How does one get started with procedural generation?

Question

Procedural generation has been brought into the spotlight recently (by Spore, MMOs, etc), and it seems like an interesting/powerful programming technique.

My questions are these:

• Do you know of any mid-sized projects that utilize procedural generation techniques?
• What language/class of languages is best for procedural generation?
• Can you use procedural generation for "serious" code? (i.e., not a game)

Answer 1

Procedural generation is used heavily in the demoscene to create complex graphics in a small executable. Will Wright even said that he was inspired by the demoscene while making Spore. That may be your best place to start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

Answer 2

I'm not an expert on this, but I can try and contribute a few answers:

1. NetHack and it's brethern are open source and rely heavily on procedural generation of levels (maps). Link to the downloads of it. If you are more interested in landscape/texture/cloud generation, I'd recommend you search Gamasutra and GameDev which have quite a few articles on those subjects.

2. AFAIK I don't think there is much difference between languages. Most of the code you see will be in C/CPP because it's still very much the official language of Game Developers, but you can use anything you want...

3. Well it depends if you have a project that can benefit from such technology. I saw procedural generation used in simulators for the army (which can be considered a game, although they are not very playable :)).

And a small note - my definition if procedural generation is anything generating a lot of data from a small amount of rules or patterns and lots of randomness, your results may vary :)

Answer 3

You should probably start with a little theory and simple examples such as the midpoint displacement algorithm. You should also learn a little about Perlin Noise if you are interested in generating graphics. I used this to get me started with my final year project on procedural generation.

Fractals are closely related to procedural generation.

Terragen and SpeedTree will show you some amazing possibilities of procedural generation.

Procedural generation is a technique that can be used in any language (it is definitely not restricted to procedural languages such as C, as it can be used in OO languages such as Java, and Logic languages such as Prolog). A good understanding of recursion in any language will strengthen your grasp of Procedural Generation.

As for 'serious' or non-game code, procedural generation techniques have been used to:

• simulate the growth of cities in order to plan for traffic management
• to simulate the growth of blood vessels
• SpeedTree is used in movies and architectural presentations

Answer 4

Procedural Content Generation wiki:

http://pcg.wikidot.com/

if what you want isn't on there, then add it ;)