Re: [fonc] Inspired 3D Worlds
Top post. Heightmapping can go a really long way. Probably not news though:) On Jan 16, 2012, at 8:45 AM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: Consider offloading some of your creativity burden onto your computer. The idea is: It's easier to recognize and refine something interesting than to create it. So turn it into a search, recognition, and refinement problem, and automate creation. There are various techniques, which certainly can be combined: * constraint programming * generative grammar programming * genetic programming * seeded fractals You might be surprised about how much of a world can be easily written with code rather than mapping. A map can be simplified by marking regions up with code and using libraries of procedures. Code can sometimes be simplified by having it read a simple map or image. Remember, the basic role of programming is to automate that which bores you. Regards, Dave On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 4:18 PM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: I am generally personally stuck on the issue of how to make interesting 3D worlds for a game-style project while lacking in both personal creativity and either artistic skill or a team of artists to do it (creating decent-looking 3D worlds generally requires a fair amount of effort, and is in-fact I suspect somewhat bigger than the effort required to make a passable 3D model of an object in a 3D modeling app, since at least generally the model is smaller and well-defined). it seems some that creativity (or what little of it exists) is stifled by it requiring a large amount of effort (all at once) for the activity needed to express said creativity (vs things which are either easy to do all at once, or can be easily decomposed into lots of incremental activities spread over a large period of time). trying to build a non-trivial scene (something which would be passable in a modern 3D game) at the level of dragging around and placing/resizing/... cubes and/or messing with individual polygon-faces in a mapper-tool is sort of a motivation killer (one can wish for some sort of higher level way to express the scene). meanwhile, writing code, despite (in the grand scale) requiring far more time and effort, seems to be a lot more enjoyable (but, one can't really build a world in code, as this is more the mapper-tool's domain). ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Inspired 3D Worlds
I like minecraft's take on this. Julian On 17/01/2012, at 2:31 PM, BGB wrote: On 1/16/2012 6:47 PM, Casey Ransberger wrote: Top post. Heightmapping can go a really long way. Probably not news though:) I am still not certain, since a lot of this has a lot more to do with my own project than with general issues in computing. I had messed with a few technologies already. height-maps (long ago, not much used since then, generally randomized). the issue was mostly one of being not terribly interesting, but it makes sense if one wants terrain (and is fairly cheap in terms of memory use and performance impact). a more advanced variety would be to combine a height-map with a tile-map, where the terrain generator would also vary the texture-map to give a little more interest. I have considered this as a possibility. also tried randomly generated voxel terrain (similar to Minecraft, using perlin noise). issues were of being difficult to integrate well with my existing technology, and being very expensive in terms of both rendering and memory usage (particularly for storing intermediate meshes). one may need to devote about 500MB-1GB of RAM to the problem to have a moderately sized world with (with similar specifics to those in Minecraft). I suspect that, apart from making something like Minecraft, the technology is a bit too expensive and limited to really be all that generally useful at this point in time and on current hardware (I suspect, however, it will probably be much more relevant on future HW). I also tried randomly generated grid-based areas (basically, stuff is built from pre-made parts and randomly-chosen parts are put on a grid). I had also tried combining this with maze-generation algorithms. the results were functional but also nothing to get excited about. the big drawback was that I couldn't really think of any way to make the results of such a grid based generator particularly interesting (this is I think more so with a first-person viewpoint: such a structure is far less visually interesting from the inside than with a top-down or isometric view). it could work if one were sufficiently desperate, but I doubt it would be able to hold interest of players for all that long absent something else of redeeming value. the main maps in my case mostly use a Quake/Doom3/... style maps, composed mostly of entities (defined in terms of collections of key/value pairs representing a given object), brushes (convex polyhedra), patches (Bezier Surfaces), and meshes (mostly unstructured polygonal meshes). these would generally be created manually, by placing every object and piece of geometry visible in the world, but this is fairly effort-intensive, and simply running head first into it tends to quickly drain my motivation (resulting in me producing worlds which look like big boxes with some random crap in them). sadly, random generation not on a grid of some sort is a much more complex problem (nor random generation directly in terms of unstructured or loosely-structured geometry). fractals exist and work well on things like rocks or trees or terrain, but I haven't found a good way to apply them to general map generation problem (such as generating an interesting place to run around in and battle enemies, and get to the exit). the problem domain is potentially best suited to some sort of maze algorithm, but in my own tests, this fairly quickly stopped being all that interesting. the upper end I think for this sort of thing was likely the .Hack series games (which had a lot of apparently randomly generated dungeons). it is sad that I can't seem to pull off maps even half as interesting as those (generally created by hand) in commercial games from well over a decade ago. I can have a 3D engine which is technically much more advanced (or, at least, runs considerably slower on much faster hardware with moderately more features), but apart from reusing maps made by other people for other games, I can't make it even a small amount nearly as interesting or inspiring. On Jan 16, 2012, at 8:45 AM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: Consider offloading some of your creativity burden onto your computer. The idea is: It's easier to recognize and refine something interesting than to create it. So turn it into a search, recognition, and refinement problem, and automate creation. There are various techniques, which certainly can be combined: * constraint programming * generative grammar programming * genetic programming * seeded fractals You might be surprised about how much of a world can be easily written with code rather than mapping. A map can be simplified by marking regions up with code and using libraries of procedures. Code can sometimes be simplified by having it read a simple map or image. Remember, the basic role of
Re: [fonc] Inspired 3D Worlds
The original topic was about getting the computer to create 3d worlds. That was what I was referring to when I said I like minecraft's taken on it. They use a seed to generate the world. Julian On 17/01/2012, at 3:26 PM, BGB wrote: On 1/16/2012 8:36 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: I like minecraft's take on this. Julian in which particular way?... well, Minecraft is a fairly interesting game, and allows a lot of room for people building stuff, ... the downside is: how well does the technology work for considerably different gameplay styles? (not based on mining and building) what about world voxel density? ... for example, making voxels 1/2 the size would lead (very likely) to an 8x memory-requirement increase, and 1/4 (250cm) could require 64x the memory. a similarly sized world-space with a 1.5 inch (~ 3.75cm) voxel size would require around 18963x as much memory. some people have tried fundamentally different ways of dealing with voxels (namely Sparse Voxel Octtrees and ray-casting), but these in turn have different tradeoffs (on current HW there are significant problems regarding resolution and performance). I suspect it may be a few years before this strategy really becomes practical. a big issue though is that it probably still wont make creating of compelling worlds all that much easier (so, probably a lot more random-generation and similar, with its inherent pros and cons). I guess it may ultimately be a bit of a wait and see thing. On 17/01/2012, at 2:31 PM, BGB wrote: On 1/16/2012 6:47 PM, Casey Ransberger wrote: Top post. Heightmapping can go a really long way. Probably not news though:) I am still not certain, since a lot of this has a lot more to do with my own project than with general issues in computing. I had messed with a few technologies already. height-maps (long ago, not much used since then, generally randomized). the issue was mostly one of being not terribly interesting, but it makes sense if one wants terrain (and is fairly cheap in terms of memory use and performance impact). a more advanced variety would be to combine a height-map with a tile-map, where the terrain generator would also vary the texture-map to give a little more interest. I have considered this as a possibility. also tried randomly generated voxel terrain (similar to Minecraft, using perlin noise). issues were of being difficult to integrate well with my existing technology, and being very expensive in terms of both rendering and memory usage (particularly for storing intermediate meshes). one may need to devote about 500MB-1GB of RAM to the problem to have a moderately sized world with (with similar specifics to those in Minecraft). I suspect that, apart from making something like Minecraft, the technology is a bit too expensive and limited to really be all that generally useful at this point in time and on current hardware (I suspect, however, it will probably be much more relevant on future HW). I also tried randomly generated grid-based areas (basically, stuff is built from pre-made parts and randomly-chosen parts are put on a grid). I had also tried combining this with maze-generation algorithms. the results were functional but also nothing to get excited about. the big drawback was that I couldn't really think of any way to make the results of such a grid based generator particularly interesting (this is I think more so with a first-person viewpoint: such a structure is far less visually interesting from the inside than with a top-down or isometric view). it could work if one were sufficiently desperate, but I doubt it would be able to hold interest of players for all that long absent something else of redeeming value. the main maps in my case mostly use a Quake/Doom3/... style maps, composed mostly of entities (defined in terms of collections of key/value pairs representing a given object), brushes (convex polyhedra), patches (Bezier Surfaces), and meshes (mostly unstructured polygonal meshes). these would generally be created manually, by placing every object and piece of geometry visible in the world, but this is fairly effort-intensive, and simply running head first into it tends to quickly drain my motivation (resulting in me producing worlds which look like big boxes with some random crap in them). sadly, random generation not on a grid of some sort is a much more complex problem (nor random generation directly in terms of unstructured or loosely-structured geometry). fractals exist and work well on things like rocks or trees or terrain, but I haven't found a good way to apply them to general map generation problem (such as generating an interesting place to run around in and battle enemies, and get to the exit). the problem domain is potentially best suited to some sort of maze algorithm, but in my own
Re: [fonc] Inspired 3D Worlds
There are commercial big boxes with some random crap in them game worlds now and have been since the 8-bit era. The games that stood out by immersing us despite the limitations of technology were usually the ones which were lovingly crafted. From: BGB cr88...@gmail.com To: Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org Sent: Tuesday, 17 January 2012, 3:31 Subject: Re: [fonc] Inspired 3D Worlds 8 these would generally be created manually, by placing every object and piece of geometry visible in the world, but this is fairly effort-intensive, and simply running head first into it tends to quickly drain my motivation (resulting in me producing worlds which look like big boxes with some random crap in them). 8 ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Inspired 3D Worlds
You seem to be ignoring the search, recognition, and refinement aspects. You need some way to tell the computer what is interesting so you can refine those portions (reducing variation, tweaking constraints or parameters or other code, selecting `preferred` samples on a grid as a human fitness function for genetic algorithms, etc.) while continuing to search on the other aspects. Think of this as a collaborative effort between computer and human, where you're reducing the burden of hand-crafting the world but not taking yourself out of the picture entirely. The wonderful, interesting vistas created by POV-Ray are not created by randomly seeding a world, but are also not created by hand-crafting the maps. Why should you expect different for creating deep, inspired 3D worlds? Regards, Dave On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 7:31 PM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: the problem domain is potentially best suited to some sort of maze algorithm, but in my own tests, this fairly quickly stopped being all that interesting. the upper end I think for this sort of thing was likely the .Hack series games (which had a lot of apparently randomly generated dungeons). it is sad that I can't seem to pull off maps even half as interesting as those (generally created by hand) in commercial games from well over a decade ago. I can have a 3D engine which is technically much more advanced (or, at least, runs considerably slower on much faster hardware with moderately more features), but apart from reusing maps made by other people for other games, I can't make it even a small amount nearly as interesting or inspiring. On Jan 16, 2012, at 8:45 AM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: Consider offloading some of your creativity burden onto your computer. The idea is: It's easier to recognize and refine something interesting than to create it. So turn it into a search, recognition, and refinement problem, and automate creation. There are various techniques, which certainly can be combined: * constraint programming * generative grammar programming * genetic programming * seeded fractals You might be surprised about how much of a world can be easily written with code rather than mapping. A map can be simplified by marking regions up with code and using libraries of procedures. Code can sometimes be simplified by having it read a simple map or image. Remember, the basic role of programming is to automate that which bores you. Regards, Dave On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 4:18 PM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: I am generally personally stuck on the issue of how to make interesting 3D worlds for a game-style project while lacking in both personal creativity and either artistic skill or a team of artists to do it (creating decent-looking 3D worlds generally requires a fair amount of effort, and is in-fact I suspect somewhat bigger than the effort required to make a passable 3D model of an object in a 3D modeling app, since at least generally the model is smaller and well-defined). it seems some that creativity (or what little of it exists) is stifled by it requiring a large amount of effort (all at once) for the activity needed to express said creativity (vs things which are either easy to do all at once, or can be easily decomposed into lots of incremental activities spread over a large period of time). trying to build a non-trivial scene (something which would be passable in a modern 3D game) at the level of dragging around and placing/resizing/... cubes and/or messing with individual polygon-faces in a mapper-tool is sort of a motivation killer (one can wish for some sort of higher level way to express the scene). meanwhile, writing code, despite (in the grand scale) requiring far more time and effort, seems to be a lot more enjoyable (but, one can't really build a world in code, as this is more the mapper-tool's domain). ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing listfonc@vpri.orghttp://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Inspired 3D Worlds
On 1/16/2012 10:26 PM, Neu Xue wrote: There are commercial big boxes with some random crap in them game worlds now and have been since the 8-bit era. The games that stood out by immersing us despite the limitations of technology were usually the ones which were lovingly crafted. very possibly. time and effort makes a good product quick and dirty makes a poor product, despite the availability of more advanced technologies. like, many old games did fairly well even with few pixels to work with, and even a fairly high-resolution texture can still look terrible. say, a 512x512 canvas doesn't mean some quick-and-dirty passes with an airbrush and paint-can tool and throwing some emboss at it will look good. with some time and practice though, it gets a little easier to start making artwork that looks more passable. otherwise: I was left idly imagining the possibility of using a good old scripting language (probably BGBScript in my case) to assist in building worlds. say, higher level API commands can be added to the mapper, so I can issue commands like build a room here with these textures and dimensions or generate some terrain over there as API calls or similar. loops or functions could also generate things like stairs and similar, ... then, it can partly be a process of writing scripts, invoking them in the mapper, and optionally saving out the results if it looks about like what was being hoping for (maybe followed by some amount of manual fine tuning...). similarly, the commands would probably be usable from the console as well (as-is, BGBScript code can already be entered interactively at the console), in addition to the existing GUI-based mapping interface. probably the underlying world structure would remain being built out of entities, convex polyhedrons (brushes), Bezier patches, and polygon meshes. (unlike some other ideas, this wouldn't drastically change how my engine works, or even require redesigning/recreating my tools...). sorry if all this is a bother to anyone, being solidly not really about programming per-se... From: BGBcr88...@gmail.com To: Fundamentals of New Computingfonc@vpri.org Sent: Tuesday, 17 January 2012, 3:31 Subject: Re: [fonc] Inspired 3D Worlds 8 these would generally be created manually, by placing every object and piece of geometry visible in the world, but this is fairly effort-intensive, and simply running head first into it tends to quickly drain my motivation (resulting in me producing worlds which look like big boxes with some random crap in them). 8 ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
