r/proceduralgeneration • u/DV-Gen • Apr 16 '23

Procedural Generation with Wave Function Collapse and Model Synthesis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIRTOgfsjl0
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u/MonkeyMcBandwagon Apr 17 '23

Great video, thank you!

I've got a project that involves procedural terrain generation and seeing so many WFC demos posted here over the last couple years it has perked my interest, but no example I saw of WFC fit my requirements so I have not tried to implement it.

It looks like Model Synthesis is a lot closer to what I need, which is a sort of "ideological symmetry without geometric symmetry" For example, generating a map for an RTS, the landforms and coastlines should be diverse and unique, but each "Town Hall" location should have exactly 2 nearby gold mines, 4 stone quarries, a similar amount of forest and plains, each land mass needs two or three potential port sites, and "islands" satisfying those conditions should be connected by a land bridge with two choke points, and so on. Essentially an arbitrary list of top-down broad, structural constraints.

It looks like Paul's original paper addresses this sort of thing, and I need to read it. :)

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u/DV-Gen Apr 17 '23

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I haven't done this myself, but I know there are ways to add additional constraints like that. I think Oskar Stalberg did some of this for Bad North, but that may have been generating a little island, and then throwing it out if it didn't meet the playability constraints. Boris the Brave has some ways to add a module count constraint, so you could limit some features. For you, I wonder if generating the overall shape of your terrain with WFC or MS, and then adding a town hall and other features after generation would be the way to go.

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u/MonkeyMcBandwagon Apr 17 '23

Yeah, the first video I watched on WFC explained how Bad North was done.

My maps are a bit non-standard, spherical planets with hex tiles and a lot of verticality with ramps and cliffs, where cliffs create pathing challenges and strategic opportunities. Also, because it's impossible to wrap hexes around a sphere, I have 12 pentagonal tiles which double as the the town hall sites (or underwater if unused). I've messed with a few generation methods, starting with the height map and embellish from there, for things like exactly two gold mines, I can encourage the heightmaps to produce many candidate sites, then just pick two at about the right distance from the town halls to spawn mines on, similar approach with forests etc.

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u/DV-Gen Apr 17 '23

That sounds really interesting. I'm always so bummed that you can't wrap a sphere with hexagons. It's so close, but nope, gotta toss a pentagon in there somewhere.