Reminder: Introversion Live Q&A To Debut Today

Author: by Staff

Gamasutra is reminding readers of its first-ever live webcast Q&A for Wednesday, April 2nd at 11am PST, with Introversion Software (Darwinia) co-founder Chris Delay being quizzed on procedural content in the company's upcoming titles such as Subversion. Interested parties can now register for the event, which is sponsored by major technology companies HP and Intel, and also includes a second presentation from Paul Campbell, founder of HP Gaming Business, discussing the company's 'create, power, play' motto. In addition, those Gamasutra users attending the event on April 2nd who fill out a post-event survey will be entered into a drawing for an HP L3065 30” Flat Panel Monitor. In the starting in-depth technical Q&A, Introversion Software co-founder and lead architect Chris Delay (Darwinia, Defcon) will discuss the use of procedural algorithms and techniques to create assets in the company's thus-far mysterious Subversion. Introversion has previously discussed procedural content as part of an exclusive GameCareerGuide.com article on the subject, explaining of its use of it at the time: "With each new generation of console, the costs of creating game content, in terms of both time and money, are increasing at a tremendous rate, and it is just unfeasible for a small developer to be able to keep up with such escalation. This is where Procedural Content Generation comes in handy. Procedural content is content that has been created by a computer algorithm rather than custom made by an artist. This content can be created completely dynamically, or can be generated based on some external input, from a user, or a text file, for example. Let’s say that, as an independent developer, you wanted to make a game in a similar vain to GTA3. You could spend months working on a single city, adding buildings and texturing the world, or you could spend a few weeks working on a way of creating these cities procedurally, the end result of which would be that you have an almost infinite number of cities that you can play through, with a vastly reduced development time. You might argue that a city created in this way would be far less detailed than one created by hand, but that all depends on how much effort you wanted to put into your dynamic content. Your dynamic buildings could be simple boxes, with textured windows and doors, or you could have the buildings include real, dynamically generated windows based on the size and architecture of your building, which could then be textured depending on the neighbourhood that it is placed in." The included pictures show that, for Introversion, "after a week's work, we now have a way of generating fairly convincing city layouts with dynamic buildings, whose size is dependent on the population density of that area of the city." These and other discussions will be on show at the event, during which users will be able to use chat capabilities to answer polls and ask questions in real-time. The event will also be archived for later viewing, and interested viewers can register now for the webcast.