Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Friday 18 July 2008, 10:51 AM
Game developers should embrace randomness – but not too much
It must have been turning 40 yesterday that caused me to find myself reading the Observer newspaper Health supplement left over from this weekend. The ‘special’ this week was entitled ‘25 things you need to know for a healthy life’ and number one on the list was ‘Embrace randomness’.
We should, according to psychologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, embrace randomness so as to not worry about catching our normal train everyday and just go with flow to adopt a more free flowing lifestyle. The argument goes: embrace randomness, find new levels of creativity and ultimately achieve a higher plane of self-expression.
It’s no surprise that I saw direct links here to application development and in particular, games development.
The British Computer Society published a piece by change management vendor Perforce this week. In the article, Dave Robertson talks about ‘pipeline programming’ for games developers. He describes a controlled pipeline to house to the flow of creative processes for games creation (with its huge binaries) so that inventiveness and randomness can exist, but in a managed way.
Robertson’s BCS piece says, “In many cases, the fact that pipeline control techniques exist means that the development team enjoys greater peace of mind in terms of overall project progress. This in itself opens up a new world of creative thought so that games studios can start to dream up newer and ever more compelling games.”
This type of ‘restricted randomness’ appears to be emerging as a recurrent trend in games development. My above ramblings come on the same day that NVIDIA is pushing out its latest graphics debugging and performance analysis tools.
The company says that complex programming and rendering techniques mean that game developers need to debug and optimise their games after production. That way they can focus on playability and creativity with a lighter debugging burden – and therefore, presumably, more randomness.
So take a different train, walk home on a different route, talk to a stranger and maybe embrace randomness. But don’t loose control.
PreviousComments on this post
Hmm...randomness.
I remember reading an artical in the 90s sometime, suggesting computers were having trouble with true randomness, and had to be told not to repeat them selves, If memory serves me correctly, I think the tendency was for a machine to put itself into a cluster repetition mode. If for instance, a video game I used to play in the 80s (revenge of the mutant camels, by jeff minter), had the option to randomise the first 32 levels, but it would always get stuck in a cluster of five, same thing with my old mini disk player, it would settle into a cluster of songs.
Interesting about the human factor, it s been theorised, that when you take a variation on, lets say a route home from work, then dormant neurons in the brain get fired up, and create new pathways,
thus increasing capacity.
So now I will endevour to go home via wedmore instead of burtle at
times and randomise other areas of my life...cheers rog
I know what you mean, I used to use a random number generator in my Sinclair pre-teen programming years and think, well, it's not that random is it?
Revenge of the mutant camels, by jeff minter! Wow, we're both showing our age!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Mutant_Camels
How true
You know, old Jeff has his neon light synth program embedded into
x box 360s firmware?
Awsome it was too
Oh yes the link brought it all back, I had the more kiddie version on the 64....That kind of game would look incredible on todays hardware.
http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/lightsynths.php
Nice one guys! Though I think this one may give the developers of the NIR System some headaches - I mean that if everyone started randomizing their movements and activities then the system might just spit-the-dummy.
TFD
It might just be an age thing don't you think?
Those of us that grew up in the Sinclair, Commodore - or dare I say it Research Machines 380z era - probably grew up with an inherent appreciation for (and distrust of) computer-generated pseudo-randomness.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=812
Do kids these days play games and think they've got one over on the aliens in the same way? I don't have any (kids or aliens), so I don't know.
AdrianB
I have a teenage boy, but he s more drawn to games like the hobbit, burnout, and wii sports, I used to catch him watching stuff about crop circles, UFO s, and other mystery type shows that can found spread around the sky system.
