Source
r/proceduralgeneration•
Bergasms

Challenge 2019 #1 - Procedural Garden

Pinned

There seems to still be an appetite for challenges, I wasn't sure you guys were into them anymore! I'll throw out this one as something to get you all started on then we can perhaps have a system for voting on the next challenge. In fact, if you have an idea for a challenge leave it in the comments below (I don't mind if you recycle an earlier suggested idea) then we can vote on it somehow.

This challenge is a procedural garden (People suggested flowers and trees, here you can have both). It can be as simple as a few flowers in a pot/bed, or a whole elaborate garden with trees, flowers, vegetables and even a water feature.

Questions:
Do we want to have voting on a winner like last time?
Do we want to have a fixed end date or just when enough people are done with it?

Anything else?

Answers:

  • Have a WIP thread here in the comments where you can post your updates. When you are finished tag me in a comment.

Posted Feb 12, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC · edited

10434
divenorthThe Procedural Chef•

I like the open end date. There were some challenges that I would have loved to participate in but was unable due to time. Or perhaps we can recycle popular previous challenges.

25
itsniklaas•

I agree!

Though if folks want a voted-for-winner, perhaps a deadline to be considered for the winner, but with the ongoing option to continue to contribute would work?

8
Obbita•

> Though if folks want a voted-for-winner, perhaps a deadline to be considered for the winner, but with the ongoing option to continue to contribute would work?

​

I like this idea. Having a deadline/winner is good motivation for some people, and the ongoing option to contribute, with no time limit at all, is good for other people.

4
BrokenMatrix•

I'm going to leave some relevant resources here for people to look at. To start off, the well known algorithmic botany site containing a variety of papers:

http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/

Next up a site I found where this guy just links his papers, most are terrain gen which is only partially relevant but some are more specifically useful for this challenge:
https://perso.liris.cnrs.fr/eric.galin/articles.html

​

(I will edit and add more sites/links as I use them myself)

17
itsniklaas•

Fantastic! Thanks for sharing!

2
PurpleAlpacaCoding•

Great idea for the sub! Look forward to seeing all the beautiful gardens! Should we link to images in the comments here or should we use a flair?

15
BergasmsOP•

Comment here with a WIP thread

3
BrokenMatrix•

I think it is good to have a voted winner, gives it a bit more purpose even if all they get is a mention in the next month's challenge. I think maybe we should see how this one goes, and give people around a month. No one will really be expecting to see this as they haven't been run in a while so some people will start late for sure, but maybe next time we could try only a few weeks, but still only have it run once a month or every two months. I think if we made it super sort and had no gaps then there would be very few submissions, but if we leave a gap then I think we might get more submissions for each individual challenge. I would recommend seeing what other people want and opening a strawpoll or something and linking it at the top of this post so we can put it to a vote.

10
jaredvar•

I would always love a new CSS header image on the top every month!

2
kougener•

I think two weeks will be enough for a challenge. And a post with a list of participants and their works in the end

8
srt19170•

I don't know if this is viable or not, but I thought it might be interesting to create a framework for a challenge in something like Unity or JSFiddle or something so that participants could have a starting point. Might encourage people who don't have time to roll their own entry to participate.

8
BergasmsOP•

I've considered it, but most people on this subreddit tend to have a core sort of set of code they can use ro adapt to get stuff working. I'm not sure how much traction we would get with it. Although i think there is definitely scope for a uniform 'heaightmap viewer' because a bunch of challenges can be scoped that make terrain heightmaps

9
Combinatorilliance•

Not sure, from what I've seen in the communities, what tools are used differs widely per person.

I personally use vanilla js + canvas Sometimes c++ and openframeworks Many people use processing or p5 And then you have those who user clojure with quill People who prefer SVG over canvas People who prefer shadertoy over codepen People who use a game engine Etc...

I think the choice of tool is a very personal thing, and makes a big difference on what you will be able to create.

And for beginners, codepen or processing have countless tutorials

5
CanadianJogger•

That is a great idea. I (and many others) could participate then!

2
StickiStickman•

And many many won't since it's in a different language than the one they use.

3
srt19170•

But they can still roll their own, which they would do anyway?

3
manugildev•

My opinion:

Do we want to have voting on a winner like last time? YES

Do we want to have a fixed end date or just when enough people are done with it? Fixed end date and create a new challenge on a weekly/monthly basis, once the previous one has finished. I am sure there will be lots of participants!

7
forkafork•

I think a fixed end date is better:

  • one month of time is plenty even if someone who works want to learn something new

  • I think that having a deadline is challenging and exciting

  • having a fixed end date and a new challenge theme each month can boost your creativity and is more interesting in my opinion

  • if you don't manage to finish in time you can still post your progress on the subreddit or keep your project and use it in one of the next challenges...maybe the same theme will be selected again after a couple of months!

  • maybe we could have a week at the beginning of the month to vote and add to a poll some themes for the challenge of the month and the challenge starts from the second week until the end of the month. Then in the first week of the next month the winner is elected and everything start over from the theme-voting poll.

One more thing that would be cool is having flairs for users who won or simply announcing the winner/winners of the month!

Btw...did I win the 2018 August challenge?

An other suggestion for the challenges posts: leave a link to the previous one!

edit:

My idea of a monthly challenge:

[week 1]

  • The post of the previous month's challenge is archived after declaring the winner/winners

  • A new temporary post is created to host a poll where the subs can vote and propose new themes (at least different from the one chosen for the previous month)

[from week 2 to the end of the month]

  • A new post is created for the new theme (with a link to the previous challenge)

  • The new challenge starts with the fixed deadline: the end of the month

  • When the challenge ends everything restart from [week 1] of the following month

6
watawatabouThe Rune Crafter and City Planner•

Challenges are back? Awesome!

  • Do we want to have a fixed end date or just when enough people are done with it? I would definitely prefer a fixed end date and one month seems more reasonable for me than two weeks as someone suggested.
  • Do we want to have voting on a winner like last time? It's good to have a winner, but it's not really necessary in my opinion. This way or another we need an explicit list of participants in the end, it's too easy to miss something in a WIP thread.
5
TheMadMapmaker•

Yay! It's a good theme

If I have time, I'll try to do something, I had did some simple gardens for my procedural castle, so I'll probably work on the same codebase to make something in the same style, with big, French-style geometrical gardens.

5
tamat•

love the idea

3
AuthorizedDabbler•

WIP Thread

(Reply to this comment with your work-in-progress. Let's keep them all together for organization this time.)

3
AuthorizedDabbler•

Edit: snapshot

I'm making a Rose Garden in HTML with Canvas (FabricJS) and Three.JS

Final: https://lazymammal.github.io/rose.html

Edit 2: tagging u/Bergasms since I don't have time to work on this any more!

5
BergasmsOP•

That's sweet!

1
watawatabouThe Rune Crafter and City Planner•

I don't know what I want to get in the end: https://imgur.com/a/fbZ0AS3.

The final result (the generator) is here:https://watabou.itch.io/island-garden.

u/Bergasms

4
okenfa•

They're not arranged in garden still, so i don't really know can i put it here..

Some plants

3
datta_sidThe Creature Creator•

Did it 6 months back and posted it in this sub.

Would love to be a honorable mention.

3
DisastermanTV•

Ohh nooo I have no time :( Hopefully there will be a next time :)

2
The_Wizard_Bear•

A month?

2
Lepidothyris•

So this is the first challenge I've participated in, and for the most part my code make things more by random than by following a procedure but here goes.

At the moment the it just outputs a JSON string with what's in the garden and where each thing in the garden is located. I want to make another program that takes that JSON string and makes a graphical representation but I'm not too sure how to approach that. I was thinking about maybe using unity but I'm unfamiliar with the engine as well as parsing JSON in C#, if anybody has some recommendations that would be appreciated.

Post with some sample outputs and in image to give the general feel of the layout. For the layout images, the colors are only there to tell one room/feature from another and are not correlated with plot/feature type.

https://imgur.com/a/wMwBIQS

JSON OutputLayout Image
https://pastebin.com/ZRMsnxM7https://imgur.com/T0GakU4
https://pastebin.com/yCi9hCM5https://imgur.com/U55E5nH
https://pastebin.com/Ssw4wsMyhttps://imgur.com/vX1Gv6c
https://pastebin.com/YvGq3mb1https://imgur.com/sH1H2M6

​

Github link: https://github.com/LuiMoiPer/ProcGenChallenges/blob/master/Challenge_2019_1/GardenGenerator.py

I would love any comment or critiques on how to improve what I have so far.

2
deltaOEDgames•

Made a Reddit account for the first time just so I could respond to "idea for a challenge" here.

What I've been lusting after for some time is something similar to watabou's fantastic Medieval Fantasy City Generator, but for much smaller medieval villages. Single standalone houses, not blocked in wards. Laid out along a crossroads or river crossing. Maybe looking at Gies: Life in a Medieval Village for inspiration. Houses mostly traditional peasant cottage (10 x 20 ft) or longhouse (15 x 50 ft). Occasional inn, church, manor house, trader, etc.

2
shoneone•

Gardening has a lot to do with hydrology, soil, and climate but also tons of knowledge of specific plants and their strengths and weaknesses.

I love this idea and hope it anchors in local gardening techniques and plants for each location.

1
BergasmsOP•

Yeah i feel like making a procedural veggie patch. There is plenty of scope for L-Systems in this as well

3
Obbita•

Sounds great, I'm gonna start working on something now.

Voting on a winner sounds fun, but I don't mind either way.

A month or so sounds good for a time limit. People who don't finish in time can still post to the sub when they're finished, I'm sure people would still want to see what they make.

1
vinikkk•

I am new to this Reddit, but I think you would like some ideas for the challenge management:

  1. We could use Itch.io jam platform for submission, rating and defining the winners. As it allows to embbed web projects and play inside it's environment or upload executables it would make it all easy and fast to manage and do.

  2. Winners could win badges to link on their Mozilla's Backpack account and link on their CVs.

  3. After the jams we could have a website to work as a repo of all repos and hall of winner and maybe, maybe, it could evolve to a challenge page with alot of better life inprovements on automation and so on and so forth...

Sorry if I posted in the wrong place, though...

1