Table of Contents
Will The Riot MMO Have Procedural Generation?
According to purported Riot MMO employee, David Hale, is working on procedural world generation for the Riot MMO. According to his LinkedIn, David has been working as the Senior Principal Tech Artist for 1 year, 4 months, at the time of writing. In other words, David began this role on February 2022.
What is Procedural World Generation?
Procedural generation is when a computer program is developed to algorithmically create environments autonomously. In the gaming space, its use case is useful for large landscape. Of course, procedural generation is not a replacement for placing hand crafted NPCs (non-playable characters), unique architecture, and quest objects, etc.
One could expect procedural world generation to speed up the development process. Riot’s capability for world generation could also be useful for future expansion, when more environments are added.
What is a Senior Principal Tech Artist?
This role has expertise in solving technical issues that arise during the development process. Early into a project they may begin with research and development. They’ll analyze and select tools and technologies for the team to use based on the strategic vision the Director of Technical Art decides upon. Furthermore, the Senior Principal Tech Artist will work with other content developers to ensure smooth iteration.
It is important all Tech Artists are proficient with asset creation tools. These include, shaders, meshes, lighting, VFX, and more. Plus, they need to optimize levels, and ensure pipeline optimization, which is a fancy word for the frontliners responsible for design and development of the video game.
Equally important is debugging technical issues. Examples include debugging shaders in RenderDoc, or NVIDIA Nsight. Moreover, tech artist will reports bugs
In their spare time they may further research future technologies and the most effective programs on the market.
What Will be Procedurally Generated?
Procedurally Generated Outdoor Environment Mostly
Since his LinkedIn said ‘world generation’ we can presume it will be outdoor environments. As opposed to dungeons, PvP arenas or other forms of gameplay.
Now, anything within the world of Runeterra is fair game. Therefore, NPCs walking about the world can be procedurally generated. Profession and loot nodes could be procedurally generated. Skill based difficulty could be implemented with more NPCs and other environmental factors imposing on players are possible. Currently, we don’t the know the scope the development team has in mind. Nor do we know the strategic vision which might lend us some hints.
What we most commonly see in video game procedural world generation is: forests, rocks, roads, ground particles, statues, farms and other environments being procedurally generated during development. It is important to distinguish this from a procedural generation that players may experience during their gameplay. Such is the case with Minecraft. When you approach the edge of the map in Minecraft, more chunks are loaded into the game procedurally. What is loaded is decided upon by the game’s algorithm.
Not Procedural Generation Like Minecraft
Considering the Riot MMO is a shared world, one can assume the procedural generation will be limited to the development phase. Bethesda’s games such as Skyrim, and the upcoming Starfield are good example of procedural generation during the development.
“We do a lot of procedural generation [in Starfield], but I would keep in mind that we’ve always done that,” Howard explained. “It’s a big part of Skyrim in terms of questing and some other things we do. We generate landscape using procedural systems, so we’ve always kind of worked on it.
IGN – Starfield Includes More Handcrafted Content Than Any Bethesda Game, Alongside Its Procedural Galaxy
What Does Procedural Generation Mean For The Riot MMO
Generally, this is good news. Riot Games, is currently investing into the effectively building the Riot MMO’s art. By discovering a senior technical artist is on the team, we learn Riot Games has prioritized the following:
- Artistic strategic vision
- Game engines and software
- Procedural algorithms
- Art pipeline optimization
- Technical debugging
- Team management
- Development
Once again, this is a great insight into the stage and scope of the Riot MMO development. Stay tuned for more news.