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Starfield Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

Norfleet

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Jun 3, 2005
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Procedural generation works a lot better in space than it does on land, for the simple reason that procgen tends to generate swaths of boring content...but space is already really boring. Most of the time it's nearly totally empty and the rest of the time you're charting yet another tidally locked rock around a random red dwarf. Procedurally generated space works because because anything it spits out has got to be more interesting than the real thing. Also, procedurally generated land tends to fail to capture the intentionality of the forces that shape it. A procedurally generated building tends to be a headscratcher of functionality. Even procedurally generated wilderness feels flat, because even wilderness is shaped by intent: Animals choose to do specific things for reasons. Space has none of these issues: Nothing in outer space is, as far as we know, shaped by any intention. Everything in space is the way it is because of physical processes, and none of it exists for a purpose. This makes it procgen fairly well.
 

tritosine2k

Erudite
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Dec 29, 2010
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(...)
You half remembered a term you heard once from a video, and thought you'd be the ackshually guy. But instead you've made an ass of yourself.

lmao dude,feel free to butt in elsewhere if you have nothing to contribute. Especially about 3D.
It's safe to say they aren't generating anything that won't fit the target system, amazingly .
 
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AN4RCHID

Arcane
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Jan 24, 2013
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A procedurally generated building tends to be a headscratcher of functionality. Even procedurally generated wilderness feels flat, because even wilderness is shaped by intent: Animals choose to do specific things for reasons.
To some degree that's just a problem with shallow procedural content. You can create systems that mimic intentionality, for example with animal AI that is attracted to water and food sources, prey on eachother, etc... I don't expect Todd to go full Dwarf Fortress, but even indie space sims and the minecraft-clone genre have done some cool stuff in this vein.

Plus "bigger than Skyrim map" doesn't actually sound that big compared to a lot of space games. It also could help that they're only making a handful of planets, since each can be unique and have some variety of biomes and features. That could alleviate some of the samieness that often plagues procgen content. And having hand crafted content mixed in obviously helps give the illusion that anything could have some intention behind it (if they don't go full retard and mark every handcrafted PoI on the map).

If it turns out to be true, might be a :d1p: for me :P
 

Magitex

Educated
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Aug 2, 2017
Messages
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To some degree that's just a problem with shallow procedural content. You can create systems that mimic intentionality, for example with animal AI that is attracted to water and food sources, prey on eachother, etc... I don't expect Todd to go full Dwarf Fortress, but even indie space sims and the minecraft-clone genre have done some cool stuff in this vein.
I'm constantly getting enraged at how procedural generation just seems to mean randomness without context in game development.. but it's no surprise that people think this, after all, nearly every game featuring procedural content just drives it into the ground using it for convenient filler content. While I'm certainly not holding out hopes of Bethesda pulling off even one remotely interesting procedural aspect here, unless they start showing off space vampires and horse ship armors, I'll probably pick the game up since I enjoyed Skyrim and to some extent the Fallout series despite their failings.
 

ADL

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Having Emil Pagliarulo as the design director on Bethesda's first original IP in almost thirty years is some real monkey paw shit.
 

Norfleet

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You can create systems that mimic intentionality, for example with animal AI that is attracted to water and food sources, prey on eachother, etc...
You can, but to fully model the effects of this intentionality and how it shapes the environment in return would be a LOT of computation, very little of which will ultimately be player visible. While the player can tell when something looks off, he won't really appreciate it when it looks better than just "okay". Also, as the lessons from the original systems of Ultima Online shows, players will just murder everything and move on, anyway. And animals are just the easy part. We CAN produce reasonably passable procedurally generated empty wilderness, aided by the fact that most players have never actually been there and therefore have relatively low and few expectations. Even those of us who do aren't going to spend a lot of time trying to track migrating deer in the game.

The place where procedural generation falls the flattest is dealing with human intentionality. Have you ever seen a procedurally generated building of any complexity that looks even halfway convincing as an actual building? The best possible outcome is that you just kinda ignore the fact that the building makes no actual sense and settle for just shooting all the generic red bandits in it. But what is this building actually for? How does any of it work? Why is it built apparently to serve no purpose except as a place to spawn random bandits? How do the bandits even LIVE here? These questions go totally unanswered as we shoot them dead and loot their corpses, but once you stroll through an entire city generated in this way, you start to realize this city makes no sense and is purely a set of randomly generated, nonsensical buildings, none of which serve any clear purpose except as places to kill bad guys.

In contrast, space is easy. For starters, players have very little expectation for how space is "supposed to be". The vast majority of anyone on Earth has never actually seen space, and have even lower expectations that game-space will be astrophysically realistic in any way, mostly because if it actually was, the game would likely be really, really fucking boring, since realistic space is really, really fucking empty. Space doesn't really have an ecology. Your random encounters will be prefabricated space structures placed at equally randomly spawned resource nodes and other points of interest, but because space is intrinsically uninteresting anyway, you won't notice that these are just randomly generated interests plopped in a vast void of nothingness, because a vast void of nothingness is what space IS.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
The place where procedural generation falls the flattest is dealing with human intentionality. Have you ever seen a procedurally generated building of any complexity that looks even halfway convincing as an actual building? The best possible outcome is that you just kinda ignore the fact that the building makes no actual sense and settle for just shooting all the generic red bandits in it. But what is this building actually for? How does any of it work? Why is it built apparently to serve no purpose except as a place to spawn random bandits? How do the bandits even LIVE here? These questions go totally unanswered as we shoot them dead and loot their corpses, but once you stroll through an entire city generated in this way, you start to realize this city makes no sense and is purely a set of randomly generated, nonsensical buildings, none of which serve any clear purpose except as places to kill bad guys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Ratio_Regum_(video_game)
author gave a good presentation pretty much exactly on this
 

tritosine2k

Erudite
Joined
Dec 29, 2010
Messages
1,465
The place where procedural generation falls the flattest is dealing with human intentionality. Have you ever seen a procedurally generated building of any complexity that looks even halfway convincing as an actual building? The best possible outcome is that you just kinda ignore the fact that the building makes no actual sense and settle for just shooting all the generic red bandits in it. But what is this building actually for? How does any of it work? Why is it built apparently to serve no purpose except as a place to spawn random bandits? How do the bandits even LIVE here? These questions go totally unanswered as we shoot them dead and loot their corpses, but once you stroll through an entire city generated in this way, you start to realize this city makes no sense and is purely a set of randomly generated, nonsensical buildings, none of which serve any clear purpose except as places to kill bad guys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Ratio_Regum_(video_game)
author gave a good presentation pretty much exactly on this


UH OH, the guy almost said culling in the slide, NPC meltdown triggered in 3...2...1...
 
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tritosine2k

Erudite
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Dec 29, 2010
Messages
1,465
NPC's of the thread Cohesion flushfire Corbin Dallas Multipass when confronted by uncomfortable truth about procgen:

vN6biZB.gif
 
Joined
Aug 27, 2021
Messages
698
NPC's of the thread Cohesion flushfire Corbin Dallas Multipass when confronted by uncomfortable truth about procgen:

vN6biZB.gif
Lol, you were wrong, you're still wrong, and yet you're congratulating yourself?

Procedural Generation is not graphical culling.
Procedurally generated space between designed hubs actually sounds interesting by modern Bethesda standards, maybe in another 20 years they'll make something half as cool as Daggerfall again.

FYI "procedurally generated" nowadays means the visual has to fit into framerate / power envelope and so it's more of a culling thing

think of less obnoxious popping at distance


...
Just to remind you of the idiotic position you're still apparently defending. You think procedural generation has anything to do with 3d graphic rendering because you're stupid.
 

DJOGamer PT

Arcane
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Apr 8, 2015
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Location
Lusitânia
Emil Pagliarulo as a design director...
Not familiar with the roles of such position, but from what I can find it means he works more with the techinical side of Starfield that it's creative teams
If so, that actually might be a good thing
 

Butter

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 1, 2018
Messages
7,523
Emil Pagliarulo as a design director...
Not familiar with the roles of such position, but from what I can find it means he works more with the techinical side of Starfield that it's creative teams
If so, that actually might be a good thing
It's the same position Sawyer holds at Obsidian. It's a way of removing someone from the creative process.
 

Zeriel

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2012
Messages
13,379
Emil Pagliarulo as a design director...
Not familiar with the roles of such position, but from what I can find it means he works more with the techinical side of Starfield that it's creative teams
If so, that actually might be a good thing
It's the same position Sawyer holds at Obsidian. It's a way of removing someone from the creative process.

I'd like to believe that, but cynically would place all bets on Starfield's story being about some dumb "family" shit with the sci-fi sidelined. Perhaps this time Emil will show brilliance and innovation by making it about 100 hours of asking NPCs "Where my daughter at?" instead of "MY SONNNNNNN".
 

Tihskael

Learned
Joined
Jun 22, 2020
Messages
315
Just imagining the Todd hyping us all next E3 with his sweet little lies makes me happy. Goddamnit Todd, I can't wait to make settlements out of tin cans in Starfield 76.
:hearnoevil:
 

tritosine2k

Erudite
Joined
Dec 29, 2010
Messages
1,465
I can't help but notice how this is eerily similar to telling about the true origins of VR here gets you downrated by certain arbiter-of-taste big-thonk special-individuals (sold on kool-aid wholesale lmao)

Todd peddled VR too, coincidence?
 
Joined
Aug 27, 2021
Messages
698
I can't help but notice how this is eerily similar to telling about the true origins of VR here gets you downrated by certain arbiter-of-taste big-thonk special-individuals (sold on kool-aid wholesale lmao)

Todd peddled VR too, coincidence?
Lol if your ideas of what VR is are anything like your ideas of what proc gen is I'm not surprised you got downvoted. You double posting sped you.
 

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