jet OUT THE WINDOW and land on a shorter building. The fight escalates from there.
Think Tribes set in a city. Thats what im thinking.
Red Faction Guerilla had stuff like this but wasn't procedurally generated.
I know... Im enjoying the game a lot right now.
Yeah, you'll be doing a lot of building-to-building destruction once you reach Eos.
Alternatively, a system (again like people are saying) where locations are proceduraly generated on the fly, as and when needed (so you crash through a building and bam, instant new location to fight in) would be pretty damn spiffy. I do love the idea of being able to duke it out through and over any old building that may get in my way.
Potentially never having to play the same multiplayer map more than once, or alternatively, the ability to hold hundreds of maps determined to be good on a single disk, as they just need the correct seeds to generate, as opposed to having the files to load everything.
Supplemental cover. We've all played an FPS where you're on a street, shooting it out with the enemy, but damn, every single door is locked and bolted, so you have to use the cars and whatnot as cover. Even if you don't duck into buildings much, it would be nice when needed.
A sims type game. I mean really, no more pre-generated tiny towns of 50 people, lets talk new york every game, unique.
Sim-earth types of games. Between things like this, terragen, speedtree, spore, etc, we're getting pretty damn close to being able to simulate an entire world over time, in detail.
Quicker development times/less cost for smaller projects, which means potentially more time to polish, or add other things.
3d roguelikes.
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No more flying over a hundred miles of empty green and brown terrain when there could have been a bunch of cities and towns generated on the fly (oh ho!) pass by beneath you.
While I hate the story (not because I thought it was bad, but because I just didn't like where it went or how futile it was), the potential for a setting like that in procedurally-generated cities would be awesome. And if they really, really wanted to make it horrible, they should let the player have a dog. The whole game would end up with people just building a fortress so the bad things can't hurt their dog.
Procedurally generated cities could actually spawn an entirely new genre of games which are simply survival games. Not survival horror or anything like that, just surviving. Yeah, maybe this time around you got a city that just has random aggressive survivors. Maybe this time you got the city in such bad shape that simply climbing a couple floors to find supplies is a harrowing experience. And maybe this time, you got the city with things which only come out at night. You would just never know until you play.
And if the developer is really evil, you could randomly find these when you go out at night:
This has got to be one of the dumbest posts I've ever read. X-COM HAD "PROCEDURALLY-GENERATED MISSION SITES"!!!
You think they sat down and designed every square inch of the entire fricken planet in a level editor before releasing the game?!
X-com actually had EVERY SINGLE feature you could ask for from this new technology, except the levels were much smaller, and nothing was generated in real-time.
Lastly, the aliens WERE hiding "anywhere" and you COULD blow apart everything with "scores of rockets and high explosives"!
Some of the other ideas seem neat, though.
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And you base this off... what? If anything, I think a computer could more reliably produce maps that had good flow and all than a developer. Or if not this, they could just spend the time having people test out seeds, and picking the good ones, probably get games with 10x more maps.
Also, "competitive" fps's are great and dandy, I prefer fun fps's.
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And I'm basing this off most maps already being terrible, the fact that learning the maps is FPS 101, that losing games because you were randomly put in a disadvantageous position would get old really quick, and teamwork outside of the competitive scene that you eschew just doesn't really exist to the degree that it would take to make the maps viable.
Besides that, if I'm on a street in an FPS and I want to duck into a doorway then I'll duck into the doorways that have been conveniently placed there for that exact reason. I don't need a dozen small apartments off every corridor to make it work.
Now, for a coop or single player Rainbow 6 terrorist hunt random maps could be fun.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
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You're saying that because a human can't do something, a computer can't... I can't calculate pi to 100,000 digits, can you? In the same time, anyways?
Yes, having pre-determined maps and learning them is currently an fps convention, because its something that doesn't change in a game of otherwise uncertainties like player skill and actions. Procedural maps would be just another unknown, making players focus more on skill than on knowing where to go perfectly, when to expect the enemy, etc. If you never know whats in the next room, I think it''d encourage teamwork.
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The only downside (going by your average online opponent these days) is, finding good team members.
And yes, because people can't do it after hours and hours of very specific, tested, and thought out work, I don't see other people being able to program something to do it better. It'll still come down to someone having to do the work anyway, which should be obvious.
I don't see how adding more random elements will help balance out the randomness already involved in a pub fps game. The team with the better players will still win. Unless you think the random maps may end up being so skewed in favour of one team that worse players could win.
And what kind of game are we talking about here? Continuous TDM? People will learn the map over time and the ones who are better at that skill will have the advantage. FFA? See TDM, only more random. Round based? The team with the better spawn gets the advantage. CTF? I don't even want to imagine the chaos involved in that. But some guy who figures out (or gets lucky) a fast way to cap before half the other team even knows how to get out of their base is as likely to take a game as anyone else. Duel? No duel players would ever play a random map, I can almost guarantee it.
Hell, I'd love to be an idealist about this, but developers have been trying to encourage teamwork in FPS since teamwork in FPS has existed. It hasn't worked yet, and I don't see random maps helping. Which is why I think it'd be better for a slower terrorist hunt scenario.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
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