gretchenleigh

middle-aged multimedia queer

Gretchen
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software engineer @ Internet Archive
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MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

This is a weird time to go on a ramble about this but I think a thing that the over marketing focus on "procgen = roguelike" has obscured to the average person is that something can be procedurally generated and also completely hand-authored at the same time. They're not contradictory concepts!

If I set up a load of math and curves that makes it so that a character shifts their weight relative to where their feet landed when the player stops moving, that "animation" is completely procedural - it'll be different as many times as there are subframes of the running animation that you can stop on. But it's also playing the same "animation" (composed of math) every single time, one I specifically created and fine-tuned

This is procgen; in fact one of the most common uses of procgen. Games you think of as being non-procgen have this kind of stuff in them all the time! The truth is that beyond the buzzwords "procgen" is just a term for shit you get the computer to do dynamically at runtime and that can be almost anything.

I feel like this is an important thing to get across because I really don't want there to be some sort of rhetorical dichotomy between "handcrafted" games and "not". That distinction doesn't exist, in the same way we don't distinguish between games that use XML to store data and games that use JSON, or something. It's just a tool in the toolbox, it doesn't have to define the game - and indeed most times it doesn't!


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

I wrote a paper about this this year (sadly rejected but I'll get it resubmitted somewhere). All game design is generative design! All we do all day is think about nonlinear experiences and systems! The player is a random number generator!

creating natural and 'realistic' feeling (in terms of patterns, etc) visuals, etc w/o procedural generation seems like a colossal task, much of the natural world and its patterns are governed by simple rules stacked on one another.. waves, clouds, sunsets, spots on a leopard, leaves on a tree, whatever.

there's a real sense of throwing out the baby with the bathwater in some of the posts i'm seeing on the topic and it is disheartening

Yup, so much of this proven with modern material creation tools. The amount of procedural math used to make natural reproductions of things is so huge. So much intelligent effort has gone into both sides of it, too -- the people developing and using procedural tools and also the immense amount of academic research into the world around us that precedes so many of these solutions.

it's frustrating the way that people without a lot of skin in the game are wont to conflate 'AI' in the pop-culture sense (that is, diffusion engines or LLMs powered by privacy violations) with other forms of generative technology which have been around for longer and which don't share any of the drawbacks or ethical concerns.

I've seen a fair bit of grumbling about research into medical AI, for instance, when it's in fact an excellent use of a computer's ability to spot patterns in enormous volumes of multi-dimensional data. it is remarkably unserious to think of these things as being related.