Re:Procedural Building Generation in Unreal Engine 3
by jacques_chester on Monday December 13, 2010 @12:30AM
(#1999463)
I'm not an information theory expert, but my hunch is that this has "poor" compressibility under the purely random scenario. Here's why.
The point of information is that you want to convey a particular piece of information. A particular sequence of bits, say. Compressibility is about how many 'physical' bits are needed to convey the original information.
When cities are random, your odds of getting a particular city you might have wanted are very low indeed. This means that the channel is noisy and you will need very many repeats to get the original information.
If on the other hand the randomness is from a PRNG, you could ship the engine and the seed value and go from there. The compression ratio would depend largely on how large map files are vs the engine + seed.
In one sense this is a classic time and space tradeoff. In the case of randomly generated maps it's about externalising the cost of map making onto the user.
The point of information is that you want to convey a particular piece of information. A particular sequence of bits, say. Compressibility is about how many 'physical' bits are needed to convey the original information.
When cities are random, your odds of getting a particular city you might have wanted are very low indeed. This means that the channel is noisy and you will need very many repeats to get the original information.
If on the other hand the randomness is from a PRNG, you could ship the engine and the seed value and go from there. The compression ratio would depend largely on how large map files are vs the engine + seed.
In one sense this is a classic time and space tradeoff. In the case of randomly generated maps it's about externalising the cost of map making onto the user.