[MUD-Dev] Procedural content generation

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: Ola Fosheim Gr=F8stad [mailto:olag at ifi.uio.no]

> You could make similar examples about landscapes, say; you hit
> this path and it leads to a weird tree. If you know that this is
> hand-made then you will intensify your exploration, looking for
> the meaning, where is the secret door or the hidden house or...?

Ah, but isn't that expectation of further meaning an assumption
shaped by the sparsity of current hand-generated content. We have
been trained to expect a hidden meaning, because most games have so
little superfluous content. Of course, it would be nice if the game
had put the bend trees in because we were becomming proximate to
some source of 'evil' - you could just have the geometry deform a
bit based on this proximity.

I still don't believe this kind of thing is beyond the realms of
current technologoy, if you create a rich enough set of rules and
inter-relations, there is no reason cohesive content couldn't be
generated. The only reason this direction hasn't been properly
explored is because only recently have commerical developers run
into a content generation problem the size of a multiplayer world.

Dan
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