Silverware wrote: ↑Wed Oct 09, 2019 2:55 pm
But by DOG is it hard to think around how map generators would have to work.
Mixed Euclidean and graphs, with the proportion describing something about the area. For instance, if you wanted the world to mostly be chaotic and shattered with islands of sanity, the "natural" sections would be heavily graphwise and decidedly non-Euclidean, while the "artificial" sections would be Euclidean rooms connected by corridors of varying degrees of topological coherence. Or if you wanted the world to mostly be flat but with pockets of corruption, the wider world would be Euclidean but devolve into graph space garbage near the epicenter of some kind of Event, with isolated blips scattered about like spatial shrapnel wounds.
You could achieve this by using conventional terrain generation for the most part, or "tile-like" generation for rooms, and then inserting too much of it or excising some. Or you could do it by working on a non-Euclidean surface: generate the world on a sphere or in hyperbolic space, where the angles are too much or too little, and then cover it in an evenly-spaced mesh (possibly using circle packing or Voronoi or something?) to convert it into renderable graph space. Another option is to mostly work on an Euclidean surface, but then place anomalies onto it.
I suspect taking full advantage of graph space may be exclusive with an infinite stateless procedural map generator, though.