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"Future Randomness"

I was musing the other day about programming (as you do), and was thinking along the lines of: How much time, man-hours, and money go into making a decent computer game?

Then I was thinking about ways of cutting down on these expenses, and the answer hit me like a bolt from the blue, so I picked myself up from the floor and put the fire out, and started typing here instead.

How about getting a COMPUTER to write games? The idea has been around for a while. But think of the possibilities. Driving along on Sega Rally, MSR or Toca Tourning Cars, and having the track randomly generated as you go, with scenery constantly changing; this would add a certain amount of lastability to the game.

On RPG's you could have randomly generated beasties to bash, on Tomb Raider you could have randomly generated levels to explore, on Zelda MM you could have whole new worlds to explore and randomly generated NPC's to interract with, all generated by your console in real time, so that the game was completely different each time you played it.

Programs are available for the PC where you just drag and drop game elements onto an easel from a pallette, and then click 'GO' to create the game, the elements being things like 'Platformer or Adventure or Shooter or Racer', 'No. of Players', 'Difficulty Rating' and so on.

So why not just develop these programs a bit further, and get the computer to randomly generate the games for you? With a PC or DC, and in the future the PS2 or the XBox, you could then download new modules for your program as they are developed, so that more options become available to you.

The idea just needs developing....by a human. :-(

I have been researching the surname Chatters for about twelve years. I found your post when surfing the net. Although I am only distantly related to the West Mercean Chatters, I have built up quite a lot of information on that branch of the family so I can probably help with John's ancestry. Can you let me have a bit more information about him. Date of birth? Is he married?
Regards

John who was in the Royal Marines is now living in Cyprus and is seeking information or pictures relating to his family He was a member of the local Sea Cadets and lived with Percy and Lillian Chatters in St Peter's Road - leaving the Island in 1957 when he joined the marines

Not really... the basic construction of maps for games is still very basic... remeber you can run a Doom engine on a Speccy 48K... I would expect more from a system today than one fro 1980

Yep but you'll be demanding alot from games, if you have that. Maybe with more powerful consoles they can start to do that.

The original random games were maze games,,, since there pretty easy to randomise...

Although RPG are pretty much the only other games that suit this style of play... radomising dungeon layout fot ASCII adventures has been going on since the early PC, non graphic card, days....

What's the name of that PS powerboat racing game with the random track generator?

So it can be done, but it wasn't really all that great. Perhaps it'll be a little different for games other that racing games. Come to think of it, there are quite a few games that have random levels, like UFO:Enemy Unknown.
It would be fairly easy to have random levels for the C&C series or SC (or other similar RS games for that matter) seeing as they already have ma generators. Worms had a random level generator, too.

Taking it up a level to create random levels for an RPG type game would be a little more awkward though....it tends to take planning and design to make these well. You also have to define how 'random' you'd want it, else it'd end up looking like a complete mess of objects. Has to be 'themed' in some way...

Insane Bartender... people already have adopted the idea... like I said below, theve been using the idea since the early days of the Speccy... and have been using it in games as recently as Diablo...

Utter folly.

In your efforts to cut down the price of gaming, you have likely doubled such costs, and added little of use to most games. Hence, if all software houses were to follow your advice one of two things would happen:

1) In order to cover the cost of making these random games, the price of games would skyrocket.

2) In attempts to keep selling games, the price remains stable, but the software houses make losses and eventually go out of business.

No-one will adopt the idea of in-game randomness because it is too costly and and offers little in return.

Although randomness is good for somegames - ie random encounters in FFIIV etc these are still controlled by perimiters so that you don't come up against the hardest monster your first time out.
As for random tracks in games, you need to learn tracks to be good at them, so you know when and how hard to break.
Perhaps a randon track generator, which would save the track so you could play it and learn it. However these tracks probably wouldn't be as good as the tracks designed by the pragrammmers - Grand Valley (GT) anyone!

I think you got your A$ and B$ in the wrong order...