Skimming around I found this snippet at the end of chapter six. Are the authors even aware of .kkrieger?
As we can see, all existing work on generating graphical game has targeted games
in the style of classic arcade games and home console games from the early 80’s, or
simple arcade games. There is still considerable work to be done here, and nobody
has yet constructed a system that could generate novel graphical games of high
quality, comparable to the novel high-quality board games produced by Cameron
Browne’s Ludi system. However, there is also considerable opportunities in devel-
oping game description languages that can effectively and economically describe
other types of games, and game generators that take into account the specific game
design affordances and challenges that come with such games. For example, what
would it take to generate playable, interesting and original FPS games?
Every once in a while, I've been reading the articles in this interesting blog[1] that covers various topics on procedural world generation. I've found that some of the articles (like, for example, this one[2] covering the creation of vegetation using space colonization instead of L-systems) are very educating.
I couldn't find a single pdf version of the book, and I failed to find the copyright to know whether I'm allowed to upload such a version myself.
In any case, the following two lines are what I used to unite the files using bash and the pdfunite utility (available as the poppler-utils package in ubuntu) for my own personal use.
for i in {1..12}; do wget `printf "http://pcgbook.com/wp-content/uploads/chapter%02d.pdf" $i`; done
pdfunite chapter*.pdf ProceduralContentGenerationInGames.pdf
for i in {1..12}; do wget `printf "http://pcgbook.com/wp-content/uploads/chapter%02d.pdf" $i`; done
"/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py" -o ProceduralContentGenerationInGames.pdf chapter*.pdf
Brogue[1] is an acclaimed roguelike that follows in the tradition of substantial procedural content for that genre, and exists on IOS[2], at least. You might find others at: [3]
Minecraft at a minimum uses a variant of perlin noise for the terrain generation.
Also, while it doesn't have the replay value found in the Minecraft sandbox, Starbound procedurally generates not only the map/terrain but also the mobs.
did AoE really use procedural generation? it could have been due to the immaturity of the genre, but i think you'd be hard pressed to procedurally generate balanced RTS maps. seems more forgivable for something like Worms, but still kind of dangerous.
Age of Empires on the PC did indeed have random map generation. Age of Kings also included the scripting language that let modders create their own scripts to generate new types of procedural maps. The cells from the random generation were also repurposed as part of the pathing.
Most of the default scripts ensured balance by having a set of identical resources by each player's start. An example of the scripting language, placing a gold resource near the player start:
There's a bunch of articles and info related to procedural content at http://pcg.wikidot.com which might be of interest to people reading the linked book. I haven't read enough of either to comment on their overlap or relative merits.
DLC and MODS
Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark. (DRM killed it. no longer playable)
Legend of Grimrock. ² (Excellent Scripting.)
Engines (Nearly every modern engine is well represented.)
Irrlicht3D ¹ (FOSS, Source, API and documentation are super.)
Unreal ² Excellent Editor and Scripting.
Unity ² Excellent Editor and Scripting. Affordable
Minetest ¹ (FOSS, Irrlicht3D -> LUA script API)
Minecraft ¹ (Source code available for early releases.)
Skimming around I found this snippet at the end of chapter six. Are the authors even aware of .kkrieger?
As we can see, all existing work on generating graphical game has targeted games in the style of classic arcade games and home console games from the early 80’s, or simple arcade games. There is still considerable work to be done here, and nobody has yet constructed a system that could generate novel graphical games of high quality, comparable to the novel high-quality board games produced by Cameron Browne’s Ludi system. However, there is also considerable opportunities in devel- oping game description languages that can effectively and economically describe other types of games, and game generators that take into account the specific game design affordances and challenges that come with such games. For example, what would it take to generate playable, interesting and original FPS games?