I am the procgen map admirer

April 2, 2018 9:00 PM

I love maps & their promise of fractal discovery. I love procedural generation and the aesthetics of the unauthored. Where do these two loves intersect? Generated maps.

posted by Sokka shot first (14 comments total)

Was rather disappointed he didn't mention Unexplored. The procgen maps have procgen puzzle elements and just don't "feel" procgen'd, IMO.
posted by Samizdata at 9:22 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Recognized RedBlobGames' maps by sight. Truly an excellent set of tutorials and tools.

I expect the next step up for Bay 12 Games (the Dwarf Fortress guys) is generating whole fantasy epics together with their maps, histories and everything else.
posted by Harald74 at 1:00 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

I wish I could wander around those Shards of Immortality maps. Hopefully the game will come out one day.
posted by Kattullus at 1:45 AM on April 3, 2018

Here Dragons Abound is a pretty detailed blog about creating procedurally generated fantasy maps.
posted by smcameron at 4:05 AM on April 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Harald74, revisit DF if you are looking for history and myth generation.
posted by bdc34 at 6:09 AM on April 3, 2018

Here Dragons Abound is mine; thanks for mentioning it, smcameron. Azgaar is doing some fun stuff as well. In general, /u/proceduralgeneration seems to be the most active community if you're into this stuff.
posted by srt19170 at 6:47 AM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

To me procgen maps are fun to look at, but as a world in a fantasy context to explore they are without soul. Games with procgen maps never really satisfy beyond something like Minecraft, where you know this is a world without legends or culture.

Take procgen as a first pass, and then let humans create atop it... that can lead to good stuff.

But "You have found the [$weapon] of [$namelist] and must take it to [$location]" bites big time.
posted by Meatbomb at 6:59 AM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

Meatbomb, have you played Dwarf Fortress? It tries very hard to generate the entire history of the world, with heroes and epic tales.

Thanks for posting the link, Sokka shot first, this is so far up my alley that I had to generate further narrow passageways to accommodate it.
posted by AndrewStephens at 7:44 AM on April 3, 2018

> Meatbomb:
"To me procgen maps are fun to look at, but as a world in a fantasy context to explore they are without soul. Games with procgen maps never really satisfy beyond something like Minecraft, where you know this is a world without legends or culture.

Take procgen as a first pass, and then let humans create atop it... that can lead to good stuff.

But "You have found the [$weapon] of [$namelist] and must take it to [$location]" bites big time."

Also Caves of Qud does some really interesting things with procgen lore.
posted by Samizdata at 7:52 AM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

"I expect the next step up for Bay 12 Games (the Dwarf Fortress guys) is generating whole fantasy epics together with their maps, histories and everything else."

That's a major feature of the game already, it generates fantasy epics procedural with more depth than most hand-written RPGs or fantasy worlds are. Like, it tracks individuals through history and their interactions with the world. You can go in and explore the world and uncover that sort of stuff, plus whatever legend arises from any failed or retired fortresses you might have on that map. Dwarf Fortress is a treasure, was happy to see the maps featured there, I have been wanting to make a layered painting in that style for years, it's very alluring.
posted by GoblinHoney at 9:25 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

There's a video that talks about the procedural generation of lore in Caves of Qud that Samizdata mentioned.
posted by smcameron at 9:39 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

What would go well to populate those maps are some Dungeons and Dragons monsters generated by neural network. Well, their names anyway.
posted by exogenous at 1:53 PM on April 3, 2018

Caves of Qud has some pretty good procedural level generation too. Thanks in no small part to ExUtumno's very cool Wave Function Collapse tech which applies Markovian voodoo to tile maps, generating endless variations in the style of a source map.


posted by rodlymight at 3:47 PM on April 3, 2018

Ultima Ratio Regum is another roguelike(-like?) which attempts to procedurally generate a ton of stuff. Continents, cities, civilisations and their mores, languages, religions, history...

It's up there with DF in its level of detail.
posted by entity447b at 4:45 AM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]