For me, the major impact of procgen is not the effort or cost, but the translation of skillset. I can handle gigantic, difficult algorithm design problems, and still maintain engagement and happiness. If I have to do even rudimentary art or level-editing tasks for any length of time, I quickly become miserable and quit.

Although, I do also happen to believe that ultimately, procgen has much more absolute potential than hand-made content. Minecraft is only 6 years old, and imo people have barely begun to expand on the basic concept.

You are severely underestimating the effort good procedural content takes.

And perhaps you are severley underestimating the effort large-scale world assets take to create.

I agree that doing procedural generation properly takes a lot of work, but there's a reason that AAA open-world games like GTAV cost hunderends of millions of dollars to develop.

There's a reason that AAA open-world games like GTAV are using rather limited procedural generation, too.

The problem is that to create N pieces of satisfyingly unique procedurally generated content, you need M pieces of content that were carefully designed within additional restrictions to make them combineable in various fashions - making them harder to create. Then you add code to glue that all together. If you think M=0, that just means you've hardcoded your content in code.

When N >> M - e.g. you're generating thousands of similar-yet-distinct roguelike levels, trees, etc. - procedural generation can pay off.

But even for large-scale world assets, it's frequently the case that N < M. Making the content non-procedurally is going to be cheaper - fewer limitations to worry about, and fewer pieces of content to actually generate. A few clever tricks - rotating, retexturing, tweaking a base model, etc. - let you make a lot of non-procedural content without creating each piece from scatch, and lets you stretch that content to appear like you have more variations than you actually do.

I don't think No Man's Sky will show a significantly better RoI, in the long run. Star Citizen is certainly racking up the bills.

We could even argue that AAA game studios using hand-modeled art assets instead of procedurally generated content is proof that hand-modelling is the "cheaper" route. Though most AAA game studios are using a hybrid approach and have some form of procedurally generated content in their pipeline, whether it's to create quests or to create the baseline environment on top of which bespoke content is added.

Projects are hard. Full stop.

But it does scale better, doesn't it? Seems that would be the case if more tools and libraries like this one were open-sourced.

Not really. The problem with procedurally generated content is making interesting iterations. Sure, you can have a million space ships just as easy as one, but will anyone care about them? It is a different sort of work, but of equal effort, to "just" modeling the content.

Even most landscapes on Earth (reality is "procedurally generated" by the laws of physics) are pretty boring. Spectacular documentaries must travel far to reach the interesting ones.

Interesting procedural generation may require strong AI, because it must model how it is interpreted by us.

> Even most landscapes on Earth (reality is "procedurally generated" by the laws of physics) are pretty boring.

Strongly disagree! I truly feel sorry for you if you can't see beauty and spectacle everywhere you look in nature.

Well, for now, yes- but things like this tend to get easier as new techniques are perfected and more powerful tools are developed, whereas building a thousand art assets by hand will remain time-consuming indefinitely.

Not only for indie games, mainstream games like Stellaris could be vastly improved by this. I already posted a link to their forums. :)

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/space...

Procedural generation of mesh is difficult, but not costly (in terms of CPU, drawcalls or memory, textures or total polygon/tris in the combined mesh).

Many, many other games use modular assets, especially if poly and tri counts are important to keep down for mobile and low power consoles / handhelds.

With a few component models that can be separated and added to a base model, procedural mesh generation can work. But, it is extremely messy when starting out, just due to complexity and the strategy of a significant redesign of assets to be modular, not singular.

Once designers and artists are on-board, and that's half of the battle initially, in getting artists to make modular design for assets instead of single design of flagship or lead assets, then you need to create code to make the game actually work with Frankenstein ships or Frankenstein characters, buildings, etc.

it leads to intriguing art and possibilities.

And working out all of the intricacies of positions, storage, blending, replacement/deformation of modular assets, how to diagnose, test and display problems, modifying or identifying pre generated or fixed module assets in the gui, storing the atomic position and/or physics settings, looking for deformed mesh, hollow mesh/gaps, raytrace problems, wrap uv and deformation, problems with textures, etc. Batch calls, pooling, spawn locations, collision mesh, sic.

And that's just things I could think of from regular assets. Modular mesh, as well as modular textures are usually a no go area, because of the problems with the engine and performance guesswork when problems come up at the last minute. Or the first minutes. Etc.

Most indie games don't have the time to waste on procedural generation unless it's been troubleshooted or tested by designers and coders, or sold as an asset by others.

Buildings are often generated like this in game,

No Man's Sky is perhaps the more popular ur example of how to make procedural generated assets using math functions and geometric texture generation (it's been a long time since I looked at the tech they were supposed to be using under the hood, but i misremember something like fractal/geometric generation of textures to minimize the workload)

but it is still a tech demo of a well understood, but infrequently used tool.

That is, until they release the game.

That would be No Man's Sky®.