Procedural Generation and the Creation of a Pseudo-Infinite Universe.
Joakim Rasmuson · 2012
Procedural generation refers to the generation of media and content by means of algorithms and functions instead of manual labor. The many techniques of procedural generation are ways to a get a lot out of a little and can therefore be of great importance for software projects when it comes to saving storage, memory, man hours and more. During the course of this project I have analyzed and implemented different techniques of procedural generation within three different cat- egories of content. The topic of the first chapter is natural language generation, in which two types of generators are created. One for gen- erating natural-sounding words by use of a Markov chain, and another for building sentences. For the second chapter I have looked at the sim- plified genetics of Richard Dawkinsâ virtual creatures called Biomorphs. A basic evolutionary process is here created where genomes are gener- ated, mutated, and at times selected for reproduction. In the third and last chapter I make use of procedural generation to generate a pseudo-infinite universe. For this I use a pseudo-random number generator and a system of seeds to keep the universe intact when it enters and exits memory, even though it is never stored. Some of the concepts of earlier chapters show up again for this part, and working together they show a great little example of the possibilities that are present while working with procedural generation.