Let’s say that, as an independent developer, you wanted to make a game in a similar vain to GTA3. You could spend months working on a single city, adding buildings and texturing the world, or you could spend a few weeks working on a way of creating these cities procedurally, the end result of which would be that you have an almost infinite number of cities that you can play through, with a vastly reduced development time.
You might argue that a city created in this way would be far less detailed than one created by hand, but that all depends on how much effort you wanted to put into your dynamic content. Your dynamic buildings could be simple boxes, with textured windows and doors, or you could have the buildings include real, dynamically generated windows based on the size and architecture of your building, which could then be textured depending on the neighbourhood that it is placed in.
http://pcgames.fdg2010.org/
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With rich procedural generation, a single person becomes capable of creating games that now require teams to create, thus making individual artistic expression easier to achieve. Automated content generation can take player history as one of its inputs, and thereby create games that adapt to individual players. Sufficiently rich content generation algorithms can create novel game elements, thereby discovering new game potentials.
With content generated by a computer, you spend less time placing buildings and more time fixing the damn coding.
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Generating the game's resources procedurally.
http://www.runescape.com/kbase/guid/dev_diary08a
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The way we implement textures in RuneScape is slightly different from the norm as, even though PC graphics cards can deal with textures, they still need to be downloaded by the RuneScape game client. As textures can have large file sizes, they would take too long to download. Mod Nick explains the process:
“The Graphics team create textures in an editor, which then converts it into a series of instructions at a fraction of the file size. Instead of the game downloading a texture, it's recreated on the player's computer from that series of instructions, as and when it's needed. This is called procedural texturing.” Texturing is not the only thing we do procedurally, which is what has allowed us to keep the experience of playing RuneScape in the new detail mode the same as it currently is (e.g. a comparable loading time after the initial download and no extra steps required).
Designing textures in this way requires more than artistic ability, though. Mod Farley says,
“An artist controls a whole load of graphs, charts and nodes to build a texture; the combined art and math involved takes a lot of ability and skill. It's more like sculpting than drawing.” Indeed, it can, on occasion, cause unexpected results, as Graphics' Mod Lluis explains,
“I once accidentally ended up with this crazy, jelly-like texture while trying to make a floor texture.” He kept it as, although it wasn't ideal for a floor, it was perfect for the spirit jelly familiar.
