Introduce yourself here.

Summary:

The introduction thread.

Introduce yourself here.

andrewdoull 1211179003|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hi,

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

Re: Introduce yourself here.

murgs 1215532031|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hello,

I'm a Bioinformatic (computational biology) student from Germany finishing my fourth semester this month.
In the holidays I'm intending to try and program a 3D level-generator for Tremulus.
(But I'll first start with a ASCII one)
On the way I'll try and fill up the Maze and random dungeon bits of this wiki.

Mark

Re: Introduce yourself here.

Flink 1216069817|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hi!
My name is Henrik and i work as a game programmer for a small independent studio here in Sweden. Graduated this spring from School Of Future Entertainment as a game programmer. I really find the PCG interesting and think it's a way to evolve the current state of games, giving it more depth and variety. Interesed in every thing from level generation to procedural generated textures and also to find new ways to use PCG. Hope i can contribute something to this site and also learn new stuff!

Henrik

Re: Introduce yourself here.

Flammifer 1230249298|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hi!

I'm Emile, a French gameplay programmer; I'm working on a personal project that features a bit of PCG (in Python); I've played a bit with various algorithms, and think PCG has a lot of potential.

I'm also a Wiki fan, so I'll see if I can contribute here (barriers to entry right now: no obvious entry point/community portal, I didn't find recent changes, I'm not really sure where to start).

Re: Introduce yourself here.

andrewdoull 1230279276|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hi,

Everything should be accessible along the top menus - Recent Changes are under the pages menu, where you can also add a page.

Welcome to the wiki.

Re: Introduce yourself here.

Decipher 1230942315|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hi,

I'm Gøksel, from Finland. I am an 18 year old scener (demoscene), a high school student and I have coded/been a part of the following projects:

Caret by Resident (Textmode demo)
Wasted by Resident (J2ME cellphone demo)
Infect Me With Your Kiss by Resident (1k procedural intro)
Crawlspace by Youth Uprising (1k procedural intro)
Snowflake by Beskrajnost (16k procedural game)

I am one of those people who swear by procedural generation, and thus am a big fan of things like Constructive Solid Geometry. I wish to contribute as much as I can to PCGwiki.

Re: Introduce yourself here.

andrewdoull 1231052499|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hey Decipher,

Welcome to the community.

Having said that, I've just reverted one of your changes ;)

When talking about procedural generation, I tried initially to make a distinction between procedural content generation and procedural generation. Coming from a gaming background, it felt important to me to distinguish between stuff that affects game play, vs. cosmetic procedural generation. Obviously, this is a a continuum - visual changes can impact game play. There's a few people contributing to the wiki who don't make this distinction, however, so feel free to argue your case here, or go ahead and re-revert my reversion.

Andrew

Re: Introduce yourself here.

droid 1232065173|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I have made a few edits, so I suppose I should introduce myself.

I am droid or Andrew. (Andrew means manly or human, same root as Android but droid is cooler.)

What I would like to be known for is making cool games, but dreams have not yet met reality - I have not finished anything significant. Right now I am working on a game in python, we will see if that goes well.

However, I believe in this site and hope it prospers. I hope to see some activity in the forums. It would be much easier to edit pages if I could first throw out some ideas on the forums and get a response. I plan to use the forums as a place to share strange new things, and hope to see the same from others.

I look forward to working with you all.

droid

Re: Introduce yourself here.

andrewdoull 1232095652|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I'm definitely looking forward to more community discussion. I wonder if we should start a 'link to the PCG wiki campaign' to try to get a few more people along…

Re: Introduce yourself here.

Flammifer 1232102601|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Yay, another Pythonist!

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 :)

Some things that would help:
- clear starting points for more informal discussions (a wiki page like village pump / community portal), the forums feel a bit "far away" from the Wiki
- "discussion" sections in articles (rather than having a seperate half-hidden discussion page)
- A more informal tone in some articles - more "I think that", "this kinda sucks", less encyclopedic tone (When editing a page, I found myself avoiding too personal language)

Whadda you think of those, Andrew (Doull, not droid)? If you have no objections I'll start editing away in a dirty way so the wiki doesn't seem as formal and cold :)

Re: Introduce yourself here.

Flammifer 1232114771|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

By the way, the use of namespaces (taxonomy, algorithms, etc.) is a bit of a barrier of entry for editing; it doesn't promote accidental linking, and requires quite a bit of double checking to make sure you're linking to the right place. As far as I can tell it makes more harm than good (especially as there aren't clear rules as to what should go in which namespace)

Re: Introduce yourself here.

andrewdoull 1232598973|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

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

With regards to the name spaces - it seemed a fast way to build up links between various pages, particularly the classification of games, software and algorithms. You are right in that it's a barrier to entry though.

I guess setting up categories is the 'correct' approach - is that too much work now?

Re: Introduce yourself here.

Ipsquiggle 1233088188|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hi!

Graham here — game designer, been in the insdustry a couple years. Teaching myself how to program, mostly through procedural generation and generative art… This site is like magic for me! Thanks huge!

I agree strongly about the namespaces thing; having started several wikis of my own, I have a strong distrust of namespaces. Consider their purpose: to prevent naming collisions. But how many games are going to be called 'runtime-random-level-generation' ? Not many I assure you. ;)

If there are collisions, wikipedia-style disambiguation pages still encourage accidental linking, and increase user exposure to content, rather than hiding it away.

I haven't ever played with Wikidot, don't know what kind of control it offers for rearranging these things (going to start a sandbox and play around with it). This seems like a community I can really get into, I'll report back here if I find anything interesting. :)

Re: Introduce yourself here.

neuzd 1234265670|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hi guys, I just discovered this place and it looks to be a very useful repository for PCG resources.

I'm a 34 yo mediocre programmer from northwestern Italy…I'm not very sure my contributions will be useful for the community and I don't see myself stopping by in the forums very often, but I saw there are few members registered and thought it was a nice boost anyway to have some new guy around.

By the way, I'll be devouring all the informative material presented here and hope to learn something even if in the end I won't be able to create a "product" (I'm much for studying for pure knowledge).

My actual "dreams" would be applying PCG to world creation, focusing on caves (maybe based on hexagonal-cell mazes) and cyber-megalopolies

Bye all!

Re: Introduce yourself here.

Grand_Marquis 1244522246|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hello everyone! I'm Eugene, Animator from LA. I've work on both games and film - both are just as fun to do if you ask me. I fell in love with the concept of procedural generation in games long before I knew it was called something. The idea of having a Mario Bros. game where every level was invented for you, right there by the computer, just sounded so cool. Never got interested in ASCII dungeon crawler-type games, but I have to admit I'm quite impressed with what some of them can do.

Recently, I've been stuck on the idea of procedurally generated storylines. It just seems to me that all these Game Companies could save an enormous amount of money on personnel if the job of creating mediocre game stories was handed over to computers. Or at the very least force them to come up with something better than the algorithms can come up with. :D

As a non-techie, I'll be around more for intellectual curiosity and knowledge absorption than as an active editor, but I may pop up from time to time, depending on the circumstances.

Cheers!