Pixel City

You have got to watch the video to believe it. A night-time city-scape generated procedurally. If you don’t understand what that means, it means that the whole city is created using mathematical formulae. In typical games, environments like these would be laid out by hand. That is why, games look boring after a while because it is the same old thing ad nauseum. But if everything was generated with algorithms, merely tweaking some of the parameters and throwing some randomness into the mix will result in entirely different results. Granted, the present proof of concept is rather limited but it’s the concept that counts!

As for applications – both the XBOX360 and PS3 are fans of procedurally generated content. The PS3 certainly has enough computing power to create an entire city from scratch. So, it makes sense that gaming companies might want to take it up and create their own virtual cities on the fly. It would make the games interesting to even the developers themselves.

Kudos, Shamus!