The hiding-from-robots-sim Sir You Are Being Hunted transports you to a procedurally generated British countryside. Here’s a video of Tom Betts and James Carey explaining how it works.
The always-interesting BLDGBLOG has also covered the generator:
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/british-countryside-generator.html
Weird Alien Frogs (2015)
You know what your life is missing? A frog generator. Luckily, alienmelon is here to fix that. Generate your very own frog today!
Find it at frogs.alienmelon.com/ or on GameJolt. You can download a picture of your frog! Post it!
Rune Skovbo Johansen has been working on a procedurally generated exploration game called The Cluster for a while. While the game isn’t out yet, he’s published a quite a few posts talking about the internal structures and techniques.
For starters, Rune is responsible for that video about layer-based infinite world generation, and he’s also got some source code for his rolling grid implementation. And here’s a tip about better debugging for your generator.
Helpfully, there’s an overview of the technical aspects of the game, with links to even more blogposts.
.kkrieger (2004)
Created by .theprodukkt for a demoscene competition in 2004, .kkrieger is an FPS with procedurally generated graphics. Cramming an entire 3D FPS into 96k is rather impressive: for comparison, just the executable for Doom is 694k. This was basically only possible with procedural generation.
There was also some insane metaprogramming involved to get the thing to finally squeeze under the limit.
Hotel Paradise (2015)
A low-key walking game by Kai Clavier that uses procedural generation to capture the feeling of being lost in an infinite hotel. Interestingly, it uses the sameness of the generation, which would ordinarily be a weakness as a way to create a specific feel.
There’s a few tiny things you’ll miss the first time through: play it twice to get a hint.
What is the hint I’m supposed to get the ‘second time’? I keep relaunching the game and it’s no different.
Perhaps better said: finish it twice and be enlightened. If you haven’t seen palm trees, keep looking.
In the spirit of NaNoGenMo, a number of people are taking the month of April to teach robots how to write poetry. You can blame @OtherMichael and @hugovk for the idea and the site.
Generating images is fairly easy; the format of the output is well-understood. But what if we want to make something three-dimensional? It’s not just enough to figure out where we want to put the vertices, we need to know how to assemble them into a visible object.
Here’s a tutorial for Unity, explaining how to take your points and turn them into mesh geometry.
http://blog.nobel-joergensen.com/2010/12/25/procedural-generated-mesh-in-unity/
So, you like the idea of a noise library, but you can’t use LibNoise because you’re using Haxe instead of C? Today is your lucky day! As part of the 2014 ProcJam, Gamepopper created a library of procedural noise algorithms in Haxe and posted it on Github under the MIT license.
Last year, Michael Cook organized ProcJam, a jam about making things that make things. A bunch of neat projects came out of it: games, tools, libraries, weird little procedural things.
There’s going to be another ProcJam in 2015, so keep an eye out for that!
Stacking things is a surprisingly difficult problem to solve. In the real world, you can just place objects on top of each other. But simulating that is surprisingly tricky, and stacking a lot of irregular objects can tax most physics systems. Each little shift in position might have a cascading effect on other rocks, but if it is too sensitive, the whole thing becomes jittery.
So here’s an approach that generates stacked tiles directly, instead of trying to simulate the physics. Presented by Adrien Peytavie, Eric Galin, Stéphane Merillou, and Jerome Grosjean at Pacific Graphics 2009, it uses a top down process that is much faster and more reliable than trying to simulate it from the bottom up.
The approach in this project specifically creates irregular tiling that avoids repetition. Many other tiling solutions have inherent repetition. Obvious repetition on something that is supposed to be natural is jarring and draws the eye, so that is a property that seems useful for other applications.