Procedural Game Development

June 7th, 2008 by Nokill | Posted in Uncategorized |

Today’s big triple A games cost from 10 to over a 100 million to create and take years to finish.

I went to a presentation about a week ago by Ernest Adams and he gave me some new ideas on the subject of future development.
Ernest is a veteran in the industry and currently working as a consultant.
You might know him from one of the games he worked on, you can find a list of them here.

In the presentation he talked about games in the year 2050, and this is one of the most interesting subjects that I heard about.
Procedural creation of games.

This is in itself nothing new at all, because at the early stages of games there was not enough memory to store large amounts of data.
So games had a lot of procedural content that was created on the spot to save memory, large pre made levels and artwork where just not possible at that time.

These days we have a large amount of memory available and many game assets are pre made and every object is placed in levels up front.
Games like for example Commandos 3 has had a lot of artists working on it and created everything themselves.
I took commandos 3 as example because they are one of the few that made every house interior to coffee cup themselves, instead of using the luring ctrl+c and v combination.

In old games you might see the same character over and over again just to save that little amount of memory, in today’s games you will have every single character created by artist with enormous detaill.
Just think about the amount of time you have to spend on creating a game like GTA 4, and even in this game you will see the same characters over and over again after some time.
So to make games more realistic you will need more characters made and a larger staff of people.
This is the main reason games cost more and more to create.

Now its possible to create characters using programmers that can code them and making procedural created meshes according to the needed parameters, but it has been proven that its more reliable to let an artist do this work.
So procedural is not completely possible in some cases here and there.
So in the end most of the games are just more reliable to create this way then procedural.

A few examples of today’s used procedural methods in next gen games are Speedtree and MapZone.
Speedtree is a middle-ware used to create large amounts of trees in game worlds by placing trees randomly in a selected area.
But still this program uses hand made textures for its leafs.
MapZone is a tool that lets you store textures as process with the program making its own textures rather then storing textures made by artists as a whole.
This makes textures smaller because of its better compression methods making a game need only a few MB instead of gigabytes.
Here is a excellent example of a 96kb game.

One new game called Spore also uses procedural creation of content and is unlimited in places you could visit.
You could take your little ship and fly over a million planets and never see one planet 2 times.
Having galaxy’s in games is also nothing new, if you look at Elite, a old game from 1984, they had approximately 282 trillion galaxies with 256 solar systems each, which they later on dumbed down to smaller amount of 8 galaxies.

And next to Procedural creation Spore also has something that’s even better and lets the user playing the game create his own content for others to see.
Using simple tools that can make a child create something unique and good looking, Spore will expand itself.
And with a little help of procedural textures these creatures are only around 8kb.

Now lets get to characters some more and mainly their animations and behaviors.
Its an expensive process to animate characters and let them behave and react correctly to the world around them.
You need to make animations for walking, running, crouching, sitting, holding something and many more things.
And the bad thing is you will have to make these differently for taller characters or ones with a different build.

Now someone pointed me to the Euphoria Engine that uses NaturalMotion that can look at a character and determine if he’s fat or cripple and then also lets the character react like he’s a cripple fat person.
It also procedurally makes the character react differently every time you, for example, shoot it or make it fall down.
He will react like a real human would, but slightly different every time, witch makes the character animations even better then when someone animated the character manually plus a lot cheaper.

These are just some of the developments taking place on procedural creation of games but I’m sure there are many more in development as we speak.
To be honest I don’t see the artists without a job on the side of the road any time soon, because they will always be needed in the industry for there are things a computer can simply not do.
But I do see production going up and costs going down using and thinking more in the way of procedural creation in the future of game development.

I’d like to thank Ernest for my inspiration on this blog.