The recent thread about a flight-sim type driving sim got
my brain working. Well, that together with a love of the
game play of the original Need for Speed, mixed with a
boring 1000km drive from Berlin to Switzerland. How difficult
would it be to generate a random driving environment on the fly?
As I was cruising along the Autobahn (unfortunately in a turbo-
diesel truck) I began picturing a future version of Need for
Speed. At the core of the game is a set circuit, for the
head-to-head races and time trials. But, if in the middle
of a police pursuit one decides to take the next exit ramp,
then it's allowed. The program starts generating
a random environment on the fly, with some simple rules to follow
for scenery placement etc. Turn off the autobahn, and the
program starts generating two-lane asphalt, with random
trees, buildings etc. clumped together in an appropriate
fashion. If one decides to turn off the asphalt onto
an inviting looking dirt road, then the program starts
generating dirt road with more sparsely placed buildings
of an appropriate type. Now, this could leave you stranded
down the end of a long, random path, unless the computer
also kept a little trail of "bread crumbs" in its memory.
Limit the random terrain to a set variety of turns, road
surfaces, intersections etc., then record the sequence that
the track sections are laid down. If you do a U-turn, then
the computer could just lay them down in the opposite
order. I myself would care much if the random scenery
changed for the reverse trip, as I would be too busy
driving like mad. Now, if you could also get the program
to recognize when it is getting close to an existing intersection
on the fixed circuit, and lay the appropriate track sections
to link up, well then we'd really have something fun,
wouldn't we?
Thoughts?
Stephen