blitz-kugeln (all purely math-generated) ...who needs snow-globes anyway ;-)
https://redd.it/15fhim3
@proceduralgeneration

New Video on Procedural NPC Dialogue Systems

Hello, my fellow proc-gen fans and coders. By chance, I think The Algorithm has favoured me today by serving up this pure gold procedural programmer wisdom:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l7YcGCQ5Ck

The topic of reactive, systems-driven NPCs always inspires me. This video goes into great detail on how Arcanum handled its dialogue system. I never played that game back in the day, but heard legendary praise for it years later. But in terms of 'smarter NPCs than average', I was even blown away by Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode's NPCs just doing things as simple as remembering they'd spoken to you before. I've been following Ultima Ratio Regum's dialogue system dev updates with great interest too. There's no doubt plenty more involved/clever RPG talking systems out there I'm unaware of... I'd hope. But actually... are there?

I still get the impression that the bar is so incredibly low for this kind of stuff. I wonder if anyone else agrees. And when, in this video, Tim Cain starts discussing potential uses of LLMs/speech synthesis - I nearly want to scream into the void that "surely that janky, under-developed, brand new, quirky, hard-to-control latest-trend tech isnt necessary for better NPC dialogue!". I don't think "the industry" on the whole has even caught up with what Arcanum did 20-odd years ago.

In my own coding experiments with this stuff, I found that simply working out what the conversation 'protocol/mechanism' should be can become prohibitively complex immediately - so I'm rather reassured to hear what Tim said here, about how the 'greeting' opcode became the most complex part. That seems to corroborate what I ran into. And the system he describes of a set of cascading checks and filtering conditions with cancel or continue out-paths seems a very good structure for imposing control on any such system.

Anyway, just wanted to dump the link here in case it proves useful to others here. I really hope this stuff spreads further, as I'd love to see more systems doing novel things in this area.

https://redd.it/15fjfub
@proceduralgeneration

Animated Grid Warp.
https://redd.it/15fm98c
@proceduralgeneration

Using shape keys to procedurally generate guns! Each key is tied to a stat
https://redd.it/15fxi1r
@proceduralgeneration

How to generate directed graphs? Question

I know this is probably a pretty basic question, but I am looking for a way to generate directed graphs for a level select screen, like the ones many rogue-like games have (Slay the Spire, Cult of the Lamb, etc.). Specifically, I want the graphs to have one start node, one end node, be acyclical and planar, and for every path from start to end to have the same amount of nodes between them.

What is a good algorithm to achieve my goal?

https://redd.it/15gbuz8
@proceduralgeneration

Generating a Spiral Staircase using BMesh – Part 2 of 2
https://salaivv.com/2023/08/02/bmesh-spiral-staircase-2

https://redd.it/15gdg1h
@proceduralgeneration

Experimenting with stochastic L-Systems with 'decorations'. The fruit are a low probability rule option instead of a branch. Does anyone know of L-Systems like this? I've been having trouble finding other examples.
https://redd.it/15gvli7
@proceduralgeneration

Ever wondered how the magic happens behind the scenes? #Voxelscaper
https://redd.it/15gx8ho
@proceduralgeneration

Binary Soil-Mixture Erosion, Stylized Composition Map

https://redd.it/15h10j5
@proceduralgeneration

Explosion in Houdini 19.5 Tutorial
https://youtu.be/7JHmUL1a5xo

https://redd.it/15h9dg1
@proceduralgeneration

GPU driven 3D line rasterization with atomic blending.
https://redd.it/15he5ah
@proceduralgeneration

My progress on procedural plant generation

Here is my progress on procedurally generating plants. They're able to grow all the way from seed and have some parametrization. But it's still a work in progress. I feel like I've come a long way but I'm also feeling like this might be too big of a mountain to climb for me. I wanted to be able to make many varied different kinds of plants but I'm not really sure how much much more effort would be required to make it there.

https://preview.redd.it/1b0y2a6seyfb1.png?width=886&format=png&auto=webp&s=44b4cd7fa22794da3b217593c6fda8d833a91f37

https://redd.it/15heudn
@proceduralgeneration

Meantime, at a game-making studio...
https://redd.it/15hub7p
@proceduralgeneration

Wave Function Collapse in game dev. - Expectation vs Reality



So for those who wants to try Wave Function Collapse (WFC) algorithm. We at Catiger Studio were inspired by Townscaper success and decided to implement WFC for our game.

Our takeaways:

1. There are a lot of ready made implementations. We tried a couple of them from Unity Asset Store, they are working fine for certain use cases.
2. Even though there are a lot of ready made implementations of WFC, In reality you most likely won't be able to use them out-of-the-box and you will have to modify them for your needs. For example - you may want to limit what tiles will be spawned in a certain area. You also may want to introduce certain player interactions with the map and make sure that whenever there is a local change, that local change stays locally, instead of propagating through the whole map (Default behavior in almost all implementations). Performance is a big issue. Most WFC are drawing random numbers and they are not supporting using previous known solution. (So basically Townscaper's behavior is not typical for most WFC algorithms that are out there).
3. WFC blows the minds of almost all junior developers and what is unfortunate - all artists as well. The artist should be super technical to understand the complexity of the problem and being able to produce required assets. Our live-hack to this problem: the person on your team who understands WFC algorithm produces all necessary assets in a very simple form, makes sure that they are compatible and they covers all required cases, then the artist tries to "beatify" these tiles (Artist still struggled after that because you need to track compatibility of the tiles, keep equal forms and so on).
4. It is really long and difficult. Every single member on our team stacked at least once for several hours starring at "no solution" error to finally find out what tile or case or permutation or connection was missing.

Main Takeaway: think twice if you really need WFC for your project.

Follow us on twitter:

https://twitter.com/catigerstudio

https://redd.it/15i2wyw
@proceduralgeneration

Meteor Mayhem - Three.js game - Procedural Environment
https://redd.it/15iq4h7
@proceduralgeneration

Procedural grass created with blender geometry nodes.
https://redd.it/15iwszw
@proceduralgeneration