Topic: Will Wright's Talk on Spore

[ignoramous]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-775656482294094003

If you haven't seen this, then its well worth watching.   


My brother and I were talking about how procedural synthesis might also be applied to items.  Think of a fantasy MMO where people can pick up sticks from the terrain and instead of building up a "whittling" skill, they would actually whittle the stick themselves and carve it to the appropriate degree.  Procedurally the structure of the stick would be analyzed to generate its damage stats or its usability in other contexts.  Blacksmithing would be a literal melting of the ore to purify it and then doing the actual work to hone and shape the metal.  If each item could be procedurally generated then the skill with making the item translated directly into the skill of the player to manipulate the modelled raw material.  Damage to items can also cause procedural defformations to the item itself. 

There are several philosophies being demostrated in spore which will keep the user entranced
1) User generated content is easily shared.
2) The user has a very real ability to make their game their own unique experience. 
3) The game is so variable that there's no way to predict what will evolve out of it.

Just thought I'd share the idea.

[Morgul]

I would like to apply those concepts to precursors. One thing I've never understood is the theory behind the procedural generation of meshes... I would like to know how one would go about making a 'Spore-like' game. I would love to use something like that to generate ships, or other things.

[ignoramous]

I would like to apply those concepts to precursors. One thing I've never understood is the theory behind the procedural generation of meshes... I would like to know how one would go about making a 'Spore-like' game. I would love to use something like that to generate ships, or other things.

I would like to apply those concepts to precursors. One thing I've never understood is the theory behind the procedural generation of meshes... I would like to know how one would go about making a 'Spore-like' game. I would love to use something like that to generate ships, or other things.

I don't know how its ACTUALLY done, but off the top of my head, I'm assuming its based off of skeletal structures which act like lego blocks which can be plugged together.  Each node in the skeletal structure has certain variables.  I am using "skeletal" here in the abstract sense.

Now let me switch to the literal sense where someone might be creating a body mesh to layer on top of an internal skeletal bone structure.

         _
   ___  | \_     _
__/   \_|   \___/ \__  SKIN
-A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-  BONE
__     _     ___   __  SKIN
  \___/ |  _/   \_/
        |_/


Lets say that A-J are vertebre in a skeleton.  Each vertebra has a variable indicating the cylindrical distance of the skin from the back-bone.  What is required of the engine is the ability to merge two vertebra together and create a smooth transition on the skin.  Once you have the vertebra in place, calculating the points on the mesh should be semi-straight forward.  The Engine just needs to know how to glue the meshes together.  There might be meta constructs on the partial meshes which indicate glue points.  Not sure.  The partial meshes and their glueing together is all rendered from the connected reference parts (or vertebre in this case).


http://mrl.nyu.edu/publications/proceduralshape/proceduralshape.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation
http://nintendo.about.com/library/procedural/blprocedural1.htm
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/12/1735221
http://www.sfu.ca/~cxl/index_files/Page1000.htm
http://www.texturingandmodeling.com/ -- If you've got a library