Procedural Generation in the Real World

Welcome back! So last time we tried to make procedural planets. We sort of achieved that but they didn't look that great. Our method may not have been the best but we also described others and there are real examples of people doing that, so let's take a look.

I think one of the most impressive examples of procedural content generation to date is No Man's Sky. I mentioned this game briefly in my last post but today I want to talk more about. No Man's Sky is impressive for a number of reasons. It achieved what we tried to do and generates procedural planets but it does so much more. No Man's Sky generated an entire procedural universe. A universe far bigger than any one person can ever explore. Each planet is unique and live demonstrations often surprise even the developers of the game because they find new generated content so frequently.

Source

The above video is one of the developers showing off the game and talking about it. I highly recommend you watch it as it is very impressive what these people have made. Every planet has its own ecosystem. Plants, animals, biomes, all unique to each planet and all generated randomly. This game is an incredible feat of procedural content and I am personally extremely excited for the game to be released and to explore it.

The other example I mentioned in the last post was Space Engine. Space Engine generates the entire universe starting with out solar system. It uses realistic physics when creating these planets so many of them, or similar versions of them, can be found in the real world.

Video games aren't the only place procedural generation is used either. It is also popular in film and one of the best examples of this is Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movies.

Source

Above is a shot from the film of a massive Orc army. Each of these soldiers was based on a basic orc model. From there a computer made changes to each's appearance and placed them in after filming. This allowed Peter Jackson to create a massive army where no two soldiers are the same.

Procedural content generation has come a long way. We saw in an early post that it started with dungeons in rogue-like games, and today, it has progressed to the ability to generate an entire universe and create armies. As technology progresses more and more, so will the procedural content generation methods, and it will be interesting to see what we can create.