Many months have passed since the last update on the site. Work has continued on the development of At the Crossroads, but it has been slow-going due to real life encroaching on my time. However, I won’t let that stop me from moving forward, even if the progress is at a snail’s pace. The writing on AtC has been difficult to make progress on, because you can’t force inspiration. In programming, you can overcome an issue by putting in more work to find a solution. The same can’t be said about creative efforts like writing. I do not want to rely on ChatGPT to write my story/characters for me, so that is not an option. But sometimes a break is exactly what creativity needs to recharge the batteries. Luckily, Epic has provided just such a break with the Procedural Content Generation system (or PCG for short).
The PCG system is a great addition to UE 5.2 and is going to provide a considerable degree of control over how our content can be created in our games. Previously, I used the Procedural Foliage Spawner system (or PFS for short) within Unreal to create an accurate biome. While this system is experimental (just like the PCG system), it is a really nice system that, when finely tuned, can generate fairly accurate results. This is the technique that was used in Capuchin Capers to create the foliage for all of the islands. While this system can be a great time-saver when set up correctly, and can provide a good way of realizing the data that we gain from our terrain studies in a concrete way, it definitely has it’s limitations.
The PFS system will generate a spawn location for a type of foliage and calculate the spread of that foliage over generations. This results in clumps of foliage types, such as ferns, where there are “older” ferns in the middle of the clumps, and “younger” ferns on the periphery to simulate the gradual spread of that plant type within it’s environment. While this is seen within nature, it doesn’t always play out that way. There are some types of plants that, in nature, will choke out other plants in various ways. The PFS system tends to produce these clumps, or islands, of foliage types in a higher abundance than you would witness in real life. This effect can be lessened by adjusting the values for the individual foliage types that are to be spawned. But to a certain extent, the PFS system leans in this direction no matter what you do…it is the basic premise of the system, after all. To be sure, the PFS system is still a very good tool and I loved the results that I was getting over hand-placing the foliage with the foliage paint mode in the editor. But, I always felt that I just couldn’t get the results that I was after no matter the amount of tweaking that I did. I feel that the PCG system can remedy that.
One of the aspects of the PFS system that I struggled with was getting shade-loving plants to consistently spawn within the “shade bounds” of a large tree. No matter what settings I used, I just couldn’t get a consistent result that placed the foliage types where I wanted them. This is because of the rules that are baked into the PFS system (which, unless you’re willing to change the C++ code, are immutable). Now, with the PCG system, we not only have easier access to the code responsible for spawning the foliage, we actually get to write that code! Some may see this as a regression, in that we are required to write the spawn logic for our foliage, rather than having a built-in system to aid us in this. But this is much more of an unshackling of our creativity than a ball-and-chain that increases the effort required to realize our vision. The extra work is far outweighed by the freedom that the PCG system grants us. We get almost all of the benefits of targeted foliage placement while retaining the great performance that we receive from instanced foliage. It is true that procedural placement will never be as accurate as hand-placing every single asset, but we can come much closer than we ever could before, in the least amount of time. We can do our terrain studies to find out all the information that we need about a biome, and then implement that data in our PCG graphs to produce a much more realistic result than we could ever achieve with the PFS system.
Another limitation with the PFS system is that you can’t specify a static mesh foliage type to be used for saplings or very young plants. It will scale the static mesh that is specified in the static mesh foliage asset. Not only is this unrealistic, it can lead to serious visual artifacts if a static mesh has a material that implements World Position Offset to create wind effects. The animated leaves for these scaled assets can cause severe “smearing” or stretching that is instantly noticeable and very undesirable (see Image 1 below). This can occur with PCG, of course, but only if you rely solely on scaling an asset to achieve a “younger” version of that foliage. Obviously, with PCG we are not limited to simply scaling a mesh; we can provide a completely different static mesh for these saplings/sprouts within our graphs!
I am very excited by the direction that the PCG system is taking content generation within the Unreal Engine, and by extension, gaming in general. And make no mistake about it, with this type of open-ended procedural content generation that was only available in software packages like Houdini now being available in UE, other engine developers will be forced to implement something similar or risk being left behind. The PCG system benefits all developers, but not equally. Small studios or individual indie developers will benefit far more than AAA studios, because those huge studios could already create their vision with precise accuracy in a (relatively) short period of time. For the indie studio, however, throwing more work-hours at a problem just wasn’t an option.
Thus far, I have spoken only of the PCG system as a means of placing foliage on a landscape, but it is capable of SO much more than that, and the examples used above are just that: examples. There are very few limits to the PCG system and I believe we will see it’s use throughout UE content generation/development. With further development, it will become more feature-rich and performant, which will open new doors that were previously closed in game development.
Thank you for stopping by and reading this article, and I hope that you have a great day.