TECHNOLOGY // PROCEDURAL GENERATION | BUILD
Left: Kitfox Games’ Shattered Planet is a turn- based, randomised RPG, that constantly creates new locales for the player to explore
Far left: Frontier is using procedural generation in Elite: Dangerous to create a billion star systems
Brouwer says part of the fun in procedural generation lies in the lack of control, and admits he often gets tired of the carefully designed events of more traditionally developed games.
“It can be much more exciting to play something that I know is unique for me, and of which the possibilities and outcomes aren’t fixed at all,” he explains. “As a designer, it’s the trick to find out what parts to control and what parts to let go, without levels getting too hard (or impossible) or too boring. “The game mechanics matter a lot; it’s much easier if they are fun regardless of the context or environment. In that regard, game- influencing procedural generation is not something to ‘tack on’ or to simply replace manually designed content; the game really should be built around it.”
CUTTING COSTS
One of the key benefits touted for procedural generation is the cutting of costs, even for triple-A games. As with Hello Games, Sean Murray’s small team has been able to create what, on the face of it at least, looks like an enormous universe. But it can also be used to take care of other elements of development. Kevin Meredith of Interactive Data Visualization, the company behind vegetation modeling and rendering tool SpeedTree, believes such tools can dramatically reduce the time required to model and place assets. “This lets artists spend more time on other parts of the game, as well as get the game done more quickly and at higher quality,” he says. “So not only are there time and money savings in procedural development but also the increased revenue that results from a better game launched sooner.” Brouwer feels the technique is already widely used to minimise certain level editing tasks, such as the aforementioned terrain vegetation and dirt decals, as well as enemy spawns and loot drops.
He warns though that procedural generation should not be always be the go-to
to simply replace manually crafted content or create 100 hours worth of gameplay. “Usually it takes a lot of time and effort to work, and requires changes in the entire game design to work well,” he explains. “When players have encountered too many games with cheap implementations, they will stop seeing procedural generation as an interesting quality and start equating it with bland repetitiveness. But as a core part of a game it can not only lower costs, but make it possible to create really new experiences.”
As a designer, it’s the trick to find out what parts to control and what parts you have to let go.
Maarten Brouwer, Serious Brew
But Braben believes procedural generation will not cut costs, at least in the bigger, triple-A titles. In fact, he says it could result in the opposite.
“Ironically there is a danger that it could cause an increase in costs, for triple-A games at least, over time because frequently such game development is constrained by limits; system memory, disc space, render performance, network bandwidth and so on, and the best game is the one that makes the best use of those limits,” says Braben. “Procedural generation enables a great deal more content to be included in the same memory footprint and bus bandwidth, hence requiring more art time, and so greater cost.” Whether it can truly cut costs, and that seems dependent on scale and use-case, there’s an exciting future ahead for procedural generation in games. And with more indie developers getting to grips with the tools and techniques behind it, who knows what implementations we might see in the next few years?
VEGETATION MODELING AND rendering middleware SpeedTree uses procedural generation to create trees and plants throughout a game’s environment. The tool has been used in Battlefield 3 (pictured), and is set to be integrated into Bungie’s new-gen outing Destiny, too.
Interactive Data Visualization director Kevin Meredith says using such a tool and other procedural generation-based tools and techniques can help studios trim their development costs, particularly indies.
“Trees made from scratch can take days or weeks to get right, while we’ve had SpeedTree users procedurally churn out a whole planet’s worth of amazing vegetation in less than a day,” he explains. Frontier CEO David Braben also believes using such tools to automate the creation of environments with trees and plants could be increasingly adopted by developers, particularly as game worlds get bigger.
“If asked to create a 3D forest, typically an artist will create three or four tree models, and randomly scatter them about, cutting and pasting liberally, with each tree differently oriented, and perhaps some colour variation, and the odd stretch to the meshes to hide repetition,” he says.
“He or she is following a simple procedure. That is a form of procedural generation. Automating such a process is an obvious step, and will save a great deal of time and storage.”
JULY 2014 | 41
SPEEDTREE UP DEVELOPMENT
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