Hey all, I’m back with the third in a series of posts about something that’s been around for ages for this week’s Video Game Tuesday. It’s all about part three of my blog on the use of artificial intelligence, or AI, in video games. And you can see the first part of this series too if you want to catch up.

This week, I’m going to be covering a more recent addition to the bag of tricks that game developers now have available to them that relies heavily on artificial intelligence. It’s procedural generation.

Procedural Generation?: Yes, procedural generation is an AI system that takes a bunch of assets from a database and then uses them in various combinations to essentially generate an infinite number of possibilities. I say essentially because it’s not actually infinite, and for earlier games such things were repeated based on certain criteria because of their limited number of assets.

But functionally, procedural generation can be limitless. More recently, newer titles have employed much better versions of it. A great example is No Man’s Sky, which has only improved in the years since it first launched with almost all of the planets in that universe procedurally generated.

For No Man’s Sky, there are more variation in worlds and creatures compared to how it was at launch, even if they can all be handled similarly once you get used its survival system. Still, they’re all technically unique, and it’s a fascinating piece of technology in gaming.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.