Researchers Train Computer To Create New "Mario Bros" Levels

Fffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Can I get this program. I want to take my current game engine, design a few test rooms that show off proper use of all the features, and then run this program to spit out an entire world of maps for me. It'd be a mess and repetitive I'm sure, but hey, it's a starting point.

Promising.

It would be nice if you could actually see it in action, rather than 4 lousy screenshots of a single room.

Next, someone can hook up the output to this:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/

Wooooooah, Georgia Tech. I'd love to end up there someday, they're geniuses and yet can play sports like crazy.

On the main subject, I like the idea of a level generator. How many video games do you think might have actually used one of them?

I wish the article actually showed the generated levels somewhere.

Any roguelike, and franchises inspired by roguelikes such as Mystery Dungeon and Diablo.

Also Sentinel.

EDIT: and Minecraft if you insist but I'm not sure that falls under the proper definition of a level. But yeah, practically every game claiming procedural generation refers to generating maps on the fly.

And by that token, Animal Crossing maps are randomly pieced together from specific kinds of acre (16x16 cell unit) that can go in specific parts of town.

Hey, Diablo was only not-a-roguelike in...one of the factors of the Berlin Interpretation?

And Daggerfall's (non-story) dungeons and towns were pieced together out of larger blocks randomly, like Spelunky or Rogue Legacy. (It's believed that they were procedurally-pieced together prior to release, though the number of blocks is relatively small...even if they are quite large. The Daggerfall Chronicles suggests that there may be as few as 60 non-story dungeon models.)

As for level generators, F-Zero X had the X cup, which generated courses with random turns, twists, swerves, etc. and regions of track features and whatnot. Its sanity checks were perhaps set a bit low (or the AI was not up to it), as sometimes you would get an abrupt swerve+drop combination that sent every single racer off-course to their death.

Excitebike 64 claimed to have in one of its side-game modes, a randomly-generated desert, but it always yielded the same one.

I'm told Ehrgeiz had one.

Here's what TVtropes has on the subject: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... atedLevels

That was great, especially if you managed to survive it yourself (or, in two-player mode, if neither of you did). If I recall correctly, the first such structure I encountered was a dash plate at the base of a steep hill, which leveled off rather abruptly at the top and was followed immediately by a sharp corner.

Also, the bank parameter on curves seemed to be consistent within a track, and was perfectly capable of going negative...

On the other hand, pipe and cylinder X tracks tended to be very boring, much more so than the preprogrammed ones. I wonder why?

Searched about F-Zero X's generated tracks, found this gem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_q8fmr01Ms

The part in question appears at 0:40. By 0:47 all the AI racers are gone...

Some puzzle games I have worked on also can create levels at random, but using a seed so that you can access the same level again later. If done properly, it can ensure the puzzle has a solution, and may even know the solution and be able to play it back at the user's request.

But, yes, as mentioned above most roguelike games also generate levels at random. I don't know if any save a seed to keep track of when you go back to the same room again though, or if they otherwise just save or don't save the entire level (the ones I have seen, seem to either save or don't save the entire level).

I suppose this is possible with some other kind of games too, but I do not know which ones. For example, I have not seen a computer golf game that does (nor do I know how well it would work).

Another idea can be game that only stores the random number seed and the algorithm and then makes up many levels that you can progress through (in a non-puzzle-game this time) but the game has the same levels every time.

See, at some point in time I was trying to program the Master System to generate Sudoku puzzles. Of course, the outcome of that is quite predictable. I just had to resort to the use of a (syntactically modified) generator, and use pre-made puzzles. Just wasn't the same, but I don't have plans on working on it anymore.

Well, in my case it isn't that kind of puzzles that you would ordinarily work on paper. How well it work depend what kind of puzzles. There are some cases where it can work good though.