
No Man’s Sky Is A Huge Procedurally Generated Sci-Fi Exploration Sim - radley
http://indiestatik.com/2013/12/07/mans-sky/
======
Derbasti
There is an incredible amount of negativity in this thread.

They said all the landscapes are procedurally generated. They did not say that
there won't be any missions or tech trees or some other kind of hand-crafted
progression system.

Many games like Minecraft or Terraria do very well with procedurally generated
terrain and some kind of progression system.

I think that this might have huge potential. This could be an awesome game
indeed, and so far I have not seen anything that hints to it being boring or
repetitive--just unfinished.

~~~
Associat0r
Check out "Elite: Dangerous" it has a scientifically accurate 1:1 scale, fully
Seamless Milky Way galaxy using a mix of procedural generation with artist
direction

[http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ](http://elite-
dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ)

[http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Procedural_Generation](http://elite-
dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Procedural_Generation)

~~~
amiramir
I've been a fan of David Braben's since playing Elite and Virus as a kid. I'd
never seen him speak and The Procedural Generation video gave me a whole new
appreciation of his intellect. I hope he gets a knighthood for his work on
Raspberry-Pi. Much greatness in him and I wonder what he would have achieved
if he had started off in California rather than Essex and Cambridge.

~~~
objclxt
> _Much greatness in him and I wonder what he would have achieved if he had
> started off in California rather than Essex and Cambridge._

Wow, that's more than a little bit self-important / arrogant. You do realize
that Cambridge is home to several huge tech innovators, right (ARM?) And that
the UK produces more than its fair share of huge video games (GTA?).

Applying your logic, who knows what that Tim Berners-Lee guy might have
achieved if he'd started off in the valley rather than CERN...

------
MrBra
1) [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshparnell/limit-
theory...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshparnell/limit-theory-an-
infinite-procedural-space-game) (pledged $187,865 of $50,000 goal)

2) [https://www.inovaestudios.com/](https://www.inovaestudios.com/)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6a69dMLb_k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6a69dMLb_k)
(has been in development for years, about to start a campaign on kickstarter)

3) [http://pioneerspacesim.net/](http://pioneerspacesim.net/) (free, open
source, alreaady playable, alpha stage and actively developed)

~~~
octaveguin
I like the list. I'm thinking/hoping that sandbox games with generated content
will becomes a larger part of the core game market.

Mostly, we see success in the indie 2D world:

Don't starve -
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsWm_gWyk4s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsWm_gWyk4s)

Binding of Isaac -
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5PLC6nmOO4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5PLC6nmOO4)

Terraria -
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHPX0kR9h7I](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHPX0kR9h7I)

And just released Starbound -
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvrmB4tw33Q](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvrmB4tw33Q)

Certainly 3D games are quite exciting in this space, too, but the 2D games
seem to have a lot more traction with the big exception of minecraft.

I suspect it's simply easier to make an engaging sandbox when you don't have
to worry about complexities in art assets that a 3D game requires.

~~~
stefan_kendall
Uh, Don't Starve isn't generated. The world is fixed.

Pro-tip: You need rocks, and you need them fast. Get all you can in the south,
and then move northeast for the large rock pile. From there, you need to
figure out how to survive the stronger enemies.

~~~
pohl
The video above for Don't Starve shows the game saying that it is generating
the world.

------
kayoone
Today we are still writing code like 20 years ago and one could think there
has been little evolution regarding that. But this imo shows where the
evolution has gone. Today a team of 4 is able to build a procedurally
generated game of high visual quality with a gigantic scope like that because
our tools, libraries, techniques and also hardware have evolved to a point
where this is possible. I think thats pretty amazing!

~~~
AlexanderDhoore
Revolution vs Evolution. People want to think that progress comes from a
handful of revolutions that change the world. It's a lot more exciting than
what we actually have: evolutions, over long periods of time.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Except that actual biological evolution works via _punctuated_ equilibrium, so
it _is_ possible to be living in interesting times.

------
alkonaut
Edit: I agree this thread contains a lot of negativity and I agree it's too
early to make any calls on this particular game, which does look fantastic.

Since so little can be said of this game the discussion is more "why have so
many tried to do this, and failed"?

So I'll try:

Why is "procedural" used as a sales pitch? The only thing cool about
procedural is that you can make something extremely vast. But then "vast"
should be the sales pitch!

I'd much rather buy a game that promised "ten thousand planets carefully
modeled by artists", than a game that contains millions of random ones. I
fact, I'd probably prefer a sim with a designed world much smaller than that.

The thing with procedural environments is that they leave everything to game
mechanics. A well designed world can support a basic or boring mechanic (such
as a linear shooter). Procedural worlds need a game mechanic so deep and
brilliant that only very few games have managed it (minecraft and a few of its
inspirations, for example).

There isn't much that can be said about mechanics from the trailer, so we'll
see.

I think (sadly) it will be the prettiest in a long line of "let's make an
elite style universe sim where the game mechanic will probably/hopefully
emerge from the sheer awesomeness that is an enormous space sim".

------
networked
I like the concept of a procedural space exploration game and No Man’s Sky
looks like a promising entry in the genre. There has been a number of attempts
so far that approached this concept from different angles (from using space as
a setting for fast roguelike gameplay [1] to pure exploration [2]), many of
them resulting in good games.

That said, if No Man’s Sky really is totally procedural I wonder how the
developers will handle the overall structure of the game and avoid the
"quicksand box" [3] trap. This is especially pertinent if the game doesn't
feature a Minecraft-style combination of building and survival to make the
players not mind the "quicksand".

I know the game in which I enjoyed exploring space the most is The Ur-Quan
Masters (formerly known as "Star Control II") [4]. The star systems and
planets there are not procedurally generated and I don't think randomizing
them would make much of the difference for the reason I'll explain in a
moment. My best guess as to why I liked UQM/SC2 so much beyond its audiovisual
style is that a) it has no formal mission structure that limits the player's
actions; and b) there's a lot you can do; but c) your exploration still ties
into an engaging larger story, which and in turn contributes unique one-time
encounters to the exploration. A consequence of c) is that mixing up the
layout of the galaxies without changing the overall plot, which at its core is
fairly linear and features a time limit (think the original Fallout), wouldn't
really change what the game is like. My guess is that the company that figures
out how to generate distinct game plots that provide c) along with a) and b)
will take over the procedural games business, if not the game industry as a
whole. The question is whether c) can be done well enough in some way that
doesn't involve an artificial general intelligence or per-player MTurk
writers.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Adventures_in_Infinite...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Adventures_in_Infinite_Space)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis)

[3]
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuicksandBox](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuicksandBox)

[4] It's now FOSS and available from
[http://sc2.sourceforge.net/](http://sc2.sourceforge.net/). Highly recommended
if you have an interest in SF space games.

------
RyanZAG
We've heard this same claim so many times before. Procedurally generating each
atom? Come on, this is just a marketing gimmick. These never turn out to be
decent games, usually it's just running around a world with randomly appearing
enemies who all act the same and you're bored within 10 minutes. I'd be more
optimistic if this exact thing hadn't been claimed before every year for the
last 20 with no results.

~~~
electrograv
First, I want to say how amazingly cool I think "No Man's Sky" looks -- as an
enjoyer of scifi content and indie games, I will certainly be among the first
in line to buy/play it when it comes out.

That said, I agree with this criticism of "procedural content" completely. A
while ago I created a little toy WebGL tech demo featuring "a vast virtual 3D
universe containing billions of unique stars and planets" (it's open-source on
github if anyone's interested) -- so I encountered this issue first-hand (and
saw it come up many times elsewhere in the past, of course).

IMO, the fundamental problem lies in a subtle distinction between "infinite
variation" vs. "infinite novelty". Most procedural generation amounts to not
much more than random noise passed through a variety of hand-tuned filters
and/or custom code. In most cases it's how you tune that filtering and custom
logic that leads to any amount of interesting results, not the underlying
random noise generator (from which the too-good-to-be-true claim of "infinite
variety" is derived).

I don't think it's completely impossible to derive interesting variation from
a combination of mathematics and randomness, but I think the degree to which
we find something interesting or "novel" is at least somewhat related to the
amount of computational complexity put into its derivation (at least, that's
my intuition on the matter).

~~~
hyp0
I think grammars are a way to formalize this intuition of novelty (NB:
grammars can be use to generate as well as to parse). Noise is like a stream
of random symbols from an alphabet - anything is possible; most all of it
boring. A grammar carves out a subset of the possible streams, only those with
certain relationships between the symbols.

Regular expressions are a simple kind of grammar (aka "Regular Grammars") -
you can see generation as choices made for explicit choice operators ("|"),
and choices of whether to loop ("∗") or continue. Although limited, they can
be surprisingly expressive. Context Free Grammars allow you to generate things
that have the basic structure of xml, json and source code. And you can have
Turing Equivalent grammars that, in describing a subset, can compute anything.

Of course, grammars aren't restricted to the Chomsky Hierarchy, but can
include any way of describing the subset of streams (or generating an instance
of them) - for example, the recent HN travesty/markov generators.

You can search for the right grammar (machine learning), by taking a corpus of
instances of what you want to generate, and test out your grammar, by seeing
how well it compresses them. This shows whether it is capturing regularities
within them and between them - the rules or laws that are the essence of a
grammar. In doing this, you should also take into account the size of the
grammar itself: consider the extremes of one grammar that factors out deep
regularities; versus one that is simply a choice between each instance,
verbatim (this compresses _real_ well: it just needs to encode which instance.
i.e. log2(1/N) bits, e.g. 8 bits to encode which of 256 different instances,
assuming uniform probability). Accounting for the complexity of the grammar
avoids this.

This comes down to the length of the description of the instances + the length
of the description of the grammar.

( "Model" is probably a better term than "grammar", since it doesn't imply a
sequence. )

Re: your last point, there's no theoretical reason that an extremely accurate
model _must_ be computationally expensive to execute (e.g. flocking behaviour
was simpler than expected; and Occam's Razor gives us hope) - but it might
well be computationally expensive to discover in the first place. e.g. require
many great leaps of intuition by humans. (Even if it's obvious in hindsight.)

The trailer looks a little repetitive to me - esp the yellow underwater
plants; and the trees seem to be random blocks of foliage - like minecraft
trees or github icons, just rendered nicer. I don't want to criticize, as they
probably have some cool innovations hidden away in there.

What I'd like is _gameplay-significant_ procedural generation. e.g. trees you
can climb, so their shape affects where you can reach and how. Terrain -
mountains, streams - naturally has this effect. Then, developers _have_ to
make it work right! So far, only the minecraft/dwarf fortress genres do this.
Because generation is fundamental to their concept, their gameplay, and why
people like the games, I suspect that that genre is where we'll eventually get
the hi-res breakthroughs - whereas for every other genre, including "No Man's
Sky", if their gameplay isn't 100% dependent on generation, whenever there's a
conflict between the two, generation will lose (crunch time! what _must_ be
finished to ship?). Servant of two masters etc.

FWIW I still think FarCry2 (not 3) creates the most immersive world so far.
Hopefully something even better will be done for nextgen consoles/PCs, as
opposed to just higher resolution and higher gamification.

~~~
richardjdare
One of the difficulties in creating novelty is in creating the "relationships
between symbols" as you say.

Take a sword in an RPG for example. It can be a weapon, it can be sold, it can
be used as a crutch for a wounded person. It can be used to signal to others
by reflecting the sunlight off it. Each of these aspects add new systems of
gameplay.

but these additional relationships don't seem like things you can predict
without presupposing the existence of the whole sentient world. And we've said
nothing about where the sword came from in the first place!

I agree with you on gameplay-significant procedural generation. After playing
and loving Noctis and Frontier: Elite II, I wanted to create an arty space
exploration game where you took control of a mysterious alien being who roamed
the universe in search of "knowledge". You'd do this by exploring and scanning
features of the universe with different tools that took skill to use.

For example, to scan a mountain range, you'd have to land several probes
around it, maybe in difficult conditions. "Knowledge" would be things like
"tallest mountain range","largest ocean","oxygen atmosphere","binary system
with habitable planets". I thought this was a good way of having distinct
goals, but remaining open ended and unpredictable. "biggest","tallest" etc
being things which are easy to specify but could be anywhere in the universe.

I thought you could fly a "living ship" a bit like Moia in Farscape. This ship
would develop according to how much knowledge you accumulated, along with
resources you extract from the universe.

My goal was to make the procedural world itself as something of concern for
the player, to encourage the player to actually get out there into the depths.
Maybe I'll start on it someday, I don't know. Everyone seems to be making
space games at the moment!

------
jaryd
The embedded gameplay clip has been removed from YouTube so here's an
alternative post:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2FXIf9N-yA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2FXIf9N-yA)

~~~
vignesh_vs_in
The above video has also been removed.

Use this:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU)

~~~
dirkk0
This looks awesome - Minecraft meets Dune meets Homeland?

------
rralian
When I was a kid, my parents got me a couple sci-fi encyclopedias, which were
big books of beautiful sci fi illustrations with some made-up history
explaining each painting encyclopedia-style. I loved them. This video reminds
me of those illustrations very much, which I mean to be high praise.

I just looked through my books and called my mom to see if she had them, but
no dice. They were large hardcover books with a blue cover. Anyone else
remember them? I'd love to track them down for my own kids.

~~~
redler
Maybe this one? I got it when I was a kid, and it's still right there on my
shelf:

[http://www.amazon.com/Spacecraft-2000-2100-A-D-Authority-
Han...](http://www.amazon.com/Spacecraft-2000-2100-A-D-Authority-
Handbook/dp/0890092117)

~~~
rralian
Thanks so much redler! That's totally it! I found a number of photos of the
book on flickr
([http://www.flickr.com/photos/erice/sets/72157625355578461/](http://www.flickr.com/photos/erice/sets/72157625355578461/))
and they really brought me back to my childhood. I had the first two as listed
here:
[http://www.khantazi.org/Rec/TTABooks/TTABooks.html](http://www.khantazi.org/Rec/TTABooks/TTABooks.html)

I'll have to see if I can pick up the whole series. Thanks again!

------
josteink
This looks massively impressive. Wonder if they can deliver as much as the
trailer promises?

This is the sort teaser which makes me want to try the game just because of
the "subtle" Dune-reference. Is there an Arakis anywhere there for us to
discover?

------
javajosh
I dislike this kind of news coverage very much. It is designed to tease rather
than inform. Although, I have to admit I was intrigued less by the _claim_
that the game procedurally generates every atom, and more by the _question_ it
begs of how you'd actually generate every atom.

Usually, of course, atoms don't matter. The ideal gas law, for example, is
essentially a "rule of thumb" which gives you useful ways to predict the
behavior of large ensembles of atoms; e.g. to average over the movements of
statistically significant (avagadro's number or so) individual particles -
indeed, one of the most amazing things in physics is the connection between
Newtonian physics and thermodynamics via statistical mechanics.

In any event, my naive answer to the question of what should we simulate would
be "don't simulate anything you don't have to" which means that unless you
have scanning electron microscopes _in the game_ you don't simulate atoms at
all. You mostly use approximations. In games, collisions are important so
surfaces (and their properties) tend to be important. And so those simple
geometries defines the data structure you use to define the world. In essence
mass is _defined_ in a computer program to be a volume that behaves a certain
way in the presence of acceleration. But there is no need to describe
materials as a lattice of much smaller particles. It's almost never relevant
to the simulation.

So, yeah, I don't think it's reasonable to expect a game to simulate a world
such that ad hoc chemical reactions can take place, etc. But it's not
unreasonable to expect in-game scanning electron microscopes to be able to
realistically resolve the details of any material.

~~~
Houshalter
I think they mean atom as in, the smallest unit that everything is built out
of, not the scientific atom. I.e. not a single polygon is placed by a human
artist and the sets aren't pre-designed with just some random variation.

But looking at the demo that doesn't seem to be true either.

~~~
jere
Eh, I think the more charitable reading is they meant a physical atom, but in
the sense "not a single atom has been designed by hand."

It's like if you made some algorithmic music and claimed every nanosecond was
generated automatically, even though we tend to think in terms of notes that
are orders of magnitude larger.

If they really expect anyone in the gaming community to believe they're
rendering each blade of grass with a few Octillion points or polygons, they're
absolutely insane.

------
usernew1817
This game came out of nowhere, the VGX show was basically being hyped of AAA
titles, but no one was expecting an indie title to get as much hype as it's
getting right now. I think the next gen consoles are making it much easier for
devs to develop on, though frustratingly its still far more difficult to
publish on console then mobile, mainly because you need to first be approved
into the developer program before they even consider letting you publish
games. Regardless, it seems to be moving in the right direction, although
somewhat slow.

------
xioxox
It reminds me a lot of Starglider 2. That was a great game from the 80s, which
let you fly between several different planets to complete a set of missions.
The graphics and gameplay were pretty amazing at the time on the Atari ST and
the Amiga. One minute you'd be navigating around a set of tunnels deep inside
a planet, and the next you'd be chasing whales in the outer envelope of a gas
giant. It was some stunning game design and coding. I've not seen anything
quite like it since.

------
Lavinski
Reminds me of infinity (from
[https://inovaestudios.com/](https://inovaestudios.com/)), which I've been
watching for the past few years.

------
daredevildave
There's an video interview with one of the developers here:

[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-12-08-hello-games-
deb...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-12-08-hello-games-debuts-first-
person-action-adventure-no-mans-sky)

------
raingrove
Cool Video! By the way, in the video, by "Hydrogen Dioxide", I am pretty sure
they actually meant actually meant H2O - "Dihydrogen Monoxide" or simply
"Water".

------
yconst
Looks quite cool and such. But what do you actually do in this game? I mean,
in what ways do you interact with your environment?

------
bencoder
Reminds me of an old "game" I used to play called Noctis:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis)

~~~
MrBra
Too bad Noctis programmer went through an hard time... Last time I checked his
website he had blogged about some kind of depression that arised from always
trying to be perfectionist. And you can see this if you consider he was about
to write everything from scratch for his next version of noctis. He started
coding something like a new assembler language (if I remember correclty) which
would have later be used to code the game in.

~~~
bencoder
Yeah I used to hang around the forums waiting for Noctis V.

He was developing it in Linoleum, which is his own portable assembly language
that he wrote. It's still available and an interesting experiment.

------
TulliusCicero
Neat tech, but the problem with procedurally generated games with large worlds
is that the core game mechanics are often bland or shallow, and the content
can come across as very samey.

~~~
namuol
How can you even begin to judge the gameplay from the teaser video?

~~~
alan_cx
You cant. But, the poster didn't do that at all, didn't even mention the
video. The post is short, so its not hard to see that.

My skeptical question would be: how can you set a mission in a genuinely
dynamically generated world? For example, you might not even know that a bit
of land will exist where you want the mission to begin. But, maybe I'm missing
something obvious.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Procedurally generated just means you can create lots of variety; not that you
can't generate ahead of time, save it to disk, and even put potentially useful
features in the database and then just pick from those when putting together a
mission.

------
Johnwbh
Reminds me a bit of Spore, but hopefully not so disappointing.

------
axilmar
“If you see the stars, those are real stars. They have their own planets
around them, and you can go there”

There goes my dream.

------
jheriko
good stuff. i've been waiting for a small team to do something like this for a
while... and have been planning something similar myself for when i can break
free from the shackles of full-time work.

knowing some of these guys personally - i'm quite pleased its them who are
doing it. :)

------
Yuioup
This game has an incredible potential for broken promises. I predict bad
review scores, howls of request for refunds, and the lead developer putting
out blogs in the vein of "sorry, we should do better. Expect free updates that
will fix everything soon!"

------
swayvil
The music

artist : 65 days of static

album : we were exploding anyway

song : debutante

------
yarou
Hopefully this game will be good. I've been looking for a decent spacey game
like Freelancer, but so far nothing seems remotely close to it. The Discovery
mod in particular added a dimension that most modern games lack.

------
jroes
Anyone know what engine they are using? The visuals look excellent.

EDIT: Think I found it:
[http://www.crytek.com/cryengine](http://www.crytek.com/cryengine)

~~~
Flow
Oh great, no OS X version then. :-/

~~~
booop
In my experience if you have an Apple computer and you want to play demanding
games it's better to have windows installed in a separate partition.

The performance difference for some cross platform games is huge (around 30 -
40% slower on OSX).

~~~
kayoone
true, also i find the way mouse acceleration works in OSX quite annoying for
games.

~~~
keeran
try this [http://smoothmouse.com/](http://smoothmouse.com/)

~~~
kayoone
yeah i actually have that installed, but when i enable it i get issues with
clicks not registering sometimes, which is even more annoying when playing a
game.. Dont know if its related to my mouse or something else though.

~~~
meric
Give SteelSeries ExactMouse tool a go.

------
japaget
Does anybody know what platform this game will run on? Xbox One, PS4, Wii, PC,
Mac, iOS, Android? None of the promos gave us a clue as far as I could tell.

------
otikik
I see landscapes, animals and ships, but no people.

~~~
alan_cx
Well, people do tend to ruin and scar everything. I'd leave people out
completely. Play the game as an animal!!!

~~~
gbog
Have you seen Burgundy vineyards or Longsheng rice terraces? Would you say
these are scars over the landscapes? In the old world at least, humans have
created with their hands most of the countryside landscapes and it is not
always ugly.

------
notastartup
I don't get why there's so many negative comments here.

This game looks absolutely amazing.

If anything, efforts where previous attempts have been unsuccessful, should be
lauded, and there's a lot of academic talk for a 2 minute video.

Let's wait and see but I have a good feeling about this one.

------
MrBra
Ouch.. that "it has to be funny" stylized graphics everywhere..

~~~
melloclello
I thought the aesthetic was actually kinda neat!

~~~
MrBra
You know in the angry birds era (and generally in mobile games era where all
games need to look appealing to everyone, even the most casual gamer ever) a
lot of indie devs started to think they had to create cute appealing girlie-
awe-insipiring stylized graphics even when that would not be the best fit for
a given game genre and would completely compromise player immersion.

Another reason for this is that this kind of asset is way easier to implement
than full blow realistic 3D models and environment.

In the end it's all about that, sacrifying game immersion so to be appealing
for casual gamers who are not interested in game immersion and could even be
put off by that because it contributes to let them think game is harder to
play because it's not 'just a game'.

~~~
mercurial
But not all games ask for "full blow realistic 3D models and environments".
You have plenty of indie titles (Stealth Bastard, Super Meat Boy, Hotline
Miami) for which "stylized graphics" in 2D are essential. Another example is
Apotheon [1]: even if I'm not that fond of the gameplay, I wouldn't trade
their stunning 2D graphics for any kind of 3D.

1: [http://www.apotheongame.com/](http://www.apotheongame.com/)

~~~
MrBra
Where exactly did I say all games need full blown 3D graphics?

I am just saying that for this kind of games, where the hype/fun/immersion is
all about how much fine-grained procedurally generated spatial/life details
you can get, to make it all look cartonish style it's a bit simplistic and not
up to the capability/deepness/complexity of the ecosystem engine they are
proud to market.

To me it's just a bit of riding the trend because indie devs know very well
that nowadays cute looking cartoonish indie games are well praised and boosted
by mobile app stores whose ratings are driven by casual gamers looking before
everything else for cute bleeps and rainbowish color splashes!

Anyway this is just my little opinion and I am sure it is incomplete and does
not encompass all the aspects there are to it. Just see it as a starter for a
more in-depth conversation, if you wish.

Provided you will take a 360 degrees approach to it :)

~~~
mercurial
I think it's important to distinguish between "crappy graphics" and "stylized
graphics". You can get away with a lot as long as you have great art
direction. And this won't sacrifice immersion. On the other hand, you can make
terrible-looking games with the best engines.

------
wavesounds
Procedural generation is a widely used term in the production of media; it
refers to content generated algorithmically rather than manually. Often, this
means creating content on the fly rather than prior to distribution. This is
often related to computer graphics applications and video game level design.

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anonymouz
You might as well post a link to the Wikipedia article [1], when you copy its
blurb.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation)

