.kkrieger

[eMTe]

Probably the smallest (as for filesize) fps ever created. Only about 97 kb to download. Game "makes extensive use of procedural generation", about which I know nothing, so Zyx or Maz may be more useful to explain us how it works. But it works.

http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger

[jayenkai]

Simplest way to explain it..
You know when you paint a splodge on a piece of paper, then fold it in two, open it up, and it's a butterfly.

It's kinda like that.

You layout some rules. Walls should be gritty, floors tiled, metal should have swooshy bits, things like that.
Then, rather than draw a bunch of textures, you let the GAME draw all the textures, based on the rules.

Same with the 3D models, too, but even more complex.
The layout will be predefined, but it won't be a giant 3D model in a giant file.

There'd be rough rules, like (on the first shot) these swoopy bits should have a curve of X angle, and swoop towards this point. Things like that.
Then the program builds with those rules, and it all gets done nicely.

It basically builds everything on the fly, or in a big bulky bit at the start, so you don't end up with a download that contains hundreds of little textures and things.

It's fantastic when everything comes together so neatly.
It's incredibly difficult to get it to do it right, though

LOADS of games use procedurally generated maps/gfx/etc. Biggest that springs to mind is Frontier (Elite II), which crammed an entire universe onto a 700kb floppy disk! The disk contained approximate known layouts for a few star systems, but it was generally up to the generator to do the rest.

[eMTe]

Thx!

So there's nothing revolutionary in the game. But the filesize makes it huge effort anyway.

[jayenkai]

I think the revolutionary part is quite how amazingly well it's all pieced together.
Considering it's starting with practically nothing (97kb!!) it's generating a mountain of stuff that looks amazingly well designed.
If you hunt around their website, you can find a few exampley things about texture generation.
I'd've downloaded a couple of bits, but.. stuck on a Mac.. blah!!!

[Drasir-Vel]

That reminds me of another program which generates a whole galaxy with stars, and planets, and terrain on the planets. Noctis IV.
It uses something which the developer calls starseed if i remember correctly. And that is basically a technique that procedurally generates the galaxy as you get to it.
It is not randomly generated, but semi-random, since if a person discovers some interesting ruins on some specific coordinates on a planet, in a specific solar system, on some specific unversal coordinates, they can share those coordinates, and another person that go to the same coordinates can find exactly the same.

The information about all the celestial objects are not stored object by object when you download the game, it generates them based on this algorithm.
The size of the galaxy is literally thousands of stars, each with their planets and moons, allowing you to go down and explore the whole surface of them all. And the surface of a planet in the game is in itself huge.

[eMTe]

I wonder if it's possible to decrease the number of lines of code or just simplify the whole fun even more. I dont know how it would look from technical side though, it's all about philosophy and mathematical logic (hopefully they still find use in informatics). If it's possible to "procedurally generate" on the fly complex textures and animations maybe it's also possible to do it with procedures. Something one step more "basic" than programming language would be needed to create programming language procedures (or the language itself!) on the fly.