The main reason I’m going for procedural content is speed of asset creation. An experienced artist would paint a map for L-D in 2-3 days + additional hours for making modifications. With the current map system it takes 10 minutes. As a single developer I simply can’t afford time or money (unless you give me your money) and I can make it look just as good.
Written by MM. Posted at 4:54 am on November 10th, 2009
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Have you figured out how to make a map interesting to PLAY yet?
The texture is great. The composition is simply horrible.
Procedural textures were around for ages. You didn’t invent anything, you merely adapted it.
Now comes the time for procedural content, procedural composition and procedural creativity.
Good luck failing in that.
I agree with you on that thing, but unfortunately not everything can be procedural. Weapons, characters, vehicles (if they are still in the picture)and props(like destroyed furniture,opened doors and other crap) etc. still need an artist.
BTW from the pictures you’ve shown I can see that the palette of whole image is limited to the base color. How will you resolve variation? a whole building shouldn’t look the same.
@archont
hehe, pretty harsh. unfortunately seems like MM has an issue with being full of himself to degree of shit coming out of his ears, almost everything he shows is presented like it the best thing in the world and no one did it before or better, or used it the right way. Some serious programmers I know, just laugh at that.
He losses much of respect that way. Making daily posts is the best thing ever and every dev should do that in a perfect world.
michal, maps are only interesting if it is evident that time has been put into them. i make maps for unreal 1 single player, and i’ve been working on one in particular for almost a year now, yet i still have much to do:
http://i36.tinypic.com/33voqww.jpg
i’m not saying that link-dead maps should take a year to construct apiece, but i am saying that every map must have thought put into it.
recruiting mappers wouldn’t be a bad idea.
You guys are ridiculous with the skepticism. I imagine having a dev blog when I was starting to make Soldat, it would be the same thing. Polygonal maps?! It must take a real artist to make a pixel-by-pixel map for it to be any good!!
Procedural content is super awesome for many things, it’s perfect for making things look diverse. Many games would benifit from procedural ground textures for example.
Wait, Link-Dead won’t use polygons?
Silverfish: Exactly. An artist would spend 2 days to draw concrete with that degree of variety like in this screenshot. Usually they don’t so it’s just a plain concrete texture and it sucks balls.
MM: Polygons were around since the days of Quake. Soldat scaled them down to 2d. Both approaches work.
An example of a game that is heavy on procedural content is .kkrieger. Try it out, the design value of it is shitty.
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