Many faces of Procedural Generation: Determinism (classification system, part 3)

Deterministic generation: When, given the same inputs, you can get the same output. If you are dealing with a large amount of generations, you may need to do some testing to ensure that you do not get any unexpected results or get an outcome that doesn't interfere with the game's objectives.  A good example of deterministic generation is the Universe of the much expected No Man’s Sky, where it’s always the same Universe being generated for everyone (with 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 quintillion) planets, that’s a lot of testing). Another is the 96kb 3D game .kkrieger in the generation of all its content.


 

Deterministic at load-time generation: When you get a deterministic generation only after you’ve loaded the game level. Basically, once you get the initial random inputs the generation becomes deterministic. A few examples of this are the worlds in Minecraft and the level layouts for Rogue-like games such as The Binding of Isaac.


 

Non-Deterministic generation: When you cannot determine the outcome of the generation. Even if you can vaguely predict the outcome generation (because of probability functions), with Non-deterministics you never know for sure. Stateless. An example of this are the obstacles of infinite-runners such as Temple Run.