Comment by agar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by agar | Hacker News Reader

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Perhaps a dumb question from one fairly unschooled in ML: Can't ML be used to augment traditional procgen methods to create unique ornamentation and art styles on top of traditionally procedurally generated level layouts?

IMO, despite how interesting procgen levels themselves can be, they ultimately suffer from "sameness" - similar looking building facades, trees, stonework, etc. become boring fast. Couldn't one create separate training sets such as plants in varying biomes, unique architectural styles, and divergent cultural artwork, and then apply these sets to create new textures and primitives for decorating levels? This would keep different levels/environments/dungeons/whatever feeling fresh while saving on the laborious work of drawing "stone texture #43" or having the same painting in every tavern in the land.

Obviously I'm thinking of graphical rogue-lites like One Must Fall or In Death, or RPGs with procedurally-generated elements, not classic text-based games like Rogue or Hack.

I think this is an insightful question and potentially a good idea. It's common practice to generate with GAN:s in several stages, elaborating each time on an initiation which is often cruder or vaguer.

I see no reason why principles like this https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3306305.3332370

or this https://github.com/EvgenyKashin/stylegan2-distillation

couldn't be used to create much richer environments, at least in terms of media.

Thank you for the links. These projects are fascinating, and precisely what I was thinking about. I wish I had more time, skill, and knowledge to delve into ML and GANs.

The problem here is that the differences have no meaning. Which is to say variation that is skin deep isn’t very interesting.

I would counter-argue on three fronts:

1. A lack of variation, even skin deep, is even less interesting than only skin-deep variation. That is often the norm in large "open world" environments.

2. Much of what we find most interesting about the world is, in fact, skin deep. Take humans for example; all fit the same mold, but the range of human variation is endlessly fascinating to artists and audiences alike. Similarly, the layout of the Prati region of Rome and the Marina/Cow Hollow district of San Francisco is not wildly different. However, both are distinct, worthy of visiting, and unlikely to be confused with each other.

3. Current methods of procedural generation, without AI/ML, already result in fairly interesting maps. Could "true" AI do better? Perhaps, but I'm not sure that the delta is so great that the results would be noticeably better than a well constructed procedural algorithm (play "Tea for God" if you have a VR HMD and a lot of space). I could be wrong though - the gold standard remains hand-placed, human-built worlds filled with little surprises. If an AI approach resulted in a level design competing with the best of bespoke worlds, particularly at a lower development cost, then I'm all for it.

1. That rather depends on the thing varying and whether it's important or not. Further variation can act to obscure rather than improve things that are interesting. For example having a thousand unique leaves under a tree is probably not interesting in a game where they are incidental. Likewise having a thousand slight variations of orc isn't really purposeful. And having a thousand very different looking creatures that all act the same is boring and confusing. Which is why I talk about meaning. For an example of proc-gen variation with purpose look at things projects like Ultima Ratio Regum.

2. I'm not sure these examples are skin deep to be honest in that I don't think it's just the visual variation that makes these comparisons interesting. There's some underlying meaning being glossed over.

For me the majority of AI generative/artistic projects just create facsimiles. They lack the spark of human input and often only really create mild interest when they get it through hand curation.

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