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I know this is game design related, but I have read the StackOverflow FAQ and it states software algorithm questions can be asked here. If this is better off in game design then I hope someone can help me move it, thanks!

I am designing a multi-threaded procedural dungeon generator. However, I am wondering what kinds of problems I am likely to run into-- I haven't been able to find many algorithms that clearly showed multi-threaded in them.

I have three distinct objects which must be created. A 'World' which houses multiple 'Rooms' and each room will house potential 'Objects.'

The current algorithm works like this:

Step 1: Generate World
Step 2: Generate Rooms and Objects concurrently

The World houses a room list, and an 'available objects list.' The Room creation method will generate rooms and add them to the World's room list.-- the Object creation procedure will not communicate with the Room procedure in any way. Rather, the Object creation procedure will pick random rooms from the World's room list and generate random objects in the room.

The only problem I see with this is-- if the Object creation procedure finishes pre-maturely. In other words only some of the rooms in the room list will have objects created in them because the room creation procedure finished later than the object creation procedure.

Are there more problems, and does anyone have any advice or experience with developing such algorithms?

1 Answers1

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Firstly, the problem mentioned by you isn't a real one, because you should simply work with 3 steps:

  1. Generate world
  2. Generate rooms concurrently
  3. Generate objects concurrently

In that order, it is ensured that all rooms are present. And you don't gain much from keeping 2+3 together in terms of performance anyways.

However, the main problem, as typical with concurrency, is when you join your results together. If your rooms are kept in a list, then appending to that list needs to be synchronized, which slows down your processing. A much more involved problem occurs, once you start to actually create rooms in a world-space and have to ensure that rooms generated in parallel do not occupy the same space (same for objects inside a room).

Frank
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  • This is also an interesting approach (although more complicated than my initial approach). I hoped to avoid much of that complexity by generating rooms one at a time and doing the objects concurrently along side the rooms. However, like you said my approach may not provide much by keeping rooms and objects together. I assume the object creation is light compared to the rooms themselves. –  Oct 26 '11 at 05:29
  • Alternately, you could make the room generation procedure call the object generation procedure for just that room. – Nick Johnson Oct 26 '11 at 05:37
  • I like the idea of doing the rooms concurrently and calling the object creation procedure once per-room. I think the pay off will be high and complexity is easier to manage than doing rooms and objects concurrently. –  Oct 26 '11 at 05:45