Proceduralism: Part Seven (Education)

[You'll probably want to read the original article series that inspired this follow up, then start with parts one, two, three, four, five and six of this series.]

I was going to be talking about content, but I think there's an important point that is worth underlining now, especially seeing as the previous post ruffled a few feathers.

One of the key challenges about procedural content generation is that so much of it is 'intuitive'. Not intuitive in the sense that it is easy to understand, but intuitive in the sense that you have to use your intuition to figure out what works and what doesn't work.

You will sit for hours, watching your algorithms generate content over and over, tweaking the parameters until you are satisfied with the outcome. It is an incredibly powerful feeling, like being a god in some sense, in that you are literally creating (and destroying) worlds with the click of a button or invocation of the command line. Even the smallest change can butterfly into unintended consequences or beauty, and there are a surprising number of times where accidents turn into final implementation. My favourite is the erosion simulation from Tribal Trouble, where a thermal erosion algorithm failed to produce the desired results, until the sign was reversed on the equation being used - turning a sophisticated model into a nonsensical result which happened to look better.

I've coined what I call Doull's Law: 'Any time saved using procedural generation will be wasted watching the resulting screen saver', to try to capture at least the amount of time this takes, if not the power of this idea.

The consequence of this centrality of intuition, is that you have to be told the story of developing a PCG algorithm, instead of just seeing the final code, in order to understand what was done and why. Projects that describe the process of development like Project Frontier, Procedural World, rune | vision, Making Worlds, Procedural Planets, Dungeon League, Polygon Map Generation, Infinity: the Quest for Earth, L.o.V.E. and Spore and all the other creation stories are incredibly important: not just as beautiful repositories of code and images and ideas, but as foundational documents to their procedural worlds.

And I believe, fundamentally, why procedural generation has never become mainstream, is that it takes time, especially time spent coding, to develop this procedural literacy. If you look at, for instance, the Braving Procedural Generation thread on TIGsource, you see variations on the same, simple cellular automata cave generation over and over, because each person who falls in love with PCG has to go through the same learning process themselves to try to discover this intuition.

That is why I set up the PCG wiki [1]- to try to improve the overall literacy in this field. And the feedback to the survey I'm running at the moment has been incredibly positive, but almost everyone feels like they don't know enough to contribute back. My vision ultimately is to have an online PCG paintbox on the wiki, that'll let you explore cellular automata, and height maps, and fire propagation and so on, all in your browser so you can experience this feeling without coding - I just don't have time to create such a beast.

Back on track in part eight.

[1] That and I needed a bibliography of PCG.

[Edit to add: I know we'll have achieved that level of literacy when we start talking about a Cepero nave, or Young trees. At the moment all we have is Perlin noise, which is a bit high frequency for my liking :) ]