Drop me a line or reply to this post if you want access to the Google Analytics information for pcg.wikidot.com. Unfortunately, the permissions model for Analytics as I understand it means I can only give View Only access without having to throw away all the historical information and starting again.

Regards,

Andrew Doull

Julian Togelius has set up a Google group for PCG at http://groups.google.com/group/proceduralcontent which appears to already have more discussion other than housekeeping than the forums here. I'd like to invite regular contributors to join the group - I suspect we should perhaps have a brief poll here on whether we should close down the forums here other than the General Discussion forum.

Regards,

Andrew

I've hit a stumbling point writing up an article on adaptive difficulty - always a controversial point in games. I'll quote the whole article to saving you having to go to the original link:

Adaptive difficulty is the process of adjusting the game in reaction to the player. By spawning new enemies or powering up existing enemies if the player is progressing quickly through the game, or by decreasing the frequency and/or difficulty of existing enemies if the player appears to be having problems progressing, adaptive difficulty techniques attempt to create the 'optimal' game experience.

Classically, adaptive difficulty has been seen as a hard problem, requiring a level of artificial intelligence in the game to attempt to model the player to attempt to determine if they are finding the game easy or difficult.

However simpler RPG style mechanisms can also be seen as adaptive difficulty techniques. Allowing the player to level up by playing through additional easier content can ensure the player is able to grind their way through parts of the game in order to decrease the difficulty of sections of the game where the difficulty level increases. Paradoxically, adaptive difficulty techniques which increase the difficulty of the game by scaling up enemy strength have been fiercely resisted by RPG players, as can be seen by the negative reactions to the difficulty scaling in Oblivion.

Adaptive difficulty is not usually seen as a procedural content generation technique, but it has most of the features of such techniques. It could be seen as decreasing a game's randomness instead of increasing it which would make games which feature it without other PCG features to fall outside the 'canon' of PCG games.

Should I include games which have adaptive difficulty in the PCG wiki? There are plenty of examples of games which have adaptive difficulty and are procedural (Oblivion I've already mentioned, Left4Dead) but there are plenty of games which are not (SiN: Episodes). And I don't want to include every RPG, based on the argument I've made above.

The real question is not whether I should include these games, and the answer to that is probably not, but why? What good reason can I give to not include SiN: Episodes, for instance, as a procedural game?

Again, the randomness argument is the most plausible, but it is not completely convincing.

Convince me.

I'd love to be there…

Having set up a fairly rigid taxonomy of thinking about PCG types, I think it's time to break it down. There's a couple of reasons why:

1. It's too difficult to spell taxonomy.
2. I've created this pcg-algorithm: _concepts tag and want to use it.

So if no one has any objections in the next couple of days, I'll move these across.

Of course, there's an equally valid argument to go 'why are these algorithms at all?'. They're not. They're higher level concepts. But they lie close to algorithms on the thinking about 'how do I implement the creation of procedural concept.'

Thoughts?

Andrew

I am not the first to speak of this:

Flammifer:

I gotta admit, the Wiki as it is doesn't really encourage community discussion. It has a bit of an encyclopedic tone, it might work better with a more informal tone, like tv tropes and, well, most good non-wikipedia wikis :)

andrewdoull:

Feel free to give the place more of a community vibe.

So we should be using an informal style. Don't take the long, dry, and boring way to explain something just because this is a wiki. Say it as it is, or at least say it how you would normaly. No need to use fake voice. This is the tone. I wish I could be more specific, but this is a bit unclear to me.

On the other hand, I want my writing to be written for the web. This is the style:

• Consise text. Fewer words are better words. Make every word count. (Strunk and White FTW!) Use half the word count (or less) of conventional writing. This could compete with the tone but if it makes the content easier to understand then all is well.
• Scannable layout. Use bulleted lists where they work, bold key phrases, and otherwise make it easy to find out what an article is about without actually reading it. This means
  • highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
  • meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones)
  • bulleted lists
  • one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
  • the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
• Objective language. Prefer neutral, descriptive language over subjective boasting. Marketese (aka doublespeak) causes mental friction, it slows down reading and sows distrust. Again this could compete with the tone but it shouldn't. The big point is to be honest and don't sound like you are selling something.

Anyway, this is my plan. Any thoughts?

So, for each image:

• Credit for the image (if it is not yours)
• Link to algorithm/source code for the image.

I will start.

Edit:
And we should limit the width of images displayed to 600 pixels or so.

Suggestions are welcome as to how to get the PCG wiki added as a reference on the Wikipedia page. A naive attempt (adding it) gets caught by Wikipedia spam bot detection. A more complex attempt would involve getting someone to override this.

Any other ideas?

Andrew

Pros: Structures the content for clear navigation, makes it easy to collect similar pages together for 'index' pages.
Cons: Makes creating links unintuitive, enforces particular conventions, doesn't account for pages that are more general or multifaceted.

I think, however, I have found an easy solution: Tags.

ListPages

Wikidot has an awesome module: ListPages. This does one simple thing with tags that I have longed for on DOZENS of other wiki engines: Allow list of tagged pages with and/or/not.

Basic "OR" usage:

[[module ListPages tags="game level-generation"]]

Basic "AND" usage:

[[module ListPages tags="+game +level-generation"]]

Basic "NOT" usage:

[[module ListPages tags="game -level-generation"]]

Consider a game that uses a cellular automata for fire propogation. It could be taged with: "game rpg cellular-automata fire-propogation". And also an article that discusses this method: "article cellular-automata fire-propogation".

From this we could create several interesting automatic indexes:

Games that use CA: tags="+game +cellular-automata"

Articles about fire: tags="+article +fire-propogation"

All CA pages that aren't about fire: tags="+cellular-automata -fire-propogation" (Not sure if this is hugely useful, but hey, it's there!)

And then, of course, obvious things like All Articles: tags="article".

Why?

Tags are very natural to create, trivial to edit and mash around, fairly easy to maintain. This way also all pages can be in a flat structure, making linking more straighforward, obvious, and constant. As well, the complexity of the system can grow (or shrink) as needs change.

Thoughts?

• 1,903

Visits

* 1,071
Absolute Unique Visitors

* 9,168
Pageviews

* 4.82
Average Pageviews

* 00:04:01
Time on Site

* 25.70%
Direct Traffic

* 34.63%
Referring Sites

* 39.67%
Search Engines

Sources

Visits

% visits
google (organic)
719 37.78%
(direct) ((none))
489 25.70%
roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com (referral)
314 16.50%
forums.tigsource.com (referral)
115 6.04%
216.239.59.104 (referral)
39 2.05%

procedural generation
57 7.55%
procedural dungeon generation
51 6.75%
procedural content generation
39 5.17%
procedural content wiki
31 4.11%
spelunky wiki
23 3.05%

* 53.86%
Bounce Rate

* 53.70%
New Visits

But it appears to be the other way round? Perhaps they should be renamed something like "Done" and "Apply Changes" or something similiar? This is annoying pendantry at it's worst (best?) but if this place ever becomes popular then I can forsee lots of half done edits being commited.

I've added a featured article section on the front page, so visitors can see what we've worked on recently and which is at a level we'd like to get the whole wiki to.

At the moment, feel free to change the Featured Article if you've got sick of the existing one and the new article you want to link to is at a standard you feel should represent the wiki as a whole.

Ideally this should be:
1. Has original material providing insight into the process of procedural content generation (e.g. not just a copy or quotes of a wiki article or material elsewhere).
2. Has a code example (for PCG algorithms) or review of the PCG methods used (for PCG games or software) and/or screen shots.
3. All the links from the article are complete in the sense they are not just stubs.

Let me know if you think we need less or more to qualify as a featured article.

Regards,

Andrew Doull

If you cast your eyes over the cellular automata entry, you'll see what looks like a working Conway's Game of Life up and running on the entry. This is based on my initial code for a more generic cellular automata javascript resource. I'm not going to use the word library, as I'm only just starting to learn JavaScript and it is going to be specific for displaying examples in various pages in this wiki.

The code is based on the canvas object and undoubtedly inefficient. This is based on my premis of getting working code out there is much more important than worrying about design or implementation details - I let language and compiler/intepreter designers worry about those sorts of things.

My plan is to set up independent hosting for this, as the wiki can't host .js files, and then break out the code into a couple of .js files that support overriding a generic rule set with specific cellular automata rules for entries such as fire propagation, fluid dynamics and so on.

I was wondering on your thoughts: is this a good idea? Source Forge or Google Code? Which license will best serve this in the long run? I'm leaning towards GPL v1 as its the only license I know.

Feedback about the actually code is welcome: patches are better.

As regards to the style guide: this is still evolving. I'm leaning away from having a separate Description heading and just starting with the description, and having a PCG Wiki References section which contains a module Backlinks reference so that all pages referencing this page are display. Other feedback is also welcome.

Regards,

Andrew Doull

Here's the top 100 wiki articles in order, from Google Analytics. I can't see a way of exporting the full numbers, but use this as an indication of what needs fleshing out first.

category-pcg-games
category-pcg-algorithms
major-pcg-games
list-of-pcg-games
articles
category-pcg-software
the-death-of-the-level-designer
pcg-games:elite
what-pcg-is
roguelikes
start
forum:start
pcg-games:borderlands
pcg-algorithm:blum-blum-shub
system:recent-changes
system:list-all-pages
pcg-games:rogue
pcg-games:spore
pcg-links
pcg-algorithm:artificial-life
pcg-games:x-com:ufo-defense
pcg-games:dwarf-fortress
pcg-games:stalker
pcg-games:angband
forum/c-42075/general-discussion
pcg-games:noctis
pcg-games:civilization-iv
pcg-games:subversion
pcg-algorithm:maze
pcg-games:the-elder-scrolls-iv:oblivion
admin:manage
pcg-algorithm:perlin-noise
pcg-algorithm:cellular-automata
tig-source-procedural-content-generation-competition
pcg-algorithm:megatexture
pcg-algorithm:voronoi-diagram
template:pcg-game
pcg-games:diablo-ii
pcg-games:nethack
pcg-software:dryad
category-events
pcg-games:minesweeper
system:join
category:roguelikes
pcg-algorithm:markov-chain
pcg-games:dark-cloud
pcg-games:diablo
pcg-games:left4dead
pcg-games:tribal-trouble
pcg-games:unangband
system:members
pcg-algorithm:heightmap
pcg-games:conway-s-game-of-life
forum:recent-posts
pcg-algorithm:genetic-algorithm
pcg-games:darwinia
pcg-software:world-machine
forum/t-58901/welcome-all
pcg-algorithm:l-system
pcg-algorithm:mersenne-twister
pcg-algorithm:fractal
pcg-algorithm:reaction-diffusion-system
pcg-game-box
pcg-games:infinity-the-quest-for-earth
pcg-games:moria
pcg-games:text-elite
pcg-software:grome-editor
pcg-software:nems-mega-3d-terrain-generator
ascii-dreams
pcg-games:civilisation-iv
pcg-games:hack
pcg-software:processing
pcg-software:speedtree
template:game
pcg-software:landcraft
pcg-wiki
pcg-software:neverie
pcg-software:terragen-2
pcg-algorithm:hash-function
pcg-algorithm:natural-language-processing
pcg-games:dark-chronicle
pcg-games:exile
pcg-games:star-control-2
forum/t-58902/specific-wiki-issues
pcg-games:hellgate:london
category:pcg-games
event:tig-source-procedural-content-generation-competition
pcg-games:frontier:elite-2
pcg-games:infinity:the-quest-for-earth
pcg-software:landscape-studio
pcg-software:megaterrain
pcg-software:terraineer
7drls
how-to-edit-pages
pcg-algorithm:random-seed
pcg-taxonomy:dynamic-world-generation
pcg-taxonomy:procedural-generation
five-years-away
pcg-games:diablo-ii:lord-of-destruction

For those of you who've joined so far, let me know how the application process was. I suspect the bar needs to be lowered to allow anonymous edits (with a captcha and IP recorded, and some kind of IP ban list).

Andrew

Feel free to introduct yourself here.

I'm a IT manager from New Zealand who spent the last 5 and a half years working in the United Kingdom. I've just emigrated to Sydney, Australia with my wife, and spend my free time at the moment developing Unangband and blogging. I also write as the Amateur for GameSetWatch - although I haven't written an article for Simon in a while and I should really do one soon.

Andrew

I briefly canvased Wikipedia about which site to use for free wiki hosting and then settled on wikidot as having the least commercial bias. I have a strong preference for MediaWiki, as its the industry standard, but the markup is similar enough for wikidot for it to be easy to add content.

I've not mastered categories or templates by any means, and want to have at least two templates: one for people and one for games.

There's extensive entries to be added, obviously, probably by first providing an external link to wikipedia.

My wiki design so far has been borrowed from RogueBasin, but I'm open to suggestions as a relative wiki neophyte.

As for the decision to use free hosting? In a household of laptops, the free hoster is king. or if you prefer, In the country of bandwidth caps, the free hoster is king.

Regards,

Andrew Doull

I've written extensively about procedural content generation, and while everyone talks about it in isolation, it never really seemed like there was a central site for discussion PCG, in the same way that there is a site for e.g. AI game development.

I've speculated previously about running Ascii Dreams forums, but a blog never felt like the appropriate venue for two way dialog as there is a strong author bias. Whereas a wiki is more content neutral and open.

I hope you find this site a useful resource, and feel strongly enough about PCG to contribute and build an active community.

Regards,

Andrew Doull