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Because thats really takes out the adventure of the whole process and it will never reach the quality of good old handwork.



Perhaps that's currently the case, but just think of other improvements over time like skeletal animation instead of vertex animations or hardcoded animations. I'm pretty sure the first few steps of skeletal animated models didn't look quite as good as vertex animated ones. Lots has changed since then though and just look at physics based animation nowadays. It's a world of difference and without automated processes and extra calculations in the process those things wouldn't even have been possible doing it all 'manually'...

Most game developers tend to stay away from procedural stuff, because it's hard to get right, but it isn't evil. If it's good enough for cities, then why can't it possibly be good enough for characters?

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I said it before I say it again learn to enjoy the process of making art and do not wait for tools that make art for you, because in the end you need to have great ideas.

I want to see hard work when I look at art and not oh thats made by hitting one button.



Having good ideas is never the problem, being able to make a game out of a great idea is infinitely more difficult than using your imagination and think of something interesting.

I don't think you'll notice procedural content when it's done right, nor is it always true that it's made with just a press of a button. There are all kinds of ways of getting procedural content mixed into the overall graphical flavor of a game. At the moment randomly generated dungeons look bad, but most developers aren't really pushing the limits of what you can do, but rather tend to go for something quite basic.

If you want to do it right, it has to be quite complex. If you write a procedural script that follows the same ideas and guidelines or standards an artist would, it's pretty plausible that at some point you wouldn't see the difference between an artist-made model or level and a procedural one. That's where the real power of this technique lies.

From an artists' perspective it may look like one button generated content, but the creative processes involved are still there. Even procedural content has to actually look like something interesting, something that players would like to see in a game. Who defines those rules? I'm pretty sure a procedural content (r)evolution wouldn't make artists jobless people,

Cheers

PHeMoX, Innervision Software (c) 1995-2008

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