How does one get started with procedural generation?

Question

Procedural generation has been brought into the spotlight recently (by Spore, MMOs, etc), and it seems like an interesting/powerful programming technique.

My questio

Answer 1

I'm not an expert on this, but I can try and contribute a few answers:

1. NetHack and it's brethern are open source and rely heavily on procedural generation of levels (maps). Link to the downloads of it. If you are more interested in landscape/texture/cloud generation, I'd recommend you search Gamasutra and GameDev which have quite a few articles on those subjects.

2. AFAIK I don't think there is much difference between languages. Most of the code you see will be in C/CPP because it's still very much the official language of Game Developers, but you can use anything you want...

3. Well it depends if you have a project that can benefit from such technology. I saw procedural generation used in simulators for the army (which can be considered a game, although they are not very playable :)).

And a small note - my definition if procedural generation is anything generating a lot of data from a small amount of rules or patterns and lots of randomness, your results may vary :)