For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, Psuedo-Randomness can be used in games to create just about anything, so long as a specific game element can be described with a unique serial number. Basically, if you can define some area in your game uniquely, based on longitude, latitude, whatever, you can use psuedo-random generation techniques to create anything from plains to rivers to even cities. I'm wondering on how difficult it would be to use pseudo-random techniques to create different kinds of flora and fauna in an area on the fly. Plants have a certain kind of symmetry to them, especially older forms, such as ferns or coniferns. How difficult would it be to produce different random plants in an area based on an indealized model. How far can you deviate from that model before it begins breaking down? Animals I imagine would be harder. For my game, I was thinking of defining animals perhaps in the same way that Sim Life did, that is piecemeal. How difficult would it be to create an idealized form of some animal, and how extreme could variations on that model be made before it begins to breakdown? For animals, this would apply to their behavior as well. I'm sure it's possible to do just about anything using models and mutating them for different individuals or new species, etc. but how difficult is it to do? The book I have on it uses things like fractals for landforms and iterative methods for simple plants. What kind of technique would you need for something like this? And in the end, will the player even care? I was planning on having the character be able to explore various worlds in a generated galaxy, similar to the game Noctis. That Noctis is using the same models over and over with very little deviation becomes apparent before too long, but even then it's still playable to a point. At what level of detail do you need to reach before the player can suspend disbelief? How many different kinds of animals do you need before you get the sense of a complex ecosystem?

Quote:Original post by sBibi

Quote:How difficult would it be to produce different random plants

do you mean fractal plants, or randomly placed plants?

Both, I think. I haven't decided the level of detail I want to achieve visually, but the more complex I go, the more the overhead seems to increase much faster.

The placement of terrain in random but sensible arrangements is mildly difficult at best. Games have been doing it for quite some time. It's the make up and view of different constituent elements which become more daunting.

Kylotan, thanks for the link, it's very interesting. I don't imagine my game would be that advanced, but it's nice to know what's possible.

As far as the degree of randomness I want, I was hoping to make it all random. What it is, where it is, the whole nine yards. I was thinking that changing the texture would probably be the easiest to accomplish. And I agree that trying to warp the base models would become silly rather fast. Scaling would be trivial...

How practical would something like this be: (I don't have much experience with this sort of thing.)

Animals: Have several models for torsos, legs, heads, upper-bodies, etc. Define the animal as being quadrepedal, herbivore, etc. and match up these traits to a specific model piece. You'd have a collection of parts. Meld these parts together into a finished model, which can then be used for this species of animal. How processor-intensive would something like this be? Would it look like a whole animal or some odd colony of moving parts?

Plants: Define a kind of iterative growth method for the plants, resulting in plants which look mildly like ferns or pine trees. More complex structures, like decidous trees, would require more complex functions, but probably (?) can be handled the same way. Different plant species are represented by small mutations in their iterative growth pattern. I haven't even experimented with this yet for effects, but I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to stretch and shrink plant forms in odd ways for interesting results.

I imagine maybe a dozen plants and three or four animals per area (rough idea), where each area's constituent parts are generated on entry with a 'loading...' screen. This isn't hard to do, since the only way to reach an area which you can free explore is through some kind of ground to orbit shuttle. Once the base models are created, they can be subtly manipulated to create different 'sub-species'.

I think something like this could work, but like I said, I don't have much experience in this kind of area.

Quote:Original post by marijnh
I made a little system that created random plants and trees a while back. You basically fed it a bunch of parameters and a hand-drawn leaf texture to make a plant 'species', and then you could generate different random plant models of that species. It was not perfect though, many parameter combinations looked awful, and the models were very very inefficient (polygon-wise), my usually-quite-efficient engine slowed down to a crawl when more than 5 randomly generated trees were in view.

Do you think it would be possible to take the randomly created plants you made and 'polygonize' them? By that I mean: It's possible to represent a 2D picture as pixels, with decreasing resolution to improve rendering at the cost of resolution and clarity. Could you create a complex polygon from a set of random values, and then simplify it using some 'polygonilization' technique? Would you lose too much of the detail you're trying to make?

The way you said you did it is very similar to the examples I was going to follow to do it myself. How difficult was it to implement in your experience?

Andy:
Assuming that I pre-created all the subsections of torsos, heads, etc. and stored them as models somewhere, would that decrease it's difficulty enough to make it more feasible?

I'm willing to accept a certain degree of clunkiness to improve speed and performance, so long as the player can tell a difference between regions on a planet and different planets.