[8_hours_ago]

...procedural content is not for "lazy developers". It’s not there to free you from creating content. It’s there to let content react to the player. You still need a lot of it.

This is a very good lesson for game developers. Too many games rely on procedurally generated content, which can be boring to a player if it seems random instead of being a result of some interaction (see No Man's Sky).

[optimuspaul]

I really enjoy NMS but many aspects are boring. The generated landscapes are predicable, why is the climate on every planet uniform across the whole planet?

[gnulinux]

NMS is an example of bad procedural generation. Cellular automata, by nature, is a slow[1] algorithm, so it's hard to run automatas for every single planet you create. It's certainly possible, but as we've seen from NMS it's not straightforward to implement.

[1] Actually you can heavily optimize cellular automata for cache, but a K dimensional automata will be in O(N^(K+1)) so assuming a 2D world, it's O(N^3). So, it's not scalable. If you look at procedural world generations in big scale, like dwarffortress, you'll see that they're one time operations that take a very long time. NMS is tricky, since you need to keep doing this multiple times.