Procedural generation has been brought into the spotlight recently (by Spore, MMOs, etc), and it seems like an interesting/powerful programming technique.
My questions are these:
You should probably start with a little theory and simple examples such as the midpoint displacement algorithm. You should also learn a little about Perlin Noise if you are interested in generating graphics. I used this to get me started with my final year project on procedural generation.
Fractals are closely related to procedural generation.
Terragen and SpeedTree will show you some amazing possibilities of procedural generation.
Procedural generation is a technique that can be used in any language (it is definitely not restricted to procedural languages such as C, as it can be used in OO languages such as Java, and Logic languages such as Prolog). A good understanding of recursion in any language will strengthen your grasp of Procedural Generation.
As for 'serious' or non-game code, procedural generation techniques have been used to:
Procedural Content Generation wiki:
if what you want isn't on there, then add it ;)
Procedural generation is used heavily in the demoscene to create complex graphics in a small executable. Will Wright even said that he was inspired by the demoscene while making Spore. That may be your best place to start.
I'm not an expert on this, but I can try and contribute a few answers:
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.
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...
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 :)
(More than 10 years later ...)
Procedural generation only means that code is used to generate the data instead of it being hand made. For example if you want to generate a forest with various trees you are not going to design each tree by hand, thus coding is more efficient to generate the variations. It could be the generation of the tree graphics, size, structure, placement ...
In general there is some kind of interation with a few rules, in addition to that you can add some randomness and logic of your own, combine all of these techniques ... Anything somewhat chaotic but not too chaotic can yield interesting results.
Here are a few notable techniques:
A few games famous for their procedural generation:
Video tutorial about Procedural Landmass Generation.
Conference on procedural content generation for games, has a lot of videos on the topic: everythingprocedural
Have fun.
Answering "Do you know of any mid-sized projects that utilize procedural generation techniques?" - the Wilder World project is a Web3, virtual world being created that utilizes procedural generation techniques to create the NFT assets and I believe the virtual world which will be created using UnReal Engine. Visit wilderworld.com for the main site or zine.wilderworld.com for more info.
