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Generation of Procedural building facade grammar

Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2017 3:05 pm
by Cornflakes_91
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS-PLQ3tfzY

take picture, mark things, get code that generates similar facades.
user is able to manipulate the code graphically to get results that are more in line with what they want.


what would be interesting for LT if the game could expose the rules along which it generates models and give the player the possibility to manipulate the parameters for a specific model
would be a midway between fully procedural and fully handbuilt models.

say you see a ship design you like the basic elements of, but not the way they are combined.
so you pull up the editor and make a copy of the design and shift and move them around to get the design you actually want
(would go well with something like trait based research and design with the ship design rules being modified by the traits)

Re: Generation of Procedural building facade grammar

Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2017 8:16 am
by JoshParnell
Saw this paper (IIRC I was at the SIGGRAPH presentation and was very excited by this talk)

I would also like to see something like this where we can go half-way between procedural and user-designed. Unlikely to be as nuanced as the tech in this paper.

But it would certainly be easy to expose the input variables to the PCG algorithms as a way to 'customize' your asset's aesthetic without designing it all from scratch. The same variables that would normally be automatically set as part of the faction style or asset traits could be changed by the user to 'explore' the space of aesthetics.

Re: Generation of Procedural building facade grammar

Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2017 8:31 am
by Cornflakes_91
directly changing the variables would likely cause discontinuities, no?
As in the ship/model undergoing large, intuituvely unpredictable changes instead of smooth, continous changes as "expected" and shown in the video i linked.

If yes it would likely require some smartish sliders/userside options to generate continous changes when tweaking the model.

Re: Generation of Procedural building facade grammar

Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2017 7:57 pm
by FormalMoss
Cornflakes_91 wrote:directly changing the variables would likely cause discontinuities, no?
As in the ship/model undergoing large, intuituvely unpredictable changes instead of smooth, continous changes as "expected" and shown in the video i linked.

If yes it would likely require some smartish sliders/userside options to generate continous changes when tweaking the model.
Then configure the menus in such a way that you can only adjust "sliders" in "edit mode".
For example, in as much as LT will allow modders to create mods via LuaJIT, why not have an in-engine edit mode to modify in-game assets in real-time? And then "save" the mod (e.g. Star Trek/Wars mod).
The idea being that one could then export the "modded universe" to share with others.

In such a scenario, collision detection, or some other high performing function could be reduced/disabled (i.e. freeze the market and all colonies but keep the ships moving about to simulate activity).

Ooh, I could go on and on about this.
I'm liking this idea, what do other people think?

Re: Generation of Procedural building facade grammar

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 12:28 am
by Cornflakes_91
If it was locked to debug/cheat/modding mode it would semi-defy the purpose of the sliders because they are also there to provide the player to adapt the ships they are about to build at game time, as a game mechanic.

As an intermediate between full pcg and full handbuilt.

Re: Generation of Procedural building facade grammar

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 12:52 am
by BFett
Would it be possible for the engine to learn what features and their locations make a ship astetically pleasing?

Let's take Josh's first ship designer as an example. The engine would note the relative position of the user placed components and the scale of each component on the xyz axis. Using this data as a starting point would it be possible to iterate on designs thus making similar nice looking ships?

Re: Generation of Procedural building facade grammar

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 3:03 am
by Cornflakes_91
BFett wrote:Would it be possible for the engine to learn what features and their locations make a ship astetically pleasing?

Let's take Josh's first ship designer as an example. The engine would note the relative position of the user placed components and the scale of each component on the xyz axis. Using this data as a starting point would it be possible to iterate on designs thus making similar nice looking ships?
well, what you describe is what the video in the original post is about.
Just expanded to 3D/spaceships.