andrewdoull 1257412839|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Hi,
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
andrewdoull 1256627636|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
There are some notes at http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=5174.msg272093#msg272093 if you want to see what was talked about.
andrewdoull 1256623735|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Thanks for the responses on this. I'm still not convinced either way, and have had people argue for both sides of the equation. I suspect the best approach to take is to be inclusive, but highlight the fact some people may not consider adaptive difficulty to be classically procedural.
andrewdoull 1256623452|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Hi all,
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
ejh 1256046956|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Its a tough call on this. Many popular games do some form of adaptive difficulty in ad-hoc and very game-specific ways. Makiyivka above makes a great point: the goal of procedural content is to open the gamespace, whereas often the goal of adaptive AI is to close it (but not always, consider something like the adaptive AI characters in Facade?).
I'd surely consider AI content though, the difficulty and complexity of which certainly affects the enjoyability of the game. I'd say only include games that feature adaptive AI as a major feature, like Left4Dead.
andrewdoull 1255860946|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
On the topic of Left 4 Dead, could you point me to a description of its adaptive difficulty, if you happen to have one? Because my limited experience with the game seems to suggest that what the AI Director is more an example of Algorithmic Difficulty, rather than adaptive….if I try to play a campaign on a difficulty that is too high for me, I will just fail the campaign. Likewise if I play on a difficulty that is too easy, I will run through it unchallenged. The AI Director may place the zombies in new locations each time, or order in zombie waves in different locations, but if I opt to play a hard campaign, then the AI Director will algorithmically give me a hard campaign.
A lot of the press about Left4Dead mentioned it's adaptive difficulty - [http://www.edge-online.com/blogs/gabe-newell-writes-edge] is probably the easiest example to find. I'll add it to the article.
Makiyivka 1255852149|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
The following is mostly a mixture of typing as I think and thinking at 3am, so hopefully it comes out coherent and useful.
From the 'What PCG is' page, you have created this as your base definition of PCG:
"Procedural content generation (PCG) is the programmatic generation of game content using a random or pseudo-random process that results in an unpredictable range of possible game play spaces."
A potential problem with adaptive difficulty as a PCG technique is that rather than allowing the player to explore an 'unpredictable range of possible game play spaces,' the goal of adaptive difficulty (as I understand it) is to constrain the player into the game designer's preferred play space. That is, if you are too good at the game, the game will get harder, so that you progress as expected. The same is true of the 'too bad at the game' case.
Take Resident Evil 4, for instance. Much of the tension, the overall 'experience,' in the game comes from managing a small amount of resources, primarily ammunition. Therefore, if I, as the game designer, want to ensure that a certain scene or boss 'feels' right, I need to make sure that the player has a given amount of ammunition when entering the fight, so that they get the experience I designed for them. By adding adaptive difficulty, I introduce a nice negative-feedback loop which prevents players from straying too far from this 'optimal' play space, by either removing excess resources if the player is too good (and thus has an abundance of ammo) or by adding in resources if the player is too bad (and is running the risk of leaving the game out of frustration).
Next look at Oblivion. The adaptive difficulty in this game, as far as I understand it, scales the monsters' levels with that of the player. So if I approach a tower at level 1, I will fight a level appropriate enemy. Similarly, if I approach that same tower twenty levels later, the enemies will have leveled up appropriately (perhaps the bandits have full plate mail and magical swords instead of cheap daggers and torn clothing). Now, again, this adaptive difficulty serves to focus the game into a very comfortable and safe player space…I will always be able to vanquish my enemies, provided I put in approximately the same amount of effort as I did previously. This adaptive difficulty removes the player's ability to explore the more 'dangerous' parts of the play space in favour of keeping the game friendly and playable. Now, this may have benefits for many players (I personally disliked the leveling world), but as far as resulting in the exploration of an "unpredictable range of possible game play spaces,' Adaptive Difficulty, as I have seen it implemented, seems to be designed to do the exact opposite: to allow the designer to better control the player experience.
On the topic of Left 4 Dead, could you point me to a description of its adaptive difficulty, if you happen to have one? Because my limited experience with the game seems to suggest that what the AI Director is more an example of Algorithmic Difficulty, rather than adaptive….if I try to play a campaign on a difficulty that is too high for me, I will just fail the campaign. Likewise if I play on a difficulty that is too easy, I will run through it unchallenged. The AI Director may place the zombies in new locations each time, or order in zombie waves in different locations, but if I opt to play a hard campaign, then the AI Director will algorithmically give me a hard campaign.
Anyway, I hope I've at least provided a decent springboard off of which to continue thinking about the issue of adaptive difficulty as it relates to this wiki.
andrewdoull 1255742667|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
While updating the PCG wiki today, I've come across the difficult notion of canon in procedural content generated games. I've flirted with this concept before, by defining games which are prototypically procedural, but in general I've tried to be inclusive rather than exclusive when it comes to including games in the PCG wiki.
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.
andrewdoull 1255058039|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Is anyone able to get a write up of some of the events at the Procedural Content Generation symposium as outlined by Gillian? http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2009/10/eis-hosts-the-procedural-content-generation-symposium/
I'd love to be there…
droid 1248576555|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
'ownership' might be more accurately 'identification'.
It really happens though. In X-Com a soldier had the same name as a friend I knew, so he was kept around, even after I discovered PSI and found that he had mediocre PSI strength.
andrewdoull 1248139237|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
I think those examples should go here…
droid 1248111452|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
not sure if it should go here, but names can have an impact on how an item works.
Many of the TIG-PCG entries got attributes for items by asking the player for a word and seeding the RNG with it, or hashing it, etc.
Diablo adds prefixes and suffixes to an item, and the mods on an item are dependent on the prefixes/suffixes.
Then there is Treasure of the Rudras where the player-entered name of the spell was parsed into prefixes, base, and postfixes to select the effect of the spell.
andrewdoull 1248094463|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
I can see why you're not sure you understand - I could have sworn I created a page on name generation at the same time you did… it turns out I actually just edited instancing-of-in-game-entities without creating the page.
I'll add in the additional reference I was planning to create on a name generation page to this one…
Richard Tew 1248091803|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
I'm not sure I understand — is this comment intended for this page, or did it get added to it accidently by mistake? I didn't find anything like this in the wiki, and stumbling upon the Cartographer's Guild thread about there being a science behind naming places added one. Given that, can you give me some context to understand your comment. Cheers.
andrewdoull 1248089773|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
While this is a much much better version of this page, I think the 'ownership' insight is still worth including, even if it's a case of shameless self-promotion.
andrewdoull 1247874140|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Just realised we have those tags already (nice). Or I should say: teleological and ontogenetic.
Thanks to whomever set those up.
andrewdoull 1247871916|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
I've also added in Teleological and Ontogenetic sections to the main Code page, so feel free to add _teleological and _ontogenetic tags to pcg-algorithm pages as required.
andrewdoull 1247869818|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Go Droid. Nice article on identify systems…
droid 1247844651|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
No objections here. That is probably the best way to arrange things.
andrewdoull 1247805680|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Hi guys,
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
