Sunday, September 12, 2010

Minecraft = Blockland + (The Shield Lands ÷ 3)


They've almost figured out what we've known for years...
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1 comment:

Pete said...

Thanks, Alex. Sorry about the delay in responding to this. I've been vegetating lately.

Hmm... I gather that if you dig a dead end tunnel, and leave it unlit, a monster could possibly spawn in it right behind you. This violates rudimentary space-time logic, and I have a real problem with that. Granted, this is in a world with trees that float when you cut through them, so it unabashedly artificial.

Spawning is something of a kludge. Dwarf Fortress has this interesting mechanic where many of the game characters are fleshed out long before you encounter them (like when they are born). The game world is a continuum that you are merely passing through. So your adventurer could kill some bizarre mad-lib-style ancient beast in some forgotten cave, then you could read in the Legends mode (a simple narrative listing of world-gen facts) about the civilizations it had terrorized aeons ago.

Granted, Dwarf Fortress has fairly large playability issues. But they are taking the procedurally generated world thing very seriously.

Game worlds and artificial life are generative art's purest forms.

9/19/2010 7:22 PM

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