GDC Festival of Gaming
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2019–2022
1:07:26 · 89K views · Apr 15, 2019
GDC 2019 session where Insomniac's David Santiago describes the procedural systems used to build Manhattan for Marvel's Spider-Man. It covers the open-world pipeline and how each system was designed to support iteration and dependencies.
Recommended as a prime example of large-scale procedural generation used in a shipped AAA game.
4 comments from Hacker News
There's a great talk about Procedurally Generating Manhattan for Spiderman that's worth watching and covers things like this: this video If you think this is interesting, all of the Spiderman GDC talks by the various staff of Insomniac Games are S-Tier.
I saw an interesting talk about proc gen which was basically saying a lot of studios are moving from hand crafting to procedural tools. For example if you want to fill a park with trees you don't place them by hand, you just specify the density and type of trees and let the computer place them. The advantage is that if you want to reshape the park later you can just click and drag. Then when you are happy you go though and hand craft more content on top. They were saying there is a critical mass where procedural tools feed into procedural tools and a lot of the pipeline is automated, then it becomes extremely cheap to make more content. So back to your point: I think this is where we will see AI more in game dev, it will be as smart tools to empower creators to make stuff more easily. I don't think the AI will make the game, I think it will assist the humans with the creation of it. Here is a talk about Spiderman and how much proc gen they used there this video
Looks amazing! Note that the author also has a fantasy city generator: [LINK] And mansion generator: [LINK] If you're into that kind of stuff, there's a world map generator(by different author): [LINK] and this amazing tutorial on generating maps: [LINK] ---- Also, kinda relevant - awesome talks about modern procedural generation techniques(with AI, Houdini, etc): How AI will change 3D industry [LINK] Procedural world generation for Far Cry [LINK] Procedurally generating Manhattan for Spider Man this video Mindblowing talks by Anastasia Opara (using cool math, deep learning, and a lot of creativity to create crazy cool stuff) [LINK] She is the author of the most impressive procedural generation project I've ever seen: [LINK] ---- Also, I myself have made a little tutorial about procedurally generating a 3D landscape in Houdini: [LINK]
Somewhat related(okay, not really, but still fun) - awesome talks about modern procedural generation techniques(with AI, Houdini, etc): How AI will change 3D industry [LINK] Procedural world generation for Far Cry [LINK] Procedurally generating Manhattan for Spider Man this video Mindblowing talks by Anastasia Opara (using cool math, deep learning, and a lot of creativity to create crazy cool stuff) [LINK] Procedurally generating 3D landscape in Houdini (a little tutorial I have made, can't resist sharing) [LINK]