Re: [pygame] Experiments with numeric for tile generation

[Kris Schnee <kschnee@xxxxxxxxxx>]

andrew baker wrote:
> Procedural content generation for 3D games is now in vogue.  However, I 
> see no reason to not use it for 2D games.  If you look at projects like 
> Charas.EX, you can easily see how complicated graphical content can be 
> generated with small datasets.  I've wondered (not being big on math, 
> soz) how good-looking terrain tiles could be generated.

I'm more interested in procedural generation of _settings_ than of 
individual tiles! It should be possible to do a simulation of a world's 
history, with tribes moving around and developing various cultural 
traits related to chance, time, and how they interact. Cultural traits 
could be anything from "eats with forks" to "accepts heavy government 
surveillance" to "has domesticated the horse." Once you have such a sim, 
you can have fun simply viewing it, or you can use it as input to a 
system for generating quests, locations, and dialogue. "We had a war 
about 100 years ago, over control of the mountain region..."

I've wanted to do this for years. I once built a tiny playable demo of a 
viewer at xepher.net/~kschnee/sage.htm , partly based on an online essay 
called "Medieval Demographics Made Easy."

Kris