Random idea: procedural content generation library

Random idea: procedural content generation library

bart's picture

So, I'm just wondering...  how possible would it be to write up a library that had all sorts of procedural content generation functions?  It seems to me like some kinds of procedural content are fairly common in games -- particularly terrain, mazes, dungeons, etc.  Wouldn't it be cool to write up a library of functions that generated all of these things (given particular parameters, or perhaps a config file) and then returned a data structure containing them, so that your program could use that data however it wanted?  It could start out with a fairly simple parametric maze/dungeon/2d terrain generator and eventually expand into world generation, with sub-generators for each biome (kind of like we're seeing in the latest Minecraft).

Is this something people have considered?  Would anyone find it handy?

Bart