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But, the 1000 bowls of oatmeal problem comes up: Each bowl is technically arranged uniquely, but to a user it just looks like 1000 bowls of oatmeal. Just because it’s randomly generated, doesn’t mean players like it. You need some more uniqueness, by for example clamping values between sections.

Boats (this will be a repeating pattern today)

And here is the summary and a QR code link for the slides! There are lots of great gifs and videos in this talk with many different ways to do generation that are directly applied to game development. Take a look!

Good lunch (but bad allergens signage. It’s non-existent)

Thanks to the Blender Conference last year, I am wearing appropriate socks for this conference. UVd to perfection.

Next talk is from some Houdini folks, showing a fully procedural rig and many other things that I only half understand because Houdini is a magic box that makes cool things appear if you know the right incantations. I understand the shown workflows, but have no idea which 200 nodes generate this.

Next, a talk from a digital design studio, showing some different tooling like Touchdesigner.

As well as making a digital twin for worlds’ largest telescope, and the UX for controlling it, also made in touchdesigner. And an interactive exhibit in combination with this telescope.

They also did this for Mysterland 24, by making an interactive system that’s reacts to music, in touchdesigner, that fits onto a giant physical cube at the event. And then putting VJ content on that cube as well, with a timecoded endshow that times with the physical fireworks.

A different example, from Carl Cox, where they grab data from Ableton and Carl’s decks, move it directly to Touchdesigner and making effects appear depending on what Carl does on stage. So every light on stage reacts to the music, live.

To talk to all the lights and lasers on stage they built a system called Echo.

Next! @falconeerdev.bsky.social talking about Ship Shaper, his procedural boat generation editors It’s not a presentation with slides. It’s a live demo!

“I make games for neurological diverse people.”, “People want me to make trains too.” A great demo to catch the recording of later!

“I cannot read 600 pages of Xbox documentation, or integrate any APIs, but give me a raycast and a loop and I can do anything I want.” (Now that’s the tech artist mantra)

(It reminds me of an archimedes quote, but remastered: ‘Give me a ray long enough, and a place to cast it, and I can generate the world’)

Next: Natsura, plants, polygons, and people. It’s a total conversion mod for Houdini (you can do that??) which focuses it entirely on plants & foliage.

A lot of tree generation happening here, again with many LOPs, SOPs, and many other abbreviations of nodes and node trees. (Trees making trees?) This also works in Solaris, and USD.

They just talked for a while about a way to edit the UI, and the location of the UI, to make it easy for anyone to customize their workflow. And doing so by comparing to cockpits. (Great points! If you’ve followed me for a while, you know I very much have the same perspective)

(I missed the last talk because of the terrible war news. So instead, please support Iranian game developer @bahrami.bsky.social by buying his games, which are all about procedural gen systems, such as Engare: store.steampowered.com/app/415170/E... and Tandis: store.steampowered.com/app/1297210/...)

I am only catching the end of the first talk this morning. Great conclusion though: Mandelbrot fractals are beautiful, harmonious, elegant in a very small amount of code, but also useless in application. So just because your code is neat, and it looks cool, doesn’t mean it does anything you need.

There are many other mesh deformations too, that use gravity, light sources, and shadow avoidance, to more realistically grow the foliage. (This feels like a thousand bowls of foliage to me though, but maybe it is subconsciously noticed?)

Next talk: The Engine Won’t Save You (That’s true)

Recommended hardware specs are varying extremely widely. 8GB RAM minimum, yet 32GB recommended, it’s tough to work with. Optimization is very important. Especially if you have to ship to big recommended specs and low min specs, such as phones or notebooks.