#procgen projects

Terrain Generation From Rivers

Amit Patel has recently been writing again: this time its about terrain generation that starts with river placement on the coast and works out the rest of the landscape from there. Because he’s working through the project publicly, his weekly posts have both the triumphs and the backtracking. It’s a useful look at some of the practical travails of building a generator.

It’s also a good reminder that there’s more than one way to do things: Amit was inspired by a research paper that sculpted terrain via hydrology. By structuring the data in a new way they could introduce user control in new places.

First post in series: http://www.redblobgames.com/x/1723-procedural-river-growing/

Process Compendium

Casey REAS is one of the two original creators of Processing. As such, he’s been pretty influential in the generative art space.

Process Compendium 2004-2010 is a catalog of generative artworks. Each piece, which Casey calls a “Process”, is a short description, in English, of a kinetic drawing machine. The implementation in software is up to the programmer’s interpretation. The history of the ongoing project is quite interesting, recounting a series of works that build up processes from basic forms, behaviors, and elements.

Here’s a video introduction to the Process works. If you want a step-by-step walkthrough of the project, this is probably the best place to get it.

Polygonal Planet Project

Oskar Stålberg has another relevant project online, this time an entire planet. It’s labeled as an exercise in tilesets. A close examination will reveal some of the nuances: try putting a city on snow, or using the cliffs to make a canyon in the city and see what happens.

Designing a set of components that fit together well is one of the basic artistic tasks that shapes procedural generation. The basic principles of 2D NES-era tilesets are fairly well known, but tileset design didn’t stop there. There have been quite a few games that have pushed beyond that, including Civilization 3′s hill-and-border system. The introduction of 3D tilesets opens up even more possibilities.

On a more general note, building kits of modular content is a design discipline in itself. Building kits that work with procedural generation is an additional complication, but a necessary one: while the popular image of procedural content is often one that is generating geometry from scratch, entirely in code, the real-world applications are much more likely to use at least some prefabbed components. 

The principles behind modular kits also applies to non-visual content. Prefabbed chunks of content are frequently useful in text generation, and I often use a deck of cards metaphor in systems that need varying output that still needs to fit within constraints. 

Endless Jingling (2014)

Merry Christmas! You really have to visit Endless Jingling to get the full effect.

Tamperdrome Collection

Tamperdrome Collection (by G. P. Lackey, who was also involved in GenerateACat) is a suite of generators that make cats, islands, goblins, dogs, inhabitants, and ghosts in response to your input. It, or parts of it, have apparently been exhibited in physical form. 

I like projects like like this that aren’t pressuring themselves to be more than they are. While I can think of all kinds of uses for these tools as a part of a larger interactive sim (and will probably borrow some ideas from here and from Strangethink in the future) I admire the way that the Tamperdrome Collection is more interested in being what is it rather than trying to be something that it isn’t. Generative art can be an end in itself.

A Procedurally Generated Wilderness (In Text)

Over at Sibyl Moon Games there’s great write-up about a method of generating a text adventure wilderness map. While the project in question is written in Inform 7, the logic is widely applicable. And not just to maps: this is a useful example of one way to approach generating textual descriptions for any procedurally generated thing.

It also give a look at using procedural generation in an accessible way, since Inform-based interactive fiction, like most text adventures, are accessible to blind players. While many of the most obvious uses of procedural generation are highly visual, there’s a much wider applicability. NaNoGenMo, coming up in a couple of months, is another example of mostly textual output, but that’s only scratching the patina of the vessel of possibilities.

OpenProcessing.org

Processing is a great programming environment for artists. It lets you get right to the actual output that you want to work with without having to muck around with technical stuff, but also lets you control everything directly and in great detail. There are lots of procedural generation projects that have used Processing, and it’s also really handy for building prototypes.

Another reason why Processing is so useful is that its focus on spreading visual and software literacy has lead to a widespread open source community that shares techniques and code liberally.

OpenProcessing.org is just one of the places where you can find other people’s projects and look at how they work. It’s a great learning resource and a good place to check out new techniques. There are classes, both online and offline, which use the site, some of which are specifically focused on generative art. Or you can just browse the projects and get inspired. 

(Be sure to credit your inspirations! Not only are the artworks licensed under CC BY-SA and GPLv2, but it’s respectful to let people know that you were influenced by them.)

While the new security restrictions on Java mean that some older sketches no longer work in the browser, they can all still be downloaded and run in Processing directly. Newer sketches can use Processing.js to output Javascript code instead of Java applets.

https://processing.org/

Mystery Tapes (2015)

Strangethink has done it again. I’m not really sure what the ‘it’ is, but the 640 mysterious VHS cassettes in this latest release continue the theme of re-purposing a specific artifact as a symbol for the procedural generation of space and meaning. The aesthetics invoke the era of early video art crossed with early computer art crossed with whatever it is that drives Strangethink’s alien intrusions into our plane of existence.

It would be very easy for this to be context-less chaos, but for whatever reason, the sound, visuals, and text in Mystery Tapes manages to imply just enough context to point you towards the enigmatic glowing egg...