Procedural Generation

Alright~ After much work we have finally completed our dungeon generation algorithm. First, we generate the rooms, separate them using a separation steering algorithm.

Second, we generate a graph that represents connections between the various rooms

Third, we perform what is known as Delaunay Triangulation, in which we evaluate pairs of triangles and swap their shared edge if it fails a test boiled down to a simple matrix determinant evaluation Fourth, we construct a Graph of connectivity from the Delaunay triangulation

Fifth, we perform an A* pathfinding algorithm to connect points on the delauney triangulation through the neighborhood graph

Finally, if we didn't traverse through a room, we can remove it to simplify the dungeon into something a little less dense

Data Generation

This week, Patreon had a data breech. Hopefully this won’t harm the crowd-patronage of the artists and creators too severely; the funding model has been doing great things for the creative community and letting people have a steady income producing things that are hard to monetize in the 21st century internet.

Where my interest comes in, though, is that this problem could have been avoided if they had used procedural generation. This isn’t my crazy idea: this is the recommendation from security expert Troy Hunt, who runs “have i been pwned?” a website that gives users a reliable and trustworthy way to discover if their information was stolen in a particular hack.

Based on what we know so far, it looks like Patreon was apparently using the actual data from their site on their test server. Having a lot of data that looks like your real data is vital for testing how software is going to behave under load conditions, but using the real data is a bad idea.

The answer? Generate fake data!

Some developers write scripts themselves to create fake data, while others use products like SQL Data Generator. Using procedurally generated data means there’s no privacy or security risk if the information is stolen, and it allows the developers to test how the system will behave with millions of users before they need to do it for real.

Though I usually focus on the artistic uses of procedural generation, there are also practical applications, like this one. And there are probably many more uses that are yet to be discovered.

Hey everyone! If you’re interested in learning how to creatively code yourself then you should really, really check out the upcoming, free Creative Coding course from futurelearn.com! It will start on August 3, 2015 and run for 6 weeks.

When I first saw the preview video for this course last year I was blown away! This was not ‘just’ about learning how to program but also about how to approach programming from a really creative side, which was illustrated really well with a lot of philosophical and artistic interludes. Something that other online coding courses have been lacking to a high degree, as far as I know.

And this course is for total coding beginners. So do not worry if you have never programmed before. The course will gently introduce you to it.

new project. fps roguelike.

the primary goal right now is to generate interesting procedural geometry and architecture.