[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)