History Main / ProceduralGeneration

* ''{{Elite}}'' was one of the first games to use this technique to generate not only worlds, but names, descriptions, and even prices of commodities, among many other innovations, by using the Fibonacci sequence. All in 22 kilobyte - your phone likely uses more for menu transitions.

Procedural generation is a form of creating media automatically. Basically, a designer needs to enter a few variables and let the computer do its work. It's a bit of a double edged sword: when it's done well, it's done ''really'' well, but when it's done poorly, it can just look like a mess.

* ''DwarfFortress'' takes the above example ''UpToEleven''; not only does it generate terrain for a region up to tthe approximate size of the planet Earth, it also simulates weather, erosion and other geographical features in minute detail. And ''then'' it adds up to a thousand years of procedurally generated history: Wars, battles, the rise and fall of empires and dynasties and even the creation of great works of art and literature.

RandomlyGeneratedLevels and DynamicDifficulty (and, by extension, RubberBandAI) are subtropes; put pure examples of either there.

* ''{{FUEL}}'' is a racing game with a map of '''14,000 square km''' of [[AfterTheEnd postapocalyptic]] wilderness, or ''half the size of Belgium''. It uses a fixed seed generated by the developers and a few manually created landmarks.
* ''{{Minecraft}}'' procedurally generates landscapes that are, for all practical purposes, infinite. There's an end, but it's about 30,000 kilometers[[note]](equivalent to 75% of the circumference of the Earth's equator)[[/note]] from your spawn point, which would take a minimum of 820 hours of gameplay to reach without cheating. The terrain randomly contains NPC villages, dungeons, strongholds, and abandoned mineshafts, as well as ten distinct biomes, including mountains, jungles, deserts, swamps, and tundras. This combines to create an immense world[[note]](the game is designed to support levels with more surface area than the Earth, although your system probably isn't up to the challenge)[[/note]] that you could spend your entire life exploring, if you felt like it. Furthermore, the game uses a special code called a seed to keep generated terrain consistent, and there are roughly four billion seeds to choose from, each of which can generate a unique world. The same seed can be used to generate the same world on any computer, and there are quite a few websites dedicated to sharing interesting seeds with other players.

* [[http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger .kkrieger]] was very famous in its day for being an FPS built near-entirely on procedurally generated content, matching the likes of VideoGame/{{Doom}} 3 with a filesize of only ''96 kilobytes''.

* ''{{Elite}}'' was one of the first games to use this technique to generate not only worlds, but names, descriptions, and even prices of commodities, among many other innovations, by using the Fibonacci sequence.

** Also by {{Valve}}, ''Left4Dead'' handles music the same way, giving each survivor their own music based on what was happening to and around ''them'', and not necessarily to his teammates. Additionally, spectating a player will also duplicate that player's music for the spectator.

* Almost all of ''{{Oblivion}}'' is created through simulated soil erosion, with dungeons being made of random parts of quest dungeons, making for long crawls (Except instead of "[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIDaggerfall mating octopi]]", they are just lines or loops). Coupled with enemy and loot spawns being spread sheet generated, you get the size of ''{{Morrowind}}'', and the uniqueness of ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIDaggerfall Daggerfall]]''
* Speaking of VideoGame/TheElderScrolls, both [[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsArena Arena]] and [[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIDaggerfall Daggerfall]] were entirely procedurally generated, the former being ''the size of Europe'', the latter being only the size of Britain or so.

Procedural generation is a form of creating media automatically. Basically, a designer needs to enter a few variables and let the computer do its work. It's a bit of a double edged sword: when it's done well, it's done ''really'' well, but when it's done bad, it can just look like a mess.

* There's a trend in RhythmGames to do this: creating maps from a user's music collection. ''Dance Factory'' most likely started this, making ''DanceDanceRevolution''-style step charts, and indie games like ''VideoGame/{{Audiosurf}}'' and ''1...2...3...Kick It! (Drop That Beat Like An Ugly Baby)'' offer different takes on the idea.

* ''{{Minecraft}}'' procedurally generates landscapes that are, for all practical purposes, infinite. There's an end, but it's about 30,000 kilometers[[hottip:*:(equivalent to 75% of the circumference of the Earth's equator)]] from your spawn point, which would take a minimum of 820 hours of gameplay to reach without cheating. The terrain randomly contains NPC villages, dungeons, strongholds, and abandoned mineshafts, as well as ten distinct biomes, including mountains, jungles, deserts, swamps, and tundras. This combines to create an immense world[[hottip:*:(the game is designed to support levels with more surface area than the Earth, although your system probably isn't up to the challenge)]] that you could spend your entire life exploring, if you felt like it. Furthermore, the game uses a special code called a seed to keep generated terrain consistent, and there are roughly four billion seeds to choose from, each of which can generate a unique world. The same seed can be used to generate the same world on any computer, and there are quite a few websites dedicated to sharing interesting seeds with other players.

Procedural generation has a kind of sinusoidal history: it was pretty much required in the days of 8-bit gaming, as cartridges and computers literally did not have enough memory to generate all the levels. This brought in the concept of using "seeds" to grow a randomly generated world which looked realistic and challenging. Then, as games got more detailed and had more capacity, level generation was done manually, as by this time, random generation, particularly in games with save features, took up more space than static levels (take ''DwarfFortress'' for example: each world can hit 100MB... in .txt form) As of late, procedural generation in video games tends to be behind the scenes: in AI, for example, or for audio or visual effects.

* ''TheAvengers'' episode "Love All" (6-21) involved [[ExtrudedBookProduct computer-generated]] {{romance novel}}s.

Procedural generation is a form of creating media automatically. Basically, a designer needs to enter a few variables and let the computer do its work. It's a bit of a double edged sword: when it's done well, it's done ''really'' well, but when it's done bad, it can just look like a mess.

Procedural generation has a kind of sinusoidal history: it was pretty much required in the days of 8-bit gaming, as cartridges and computers literally did not have enough memory to generate all the levels. This brought in the concept of using "seeds" to grow a randomly generated world which looked realistic and challenging. Then, as games got more detailed and had more capacity, level generation was done manually, as by this time, random generation, particularly in games with save features, took up more space than static levels (take ''DwarfFortress'' for example: each world can hit 100MB... in .txt form) As of late, procedural generation in video games tends to be behind the scenes: in AI, for example, or for audio or visual effects.

Even if static maps exist in a game, it's possible procedural generation was used in development to save map developers some time... and is probably most likely if it involves random tree or rock placement, or anything to do with cliffs or coastlines.

RandomlyGeneratedLevels and DynamicDifficulty (and, by extension, RubberBandAI) are subtropes; put pure examples of either there.

* ''{{Spore}}'' can take ''any'' creature design and make it workable. And that's not including the amount of stars in the galaxy and the planets surrounding those stars and the creatures on those planets, all procedurally generated.

* There's a trend in RhythmGames to do this: creating maps from a user's music collection. ''Dance Factory'' most likely started this, making ''DanceDanceRevolution''-style step charts, and indie games like ''VideoGame/{{Audiosurf}}'' and ''1...2...3...Kick It! (Drop That Beat Like An Ugly Baby)'' offer different takes on the idea.
* [[http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger .kkrieger]] was very famous in its day for being an FPS built near-entirely on procedurally generated content, matching the likes of {{Doom}} 3 with a filesize of only ''96 kilobytes''.

* ''{{Elite}}'' was one of the first games to use this technique to generate not only worlds, but names, descriptions, and even prices of commodities, among many other innovations, by using the Fibonacci sequence.

* Speaking of VideoGame/TheElderScrolls, both [[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsArena Arena]] and [[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIDaggerfall Daggerfall]] were entirely procedurally generated, the former being ''the size of Europe'', the latter being only the size of Britain or so.

* ''{{Noctis}}'': A space flight simulator allowing you free roaming in a galaxy approximately 90 thousand light-years in radius (about double the radius of the Milky Way Galaxy) made of over ''78 billion'' stars, many with planets and moons. If you pick any point in the starfield, you can go there, then land on any rocky planet you find and roam around, created by a program of under a megabyte.

* Speaking of VideoGame/TheElderScrolls, both [[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsArena Arena]] and [[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIDaggerfall Daggerfall]] were entirely procedurally generated, the former being ''the size of Europe'', the latter being only the size of Brittan or so.

* {{cactus}}' several games, including ''Protoganda'' games and ''BurnTheTrash'' use random seed generator to create enemies out of random parts that are always the same. These games also often included "random" option where enemies are ''completely'' random.

* ''{{Borderlands}}'' does this for your loot. It [[WhatCouldHaveBeen was going to]] make the world this way as well.

* Almost all of ''{{Oblivion}}'' is created through simulated soil erosion, with dungeons being made of random parts of quest dungeons, making for long crawls (Except instead of "[[{{Daggerfall}} mating octopi]]", they are just lines or loops). Coupled with enemy and loot spawns being spread sheet generated, you get the size of ''{{Morrowind}}'', and the uniqueness of ''{{Daggerfall}}''

* ''{{Portal 2}}'' procedurally generates music based on user actions, using a decent number of different sound effects. The game composer mentions that the frequency of hearing the same track twice is somewhere in the tens of thousands of years.

* Speaking of TheElderScrolls, both [[TheElderScrollsArena Arena]] and [[TheElderScrollsIIDaggerfall Daggerfall]] were entirely procedurally generated, the former being ''the size of Europe'', the latter being only the size of Brittan or so.

* ''{{Minecraft}}'' procedurally generates landscapes that are, for all practical purposes, infinite. There's an end, but it's about 30,000 kilometers[[hottip:*:(equivalent to 75% of the circumference of the Earth's equator)]] from your spawn point, which would take a minimum of 820 hours of gameplay to reach without cheating. The terrain randomly contains NPC villages, dungeons, strongholds, and abandoned mineshafts, as well as eight distinct biomes, including mountains, deserts, swamps, and oceans. This combines to create an immense world[[hottip:*:(the game is designed to support levels with more surface area than the Earth, although your system probably isn't up to the challenge)]] that you could spend your entire life exploring, if you felt like it. Furthermore, the game uses a special code called a seed to keep generated terrain consistent, and there are roughly four billion seeds to choose from, each of which can generate a unique world. The same seed can be used to generate the same world on any computer, and there are quite a few websites dedicated to sharing interesting seeds with other players.

* ''TheAvengers'' episode "Love All" (6-21) involved computer-generated romance novels.

* There's a trend in RhythmGames to do this: creating maps from a user's music collection. ''Dance Factory'' most likely started this, making ''DanceDanceRevolution''-style step charts, and indie games like ''{{Audiosurf}}'' and ''1...2...3...Kick It! (Drop That Beat Like An Ugly Baby)'' offer different takes on the idea.

* ''{{Minecraft}}'' procedurally generates landscapes that are, for all practical purposes, infinite. There's an end, but it's about 30,000 kilometers from your spawn point, which would take a minimum of 820 hours of gameplay to reach without cheating. The terrain randomly contains NPC villages, dungeons, strongholds, and abandoned mineshafts, as well as eight distinct biomes, including mountains, deserts, swamps, and oceans. This combines to create an immense world that you could spend your entire life exploring, if you felt like it. Furthermore, the game uses a special code called a seed to keep generated terrain consistent, and there are roughly four billion seeds to choose from, each of which can generate a unique world. The same seed can be used to generate the same world on any computer, and there are quite a few websites dedicated to sharing interesting seeds with other players.