• @mindbleach
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    18 months ago

    Companies and customers alike need verisimilitude to be as easy as slapping down some textured boxes. Procedural generation should’ve taken off circa 2006, but it got to trees and just… stopped. Even as the cost of hiring artists to arrange trash in corners kept creeping up. It’s really not that difficult to have a program generate endless unique concrete walls, at any resolution you can imagine. You can either ship the big dumb bitmaps or ship the tiny program that makes them. But for some reason the industry’s not even done that, so we’re decades behind.

    It’s obviously possible to have whole building interiors emerge as soon as you draw their dimensions, and use paintbrushes that rot away the walls with decades of water damage, for at least a plausibly boring first pass. I’m not even talking about “AI” nonsense. This is just rule-based stuff that demoscene maniacs can somehow fit in a tweet.