Games That Never Age: The Unrecognized Potential of Procedural Synthesis.

Procedural Synthesis (PS) is not a new technology. In fact, it isn’t really a distinct technology at all. It’s a way of taking advantage of algorithms to generate graphics instead of humans manually doing so. PS has been evolving in game deisgn for a long time. Even many old tile based games would have some random generated pattern tiles.

The best example for what you can do with this is the title .kkrieger. It is almost entirely PS generated, even down to the sounds and music. And yet, it makes a game that reminds me heavily of the Tenebrae upgrade to the Quake engine. Which brings us to the point altogether, making old games that upgrade themselves as computing and graphics power increases. A concept not all that foreign, as SOE tried this with their Star Wars Galaxies and Everquest 2 titles (although they did not use PS, per se).

I am excited to see games such as Spore coming out. These titles not only use PS for upgrade paths, but to make the game as open ended as possible. And we all know how fun and popular truly open ended games get (GTA, anyone?).

if your CPU were faster, upgrading your graphics would not necessarily be a process of creating new high-resolution textures, but of writing new, more complicated algorithms. Then, you use the new algorithms to generate your content, and you’ll find yourself with a graphical improvement that didn’t come packaged with a gigabyte of data.