[MUD-Dev] Procedural content generation

[lhulbert at hotmail.com]

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Original message: http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/2001Q4/msg00187.php

On Fri, 12 Oct 2001 00:34:17 -0700 (PDT)
Brian Hook <bwh at wksoftware.com> wrote:

> Subtle distinction between the two, but he made a very good point.
> His argument against procedurally generated content is that, no
> matter how good you make the generator, in the end it's still
> random and will feel random.  It won't have the flavor, depth and
> cohesiveness of hand-made content.  The individual pieces don't
> fit together to form a higher level structure that the player can
> identify and relate to.
 
> I would tend to agree, but when making a game with over one
> million unique star systems, handmade content isn't an option.  I
> would argue, in fact, that for any game where the name of the game
> is content consumption, that short of a large team and/or large
> monetary/time budget, that handmade content isn't very practical.

The best option I have come up with is to randomly generate the
initial content, and then run some "aging" algorithms.  The aging
algorithms try to simulate how your various content pieces interact.
Once you have enough simulation so that all the parts have had a
noticeable affect on each other, your done.  Note that this does
make your procedural generation alot harder to design...

Lee

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