#procgen planet

[procedural-generation]

Starflight (1986)

I found my record-album copy of Starflight! (While I was looking for something else, naturally. It was inside the Age of Empires collector’s edition box for some reason.)

Staring development before the release of Elite, Starflight had a rather different philosophy for procedural generation. You see, instead of generating a few trillion galaxies, it generates about 800 planets. Since the game came on two 360K floppy disks, this was rather a challenge.

It uses a fixed seed, so that every game has the same planets. It also remembers your actions, so that minerals you collected would still be gone if you returned.

Where it really stands out from its contemporaries is the story content; with a lot of surprisingly deep interactions. Combined with the on-planet gameplay, which is the part that uses the most procedural generation, this has been incredibly influential influential: the planetary exploration against the backdrop of an epic sandbox story is the prototype for everything from Star Control II to Mass Effect to the Forgotten Beasts in Dwarf Fortress.

These days, you can get a working copy of Starflight on GOG, which is way easier than the rigmarole I had to go through in the ‘90s when I got my second-hand copy. Do back up your save games though.

[procedural-generation]

Polygonal Planet Project

Oskar Stålberg has another relevant project online, this time an entire planet. It’s labeled as an exercise in tilesets. A close examination will reveal some of the nuances: try putting a city on snow, or using the cliffs to make a canyon in the city and see what happens.

Designing a set of components that fit together well is one of the basic artistic tasks that shapes procedural generation. The basic principles of 2D NES-era tilesets are fairly well known, but tileset design didn’t stop there. There have been quite a few games that have pushed beyond that, including Civilization 3′s hill-and-border system. The introduction of 3D tilesets opens up even more possibilities.

On a more general note, building kits of modular content is a design discipline in itself. Building kits that work with procedural generation is an additional complication, but a necessary one: while the popular image of procedural content is often one that is generating geometry from scratch, entirely in code, the real-world applications are much more likely to use at least some prefabbed components. 

The principles behind modular kits also applies to non-visual content. Prefabbed chunks of content are frequently useful in text generation, and I often use a deck of cards metaphor in systems that need varying output that still needs to fit within constraints. 

http://oskarstalberg.com/game/planet/planet.html