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Limits of procedural content?

#1
Hello Everybody!

I've been thinking about this for a while, and thought i'll put the question to the pro's 8-)
I feel like this must have been disscussed alot, but couldn't find it anywhere. So please excuse & ignore me if it's a repetitional topic.

When producing content procedurally, you create something out of a random seed. The random seed ensures a unique outcome. Right. I follow so far. That IS amazing.
What will always be the same, however, is the process that seed goes through. The algorithm stays the same. Like in the example of procedural trees. They all look different, but it'll always be a tree, since the algorithm, the rules the seed goes through, is made to produce a tree. Not grass savanna, or bushes, or moss.

So. Am i correct in assuming that visually the ship generator won't be able to create very different forms? In such a way that you will "want" to explore a different system simply because ships have a fundamentally different style? Or put differently: when you'll see a ship screenshot online, you'll imediately know it to be a LT ship, for it's style-similarity (Algorithm rule set)? Or not?

In any case. This is philosophically confusing for me. An algorithim that creates limitless forms, but is actually limited by itself since it will always be the same. So you need an algorithm, that creates different ship-style-algorithms? All based of the seed? *mind-recursively-blown*

I then start to think about No Man's Sky. They must deal with this even more. Will "Earth" in a different color stay interesting (thats what we've seen so far at least ...? I want three legged snakes with lionheads! Not dinosaurs :roll: )

So, to sum up, is it possible to ensure an overall uniqueness? Can you procedurally generate styles? Can procedural generation do the leap from tree to bamboo tree (essentially grass)? From Brick ships, to ovoids to a stacked clusters of undefined something (cool looking o' course :D)?
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Re: Limits of procedural content?

#4
There is no limit to what you can do with procedural generation. I don't know if you play DF, but I wrote a program that would procedurally generate anything from giants to mice to dragons to fish to birds and so on, all with the same code (it wrote files with hundreds of new creatures that DF would read into the game). I think that's about in line with what you're talking about.
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Re: Limits of procedural content?

#5
trashcash wrote:[stuff]
if your algorithm is designed to make trees it only makes trees, if you limit it to make pines it will not make oaks or maples.

but if you build your algorithm is designed to make moss, trees, bushes etc it will do all this.

its just a question of what you want to do.

many generation algorithms are limited, so that they only produce something specific in infinite varieties.

the LT ship generator wont be limited to specific styles
it might be biased towards something josh likes, but it will still have a big bandwith of possibilities
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Re: Limits of procedural content?

#6
We will be able to design our own ships also, so the player designed ships will look different. (unless this feature has been cut, it's been a long time since he have seen it, or Josh has spoken about it)

Plus we should be able to modify the algorithm that creates the ships. So people can switch it up to get their own "style". (or others can do it for you)
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Re: Limits of procedural content?

#7
I'd say there are two pieces to an answer here.

1. Procedural generation of content actually uses semi-random numbers as inputs to rendering algorithms.

In other words, a procedural algorithm is meant to do something specific with an input. There are only a limited number of things the algorithm can do, so the numeric inputs have to be constrained to values that the algorithm knows how to interpret. That's what I mean by "semi-random" numbers.

2. Although any one procedural algorithm might do only one thing, there's nothing that says you can't combine the outputs of multiple algorithms.

Spore remains a good example of this. Making a creature involved selecting several different kinds of parts, as if they were highly constrained random numbers. There were several options for legs, several for graspers, and so on. Plugging the number associated with the specific part type selected into the procedural display algorithm gave your creature that ability... but there were numerous such parts. Enough so that it only took a few choices to make a creature that behaved differently from many others you might have created through your selection of the numbers associated with each part of the whole object.

Those two things, I think, combine to mean that "procedural generation" doesn't imply that all space stations or ships in LT will look similar. If Josh designs the overall generator to accept (and know how to interpret) multiple kinds of input values, then I think it's safe to guess that there'll be plenty of variety -- both visual and functional -- in vanilla LT's ships and stations.
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Re: Limits of procedural content?

#9
I imagine that a lot of this won't be as limited as you think on the simple basis that I imagine Josh will probably have the content shaped against varied factors in game such as perhaps research. So that depending on research focus you might get different outcomes. I like to imagine a system where things are procedurally generated however they sort of evolve over time based on other factors that are also procedural on nature.

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