Procedurally Crafting Manhattan for Marvel's Spider-Man

89K views · 7 years ago · talk · expert · evergreen

A GDC talk by developers at Insomniac Games on how they procedurally built Manhattan for Marvel's Spider-Man. It covers the tools and procedural methods used to generate a large, detailed city.

HN people list it among the best talks on modern procedural generation, and cite it for how much proc gen went into a big-budget game.

“There's a great talk about Procedurally Generating Manhattan for Spiderman that's worth watching”

4 comments from Hacker News

c
@cptcobalt2022 · in “GTA 6 Confirmed”
There's a great talk about Procedurally Generating Manhattan for Spiderman that's worth watching and covers things like this: ▶ this video If you think this is interesting, all of the Spiderman GDC talks by the various staff of Insomniac Games are S-Tier.
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r
@rayalez2019 · in “One Page Dungeon Generator”
Looks amazing! Note that the author also has a fantasy city generator: link And mansion generator: link If you're into that kind of stuff, there's a world map generator(by different author): link and this amazing tutorial on generating maps: link ---- Also, kinda relevant - awesome talks about modern procedural generation techniques(with AI, Houdini, etc): How AI will change 3D industry link Procedural world generation for Far Cry link Procedurally generating Manhattan for Spider Man ▶ this video Mindblowing talks by Anastasia Opara (using cool math, deep learning, and a lot of creativity to create crazy cool stuff) link She is the author of the most impressive procedural generation project I've ever seen: link ---- Also, I myself have made a little tutorial about procedurally generating a 3D landscape in Houdini: link
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r
@rayalez2019 · in “Procedural content generation: creating a universe (2015)”
Somewhat related(okay, not really, but still fun) - awesome talks about modern procedural generation techniques(with AI, Houdini, etc): How AI will change 3D industry link Procedural world generation for Far Cry link Procedurally generating Manhattan for Spider Man ▶ this video Mindblowing talks by Anastasia Opara (using cool math, deep learning, and a lot of creativity to create crazy cool stuff) link Procedurally generating 3D landscape in Houdini (a little tutorial I have made, can't resist sharing) link
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@drchewbacca2019 · in “DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too”
I saw an interesting talk about proc gen which was basically saying a lot of studios are moving from hand crafting to procedural tools. For example if you want to fill a park with trees you don't place them by hand, you just specify the density and type of trees and let the computer place them. The advantage is that if you want to reshape the park later you can just click and drag. Then when you are happy you go though and hand craft more content on top. They were saying there is a critical mass where procedural tools feed into procedural tools and a lot of the pipeline is automated, then it becomes extremely cheap to make more content. So back to your point: I think this is where we will see AI more in game dev, it will be as smart tools to empower creators to make stuff more easily. I don't think the AI will make the game, I think it will assist the humans with the creation of it. Here is a talk about Spiderman and how much proc gen they used there ▶ this video
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