Just a thought that occurred to me, might CC be able to have certain elements that are procedurally generated?
I know the D9 mod has PG bolts of electricity for the arc gun, so i wondered if it could be applied to other things like terrains or maybe even sprites (though i doubt that).

discuss

Terrain might be done, But I seriously doubt the sprites.

Yes, had little hope for the sprites.

What if you were to have many different dropship part sprites, and something to put them randomly together, you could get unique dropships?

Potentially, but it'd be a lot more work than anybody is willing to do.
If you wanted good working stuff, anyway.

ye gods

"procedural" generation is not the way of the future, because procedural content will never replace handbuilt content

the amount of time it would take to get a procedural generation system to replace even ONE aspect of CC with the same quality of work as real people can churn out in a few minutes is way, way too long

despite the new fashion in indie games to "procedurally" generate anything and everything, it's really, really not necessary or even a huge benefit

explain one thing that procedural generation could add to CC that humans couldn't do better and faster

A single map that randomly generates itself whenever you go to it could be cool.
And maby some slight variation on coalition clones could add to the gameplay [for instance, when the enemys bring in 3 soldiers, they will have slightly different health, sightly different jetpack fuel, weight, and perceptiveness]
other than that not much.

Emergent behaviour.

if it took data seven years to get the game to the state it's in now do you honestly believe that he is going to radically change the entire nature of his AI programming in quite possibly the most time consuming way possible?

If you want "emergent" behavior go ahead and make it with b24, since data says he's going to open up AI routines to lua

tell me how it goes

@Lafe: Do the different Ronin soldiers "add" anything to gameplay, besides buy menu clutter?

Because there's six of them, and the only differences are minor, and, man, you really can't tell anything about them.

point taken.
but a map could be cool.

Yeah, i was just poking fun at the AI with "Emergent Behaviour".
But yes, i think procedural terrains would be interesting to see.

The only thing I would even consider using PG in CC for is maps, like selecting "RANDOM" for a map in Skirmish, but since according to Grif this would take an ungodly amount of time to accomplish, I think PG will stay part of our dreams for CC.

If you want rendomly generated maps, hack that part out of Rock Grappler http://forums.datarealms.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=18550.
I figure that with larger islands and rules for decreasing density with altitude you could make a very playable generated map.
Not "procedural," but still worth a shot.

I worked for a very short time on making a sidescroller map that was genuinely procedural, which forced (like ye olde mario) you to always move right, and then redrew the map behind you, but far away enough that you could not see it. It was pretty sucky, because the way I did that was with code from Grif's constructor, which needed a background to be effective, and that made it pretty ugly.

I had intended to get it to read the map data using IO from files you put in the folder, but I never got around to that.

Not that I know anything at all about Lua (or even ini for that matter), wouldn't it be possible to have a random series of tunnels? Like, fire a lazer beam that randomly splits and ends? You could put a brain that spawns enemies at every tunnel end and there you go, a mission.

yeah that is sort of the difference he was probably looking for, there would be one and you spawn it and it could have different unique characteristics such as an alternative head sprite or sth

having dropships with slightly different parts would be another simple implementation of "procedural" generation. that wouldn't be hard. if CC was actually open to lua.

Changing a dropship's sprites is easy, as long as they have the same offsets.