@eniko The Deep Rock Galactic people recently posted an explanation of their cave generation which goes reasonably deep and shows pretty nicely how much human input is needed there.

In short: They do hand-made rooms and modify them, and take into account the mission type, biome and a bunch of other stuff.

(edit: link directly to post)

@eniko using a random number generator twice and multiplying the result vs flying a private jet to thousands of people who've generated a number, one by one, then copying the most common two and multiplying them

@eniko I can not stress enough how AI as a term has completely disrupted the industry entirely. What used to be how we defined npc and enemy behavior in a game is now used in a completely different way. Now anything generated by a computer is considered "AI", even though, as you said, it's something very specifically crafted. We defined it's rules and behaviors. We made the equations.

@eniko reminded of kkrieger which IIRC is procedurally generated for being one of those tiny filesize FPS games? I'd always heard it as such when I first learned about it 20 years ago

@eniko that technique was used in Moria circa 1978 on the PLATO educational computer system, too. So yeah, not “AI”.

@eniko Noita uses it to with many many fun outputs https://noitagame.com/

@eniko it’s all human crafted game content; it just uses a stochastic compression algorithm

@eniko procedural generation is actual generation, while GenAI dies not generate anything, it just remixes the input and auto-completes its sludge into the output.

@eniko procedural generation can be fucking art

ai slop cannot

A major difference I’d say…

@eniko I think the most effective game to mention is Minecraft, because of the near-universal familiarity.

They were building procedural-generation algorithms in 2012 and everything about world generation is procedural. In Java!

It’s a disgrace to conflate this with GenAI.

AI is whenever computer does a thing