[HN Gopher] Rooms and mazes: A procedural dungeon generator (2014)
___________________________________________________________________
Rooms and mazes: A procedural dungeon generator (2014)
Author : probabletrain
Score : 113 points
Date : 2022-04-20 13:48 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (journal.stuffwithstuff.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (journal.stuffwithstuff.com)
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Interesting to have the explanations of how it is built and the
| code, but the end results pale in comparison to this amazing tool
| which I frequently use in my D&D campaigns:
|
| https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon
|
| Other interesting generators here as well:
| https://watabou.itch.io/
|
| And this prior discussion is full of great links:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30338074
| Minor49er wrote:
| Someone in the comments for One Page Dungeon pointed out that
| someone has been using it to generate books and sell them on
| Amazon without crediting or giving anything back to the code's
| author. While it doesn't violate the license, it's sad to see.
| gernb wrote:
| Is it sad? I recently put up a game with MIT license. The
| game IMO is pretty fun. I didn't need to write this in the
| README but just to be clear I wrote "You're free to ship this
| in a commercial app". I intentionally made it MITed. I know
| the reprocussions. If someone has the initiative to make a
| commerical product from it good for them. I'm too lazy which
| is exactly why I just posted it to github and MITed it.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I think it's sad because credit should be given where
| credit is due
| tunesmith wrote:
| I've recently gotten back into first edition D&D (AD&D) and had
| overlooked for years that there's a whole dungeon generation
| "algorithm" in the back of the book. I've started to use it to
| play "solitaire", which I've learned is a fairly popular thing to
| do for old DMs that enjoy practicing their DM skills (you roll up
| your own group and pretend they're making their own choices).
| What's fun about it is that the dungeons it generates are crazy.
| Diagonal passageways, varying passage widths, stairways that
| might go down multiple levels and then come back up, rooms that
| are only accessible by traveling to other levels temporarily,
| etc.
|
| The other thing that is interesting is that the order of
| generation is based off the party's choice of what door/passage
| to explore next, so it's very much intended to be generated
| during actual play.
|
| I've thought more than once it would be fun to work up a tool to
| generate that dungeon on demand, to just press a button each time
| a choice is made and then watch it animate.
| cableshaft wrote:
| You might be interested in "Four Against the Darkness". It's a
| solo pen and paper dungeon crawler with dungeon generation. You
| just need to get a couple of paperbacks to play.
|
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/197097/four-against-dark...
| lakkal wrote:
| I used to DM games sometimes using those random charts from the
| AD&D DM Guide. It was a lot of fun. The players (who knew what
| I was doing) always tried to figure out the purpose of the
| labyrinth based on what what developed.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I was a little skeptical of the result, but the dungeons in the
| game Hauberk are pretty nice actually.
| munificent wrote:
| The current version of Hauberk uses a bunch of different
| dungeon generators which it is able to merge together. This was
| sort of a holy grail for me for many many years. I've been
| meaning to write down something about it but haven't gotten
| around to it.
| murrain wrote:
| Tile-Based Map Generation using Wave Function Collapse in 'Caves
| of Qud' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdCgi9E90jw
| tokai wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of CoQ. But sometimes the chaotic layout of the
| procedural maps really clash with the neatness of the hand made
| story locations and towns. It's minor gripe though, meshing
| curated and procedural content seems like a hard task.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I spend like, a hideous amount of time thinking about this
| exact thing. I have been using computers to aid me in DMing
| since I was doing Basic/Expert on my TI-99 4/A.
|
| Procedural content has a number of drawbacks. Just to pick
| one example, take the various cellular automata algorithms to
| generate cave systems (or really any algo). What would be
| _great_ for this is if the 2D very simulationist matrix of on
| /off cells could be remapped to a series of nodes ("large
| enough caves") and edges ("passageways"). You could then try
| to do lock-and-key puzzles based on this.
|
| Aside from the "sameness" issue, most of these lack two big
| features that people can extrapolate from playing a dungeon:
| history and purpose. The first, purpose, is essentially about
| the creature, humanoid, whatever that did the excavation --
| what were they doing? Was it a xorn just kind of gobbling
| around? Water? Perhaps a humble owlbear looking to make a
| nest. Or were some dwarves tidily making a mine? Perhaps a
| religion was having secret meetings there. The smarter the
| creature, the more you have to think about purpose and
| intention. As an example, let's take our secret cult
| (literally "occult"): unless they worshiped a slime deity,
| they probably wouldn't place the privy next to the altar. Nor
| would dwarves place the privy next to the kitchen. Logical
| places would exist for things.
|
| History comes from having multiple excavations over time. A
| river overflows its banks for a century and hollows out a
| spot under a cliff. Then the owlbear. Ah, but a dragon eats
| the owlbear. Years later a dwarf hikes by and sees a gleam of
| promising minerals at the back of that abandoned owlbear cave
| and brings friends to excavate. Later, the mine is played out
| and a lich moves in, adding various traps ...
|
| Most procedural dungeons pay little to no attention to these
| steps, which are, after all, quite hard.
|
| After that, you have to avoid your "monster hotel" scenario
| to make some kind of quasi-believable ecology to your system.
| In reality, most full-time cave dwellers are small and feeble
| and delicate, so you may want to "shallow up" your dungeons
| or populate the more remote areas with creatures whose
| nutritional needs are scant (fungi, slimes, undead,
| constructs). Perhaps there are holes through which a vibrant
| river drains and at least there are fish for Gollum to catch.
| Or deep magicks emanate a kind of mana to be devoured by a
| fungus not unlike the kind that has adapted to live on spent
| fuel rods here on Earth.
|
| Then, you have to consider player satisfaction. You may want
| to "Jaquay" that dungeon area. Some players like exploration,
| some like puzzles, and some must kill every last critter no
| matter how small. Others want to accomplish the goal
| (whatever that is) and leave.
|
| Putting all of this together gets harder and harder with
| procedural content.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Enjoyable to see someone reasoning creatively about various ways
| to solve this. In the end there are so _many_ ways, each giving
| their own feel. I would do generative landscapes by starting with
| Perlin noise clouds, low pass filtering and then "flooding" the
| height-map with a water table. That's basically how old
| generative landscapes like Bryce used to work I think. For caves,
| pick a min and max plane, extrude to get walls. As mentioned in
| the article checking connectivity was always the PITA - and with
| 3D procedural mazes you have to also check they're _passable_ for
| the chosen engine 's collision code.
|
| That's how I learned about my favourite constant... Gerver's
| optimal sofa constant...the maximum size sofa that can move
| around a unit corner [1].
|
| [1] https://de.zxc.wiki/wiki/Sofaproblem
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The sofa problem is a so far unsolved geometrical problem
| that was described in 1966 by the Austrian-Canadian
| mathematician Leo Moser . It is a two-dimensional idealization
| of the practical problem of moving furniture around obstacles.
|
| Doesn't seem to have much to do with the actual problem of
| moving furniture, where the third dimension is heavily
| exploited.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20533546 - July 2019 (15
| comments)
|
| _Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8782295 - Dec 2014 (48
| comments)
| dataminded wrote:
| It'd be great if someone connected this to a virtual table top
| like Foundry. You could get maps, lighting, encounters, etc. at
| the press of a button. It would really enable the online-first,
| one-shot friendly reality of TTRPGs.
| bovermyer wrote:
| If you really want to dive into tabletop game generators, there's
| this resource:
|
| https://rpggen.dev/
| throwanem wrote:
| Hugged to death?
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220420162023/https://journal.s...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-04-20 23:00 UTC)