Procedurally Generating Manhattan for Marvel's Spider-Man

[@AIandGames]

Here's a bonus fact for you: as mentioned, there are over 500 roads and more than 1200 alleyways in the procedurally generated Manhattan. While the roads are designed to be a scaled down representation of the city, the alleys are 99.9% fake. Most of Manhattan doesn't have alleyways, in fact there are only a handful of them, and they're all at the bottom of the island, south of Canal St. New York's city council set a restriction to stop alleyways being built in the city in the early 1800's in order to use up all the available space. Hence when you see an alleyway in Manhattan in movies or TV, it's typically filmed in Cortlandt Alley, or somewhere else off of the island. So why did Insomniac break away from this and put thousands of alleys into their video game city? It allows for more breaks between buildings and therefore makes it easier to swing around as Spider-Man. In addition, many alleyways are used for the spawning of crimes and getaway cars. They exist entirely for gameplay purposes. Thanks for checking out my Spider-Man episodes. They're a great series of games, and now I can get back to 100%-ing Miles Morales, and then maybe start Spider-Man 2 during the holidays.

[@camwing]

I've always wondered how their art team was able to make so many buildings. Insomniac has always been a "work smarter" studio, this is really cool

[@stevep9177]

My friend lived and worked in Manhattan for many years and he always got angry that he couldn't navigate the game's not-perfectly-accurate layout by memory

[@AIandGames]

Hah, I had similar issues wandering around London in Watch Dogs: Legion.

[@happyspaceinvader508]

@@AIandGamesYeah, it’s quite disorienting! Sort of like how it would be in a dream… there are bits that seem familiar and yet not quite in the layout you’re expecting.

[@thesidneychan]

Tools like Chatgpt and ai art are best used in a manner similar to this. Assisting artists, who focus on the big picture, then fine tuned. Not replace artists completely.

[@AIandGames]

That is the only way it's ever going to work IMO.

[@unvergebeneid]

Exactly and I can't wait to see how these new generations of generative models will help make richer open worlds while freeing the artists up from doing the tedious stuff.

[@thesidneychan]

@@unvergebeneid tedium is the keyword. For example, social media captions, promos for corporate or retail - the kind of mindless, soulless work that writers dread doing anyway.

[@FrozenDozer]

And that is a lesson that the big wigs will learn the hard way. Many beloved studios will die because some asshole in a suit decides that he can replace everyone with an AI because some AI company salesman told him so.

[@siddeshjammi2138]

please do ghost of tsuhima, the way that game is generated is stunning

[@TYNEPUNK]

Really interesting video. Funny to see their imposters are still basically 3D. I always want to implement swinging into my games when I watch one of these :-) Love your AI vids.

[@caoimhinmccann4449]

You wouldn't ever think any procedural generation was used with how detailed the map is.

[@ruolbu]

rather the opposite actually, placing that much detail by hand is prohibitively expensive as far as I know.

[@ThomasAndersonPhD]

12:42 All this cool tech, but walking down stairs still looks janky 🙃 Next time, procedural staircase generation that re-uses the web-anchor tech to calculate appropriate foot-fall locations 😂

[@AlanZucconi]

This is the content I'm here for!!! 👏

[@blikpils7899]

Great content! i just wish i had procedural tools to get rid of the music in the second half of the video. It really takes the focus away.

[@scottwatrous]

So how far away are we from some driving game, in the vein of Driver or Midtown Madness for example, using these processes in conjunction with map survey data to just build a procedurally generated, fully realized and drivable 1:1 city? Like I want to drive in NYC in a racing game and have every street be dead on accurate. I already can fly through 1:1 NYC in Flight Simulator, so i imagine it isnt that far from doable.

[@SeanLumly]

Procedural generation: "Yay!" AI generation: "Boo!"

[@bettikithilrakka]

Excellent video, thank you!

[@youngknight5589]

The matrix awakens almost does the same thing they have entire talks about how they used houdini to build the city for that demo

[@TJMac93]

Great video, as usual!

[@ayush21399]

Wow thanks for this quality informative video.

[@unvergebeneid]

All webs need to attach somewhere, _except_ those in combat. Which I totally get, that would've been a huge pain. Just sayin' though.

[@night_light2867]

What is the background music ?

[@englishmaster1186]

very interesting!

[@altinislreal]

2:18 I didnt know there was a mosque in the game - that's so cool ( i am a muslim )

[@AIandGames]

It is a reproduction of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York up in East Harlem. It was the first ever purpose-built Mosque in New York. I only know this because I thought it was cool to see a mosque in the game and looked it up to check whether it was real. 😅

[@IndustrialBonecraft]

Nooooo, don't use the 'p' word! Gamers have one very specific idea of what 'procedural' means and they use it to whip themselves into frothing bouts of impotent ignorant rage about a subject they know next to nothing about!

[@PokeComm]

Why do you act like this? Are you underage?

[@videogamefreak2001]

It’s not that serious

[@neekfenwick]

Are you referring to when the word "procedural" was used in the context of No Man's Sky and friends, with people complaining that it was a good technique for churning out millions of boring planets? In that case, surely a game, and video, such as this is a great counterpoint to those complaints, in showing that procedural generation can actually be a great thing and nearly indistinguishable from hand crafted environments? This helps improve the ignorance you mentioned, and also makes the "gamers" feel less impotent when they find that a game they like employs this technique and thus brings procedural generation closer to their comfort zone.

[@jojolafrite90]

Flying around in the town is pretty fun, but even that gets boring, because the world is too uninteresting. Side quests are just boring things that remind me of some bad PS2 games, which doesn't help. Maddening the incredible wasted potential in so many modern games.