Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development

Chapter 1. An Introduction to Procedural Generation

When you load an image on a PC, a song on an iPod, or a book on a Kindle, you load it from storage. That image, song, and book already exists as a whole, and whenever you want to access it, you grab the whole previously created thing. In the case of music or a video, you can stream it in chunks, but it still already exists as a whole in storage. Let's compare this to buying a ready-made desk from a furniture store. You get the entire desk as one single thing and that's that; you have a desk.

Now, let's imagine that instead of buying a complete desk, you buy one that's flat-packed. Instead of getting a pre-built desk, you get all the pieces that you need to build one, and instructions on how to ...