procedural generation
 

I bought the missus Spore the other day. Interesting, not the point here though. Just a contributing ingredient, like having read about procedural music recently. Fractal generators. They've been around forever, Terragen has had a good long life so far. Procedural generation is not as common in games as you would think it ought to be, but when an RPG for instance has a random level generator, it's not a huge deal. Go way back to roguelikes and stuff, and you start to bump elbows with it again, I'm musing here, I don't really need to, the point is procedural generation has been around a long time. About 2.5 - 3 years ago, I developed a brief obsession after playing with a script to make and tweak array patterns in Max 7, I could tell procedural generation was a big thing, and had the potential to explode into new huge realms of bigness. That obsession went dormant for awhile and has recently been called back out. I want to learn everything I can about it.

Anyone know of an insightful articles, how tos, or anything like that?

Anyone know of procedural toy-boxes of scripts or tools or... anything to mess with?



edit: Oh, and this is interesting, and marginally relevant; http://www.quelsolaar.com/

There are ton of articles on that subject. So your best bet is to search for them yourself.

Examples:
http://www.geocities.com/felixgolubov/World/
http://www.eldritch.org/erskin/roleplaying/planet.php
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experimen...ox/Planet.html
Also see deverloper resources on ATI and NVidia homepages, they should have some articles.
There is also terragen, which uses perlin noise to generate landscapes, and there were commercial fractal planet generator (can't find it, forgot name) that allowed you to create/render fractal worlds.

Besides, Spore isn't entirely generated. All default creatures are prebuilt (made by humans) and visited/modified planets are no longer random. So instead of fractals Spore relies on technologies similar to ones used in .kkreiger and .theprodukkt, which allows entire creature (planet, vehicle, starship) to be saved into, say, 1..10 kilobytes. Truly generated universe (like the one used in Elite and Elite 2: Frontier, where galaxy was much larger than the one in the spore) use random number generators with predefined seed, not necessarily fractals. I.e. it is possible, given number of generators, define entire universe as one number (the seed for generators) then given that number, generate planets, names for planets, towns, populations, etc, as long as there are enough generators available.

Yeah, I know spore isn't all procedural, but surrounding spore is a huge hub-up about procedural generation, and that connection is what set off the whole thought process anyway.

Thanks for the links, I have done a little searching and returned plenty, this post was part of an overarching search process which googlesque web-searching was merely a component of :)