Okay so I was scouring the glorious internet for something to assist me in procedural generation. Now this isn’t a “How do I do it?!” or a question to fix a bug but more of advice and general help. I’m having difficult finding materials that talk about procedural generation in a general sense. I need to know more about the ways to go about it, the do’s and dont’s and logic behind procedural generation. My googlefu has failed me.
In regards to why I want to learn it and how I want to use it is mainly for the development of a game I’ve been working on. I want to create a pseudo game universe and have the solar systems procedurally generated. To that extent I would extend the use of it further to generated space ships, planets and such. It has always been an interest to me and I get the basic idea of how to go about it but I’ve never attempted it with Unreal 4 specifically.
Suffice it to say, I have no idea how to approach it with Unreal Engine. I’m stumped! I want to pursue it in C++ but I can infer the logic from Blueprints easily enough.
You should find ton of material by searching for “procedural generation gdc” or “procedural generation siggraph”.
You can recursively define big systems, like galaxy:
Every system is defined by a number or “random seed”. That number is used to jumpstart PRNG to generate system parameters. Said PRNG is then used to generate parameters for the system and “random seeds” for subsystem. The general idea is that given “random seed” for the system, you should be able to quickly determine “random seed” for subsystem. That way you’ll get infinite world defined by one number.
To go from recursive random generation to 3d, however, I’d advise to take a look at ken perlin’s homepage: https://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/
This guy created perlin noise and participated in the making of TRON movie.
It also has plenty of java applet examples, and you’ll need browser like mozilla firefox to run them (because google chrome decided to nuke all the plugin support)
