As someone who can barely program enemy pathfinding, I am so in awe at what people who studied a "real subject" like CS can accomplish. I feel so fucking inadequate.
@@falxgod6848 dude literally mentions 2 books cowritten by Tarn Adams 2 minutes in.. I think he's probably got a good relationship with Toady One at this point
It's interesting how little functional difference there is between the choices and that you can use strings for a lot of the things that don't hold any meaning after generation, so they rely a lot of people just filling in the blanks and making the story coherent.
No kidding. I don't think I have come back to play a game every few months as consistently as Qud. There's something about the simplicity of it that makes differences of the constant patches noticeable each time I return. Not to mention the world building and sound design makes the game so damn engaging. Most of all though it's fun to come back and play is the world map might be familiar but the procedural aspects of the game make every play through unique, even if you do the same quests and revisit the same locations.
I was really looking forward to playing this game eventually after a review by SsethTzeentach. The developers and their community clearly didn't respect him or his gesture, but I didn't think that warranted being completely dismissive of the game. I've yet to confirm if it's true, but I heard on the grapevine that members of the developer's discord sent 'illegal images' to a fax machine where the video author's relative works and got them fired. This is presumably why he hasn't uploaded and also the reason why I won't be supporting the game until I can confirm otherwise.
@@soulsmith4787 ...sooo you arent gonna buy a game because some other people who have nothing to do with development of said game MAY have gotten somebody fired? 🙄
@@jadedandbitter The developers have cultivated a community whom they are listening to in order to continue development of the game. A decent amount of said community believes the content creator who was gracious enough to advertise their game is both a nuisance and an evil fascist. There's no levity in their echo chamber because the developer doesn't discourage mischaracterizing the man that advertised their game. They've become increasingly removed from reality with the idea that he's an ever growing threat of 'bigotry'. The 'illegal images' I alluded to in the first comment was CP. The rumor itself is heinous enough that I wouldn't consider giving monetary support to the developer that's amassed that community. I put off purchasing the game at a discount because the developer and their community disrespected the content creator in the snippets he gathered for the review of their game. If this rumor holds water, then I would encourage everyone who's interested in this game not to exchange their money for it.
@@soulsmith4787 game developers only make the game, not the community. I bet the guy who made undertale wishes his community was a little different than they are, but it is what it is. Unless the dev directly said to harass the guy, they bear no responsibility for what crazies do, and it's not his job to try to police the community, which he ultimately can't do anyways.
Thanks for the talk, I'm working on a roguelike and Qud was a huge inspiration, really interesting to walk through the procgen step by step like this. : )
While I really admire their work, I cannot help but wonder whether the mountain approach doesn't make the generation loose quite some context in the process. A history that is generated independently from it's cities seems a bit disjointed. I feel like the cities should feed content back to the land-history layer
What context/information would need to be fed back in? How is that any different than simply generating the city based off of the land-history? I don't see how it would look any different.
43:00 "You can see a few results of this process" They map layout in Qud has got to be it's weakest point. They just look messy with no consistency or logical thought to their layout or placement. Like they're not build for actual beings to inhabit or use. Actually they look like they were procedurally generated by a computer algorithm which is probably not what you want.
That's my main critique of this system as well, though it's serviceable for this game. My main area of research is AI generated architecture and urban design and some of my research might help remedy this.
@@JsbWalker have you looked into the layouts of the pre-pottery Neolithic cities that existed right before the rise of Uruk?.. The RU-vidr Histocrat does a good overall analysis, effectively the cultures would generally layer over old work and just kinda fit in spaces at whatever angle seemed best per situation
Deezer map? Dikzer map? Deexer? Dixxer? Dykser? Deekster? Dexter? Deekstr? "I encourage you to look up that technique if you don't know about it" gee, thanks for the tip. ...Dijkstra thanks google, you're awesome
In Dutch one would pronounce it something like Deikstra. Important to remember is that the I and J together form a sound that does not treat the J as a consonant
"The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise." Homie said that in the 80s or something. Goddamn. I hear this quote once in a CS course and 8 years later I'm CONSTANTLY reminded of it when I am reviewing and writing code. Dude was a was truly programmer-Gandalf.
each letter in the "horrifically ugly big font" take up one tile each. its impossible for them to run the game with a smaller font, because its being run in an emulated terminal. it would be like you asking someone to watch a 1080p video on a 480p monitor.
@@tygutowski I know right. What can be better, from a game design pov, than building your whole game on top of a game engine that doesn't allow fonts, the most basic element of any UI, to be customizable. It's just genius. /s So many Rogue likes .. open world rogue likes ... huge worlds .. no loading between world sectors ... ascii and graphic tiles .. and yet ... they have humanly usable and fully customizable UIs. I have even seen 7DRL titles that run on a much better engine that this sh. Let's just call it what it is. These devs are probably good at game design .. but not that good at coding and the technical parts of game design.
@@mustno3 many of the popular roguelikes are able to be ran entirely in terminal. hell, half of the average roguelike fans refuse to play the game unless they're terminal-compatible.
@@tygutowski I haven't seen ANY ... absolutely any ... roguelike, be it from the classics or the modern ones, have a UI as ugly and off putting as that of CoQ. And I'm not the only one, there are threads about this on their steam page. It's just that they got away with it thanks to the good gameplay. For me however, if it looks ugly and the UI is sh, I'm not playing it, even if they paid me.
@@tygutowski I haven't seen ANY ... absolutely any ... roguelike, be it from the classics or the modern ones, have a UI as ugly and off putting as that of CoQ. And I'm not the only one, there are threads about this on their steam page. It's just that they got away with it thanks to the good gameplay. For me however, if it looks ugly and the UI is sh, I'm not playing it, even if they paid me.
The core of what they're doing is basically a mathematical abstraction. The end result is a matrix of numbers that follows a contextual pattern while still being procedurally generated. Think of "this village worships a legendary dragonfly" as just a number in a matrix. It's just an application of math that's so abstract it's hard to recognize. You know, like algebra. ;)
@@chonchjohnch Much of this would fall into the realm of discrete mathematics rather than continuous mathematics like algebra, no? Probability, topology, decision trees/making, graph theory, game theory etc.
@@cormano64 Simm isso que penso, sempre quis criar legenda pra varios videos, mas n sei se ajudaria alguem, nesses tipo de video vejo algo util pra ser ensinado pros br que é game dev, Já que muitos no brasil só cria jogo na base dos assets da propria engine
The minimalist symbolic graphic is what creates the flexibility for complex systems like in Qud and Dwarf Fortress. Oftentimes it's not possible to represent a tile based world in realistic 3D for example because the size of things does not matter in tile-based but does matter in 3D. A seed is as big as a dragon in many of these games and these kind of issues become huge if you start to make it more realistic/accurate/detailed.
I don't get the praise this talk is getting... It's a garbled mess. Clearly they did a great job making the game, but please never ask them to explain how they did it ever again.
He credits Tarn at about 2 minutes in by recommending 2 books cowritten by Tarn, one of which was premiering at GDQ Don't get me wrong, Dwarf Fortress is the pinnacle of the genre, but there is no room for toxic fanboyism
@@neolynxer its OK, but you see it even tripped me up, I tend to make very snarky comments myself, and can easily be accused of toxicity In fact my reaction can be seen as toxic, I accused you of fanboyism, which is just a reactive term
This is good as an entry point into programming procedurally generated worlds. Massively extending these techniques would touch on the insane complexity of DF.
The devs of CoQ are the only ones who would actively ban and insult Sseth, the only RU-vidr that wanted to promote their game but the fursona of one of the devs was too precious to be subject to the same laws of the game.
it's possible to kill that npc using a few methods, it's just that the npc (and the rest of the npcs in that area) have an equipment item that can save their life in order to make sure that random bullshit doesn't end up making the main story sequence impossible
@@BIGPILGRIM420 Agreed but Seth's point is meritable. They are capable devs and could easily code in a method that other no playing entities couldn't kill/ destroy important entities. I think the issue was they took all this time to built a extensive world/ story telling framework but then get upset at anyone that points out that limiting that logic in exceptions will only draw massive attention to the quality of those areas.
this is all very neat and interesting, but im of the opinion that games should revolve around the player... the game world is just the background playfield, what really matters are the options available and interesting interactions.
There's more than one way to skin a cat. Games that "revolve" around the player (me, in my case, ofc) have unerringly felt... artificial. Perhaps this is because they've yet to do a convincing job, but, even if I saved the world from a fleet of evil sentient asteroids firing plasma rockets, the real world still spins on. In story-games that revolve around me, it's very clear that the world the story is in, exists only for the sake of the story. It's not about me, the player at all, but about the story. And that's the problem, for me, with such games. Caves of Qud, unlike those games, does not feel like the world exists only in a story. I can do incredible things, but unless someone was involved, they don't know a hootin' thing about me, or my deeds. The whole of existence, isn't about me, in-game, but the game, itself, _is_ about me. My interactions with it, my explorations, and actions. The world isn't just a background playfield, it is the very thing that allows those interactions, and actions. You can play baseball, just about anywhere. The field, truly, is just a background playfield. But you couldn't play Caves of Qud, anywhere but the Caves of Qud.
@@robotpotato6892 Let's assume that i believe you without any evidence, who then measures a game's quality based on the time spent with it's development rather then the effort and skill that went into it? Lots of delayed games have proven to be of subpar quality.
@@deadliestvice5356 Quality is subjective and there are a lot of ways to code a game. It's common to see developers talking against procedural generation for that reason, it can increase code complexity and make you spend more time and energy on the game than necessary. If I code a framework with procedural generation in mind, it probably could be easier than make a entire game, but that would be an exception.
