Awesome Idea for addition to BGE

I know nothing about programming whatsoever, so I would be no help to the blender community by developing blender, but I came across this and thought that it would be incredible if features like this were added to the blender game engine. Maybe a GSOC project?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8len2Z7v9k&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcreatedigitalmotion%2Ecom%2Fpage%2F4%2F&feature=player_embedded

Dear users
you watch too much tube!!

That kind of system would be interesting but I doubt that anyone here is willing to spend the time to create a system even half as good as that one. And someone would, it would just result in hundreds of fps games with the same city generation system…

There are tons of FPS creators on the web. Personally, I don’t want BGE to be another one. I want BGE to be an universal game engine.

I dont see this as a question of should/shouldnt the BGE have a city generator. Obviously this is useful in some cases. Nobody is stopping your from writing one.
Feel free to do so and submit it as a patch. we can include it.

Such a feature need not be built into the game engine its self. an example is the script I wrote to display large scenes which scales to over a 1 million objects. - this is all python, theres no reason the objects and locations could not be city blocks rather then trees.

this is cool. but if you had this, and an fps template, you’d have a playable game, and what else would you do? i savor the time i have to spend modelling things. it give you more dedication to your final product.

Are you afraid that in the near future blender will be so easy to use for game development that developers might need to actually create games that are plot and gameplay driven?

Really I think it’s about time the game industry had some standardization in the game engine department. Hopefully soon Blender will have so many available resources to start with, because everyone will be using it, that a developer would need to be down right stubborn not to use Blender as there game engine.

I believe procedural content generation is the future of gaming. Why spend time and resources developing one single detailed model. And then completely trash it and waste it when you get to the next level or even the next game? If you could instead just use the same time and resources to write a script that would procedurally generate many variations of that model that could be reused over and over and over again?

It’s a matter of cost efficiency vs culture. Procedural scripts are much more efficient but the current mentality of developers still have a lot of racism against it. Many cannot understand it’s potential simply because it’s not part of our culture to use them, so they believe the results might not be as good. But the video in the OP is a great example of how successful procedural scripting can go.

Basically instead of all you guys working on your single content for your single project, you could all be working together on procedural scripts that could fit everyone’s goal. This is not only for FPS and not only for models, not even only for games. This is for all areas of media content. Ranging from cities, characters to whole scenes and even sounds and text. Personally, I’ve just got started doing my small humble share of procedural content generation for Blender :slight_smile: You guys should think about it and do the same.

The problem with procedural content is repetition- the reason we don’t make everything procedurally is because then everything would be essentially the same. Once you’ve smashed the first room in that engine, for example, you’ve seen what it’s like to smash them all. Writing the artists out of the pipeline is NOT a good idea.

I honestly believe that is one of and main racism against procedural content that I spoke of. That is purely fruit of our current culture.

Because technically speaking. A procedurally generated content will be just as repetitive as you make it be and invest your time in it. You don’t need to make only 2 or 3 buildings models and randomize those. You could make 10, 50, 100 completely different ones and randomize them. And you don’t need to stop once you’ve finished. You could increase your procedural engine with time. The community could design new randomizable buildings and add to the engine. So it’s just as repetitive as independent content. Plus procedural content takes the advantage of randomization, which independent content doesn’t.

So at the end of the day. If you spend X amount of time and resources designing independent content. Or if you spend that same X amount of resources designing procedural content. The procedural one would be less repetitive. From this point, it is easy to understand that to create procedural content that is just as good and as repetitive as the independent one. Then you’d need less resources. So it’s more efficient.

This argument seems silly to me, use procedural content where it makes sense.
If you make an arcade game or a racing car game maybe its ok to run past the same looking building for the 5th time.
if the BGE had some way to make procedural levels this would be nice in some cases - go ahead and write one :slight_smile:

That is certainly one of my goals ^^ One day I will prove you all wrong about how good and not repetitive procedural content can look :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: