a few checks to minimize impossible situations from 4fifacoinscouk's blog

"It didn't always work out as well as I would have liked," he admits, "but had several cool and surprising results that really improved the RS Gold game."Here, Brouwer offers his top five tips for other studios considering procedurally generated content in their Runescape games.1. Pick your battles"Don't expect to simply pick a section of the Runescape game design and make it procedurally generated. Adapt the Runescape game mechanics, theme and the procedural generation to each other to make it work as effectively as possible, and try to focus on high bang for low buck.In Cargo Commander, we made the uniquely generated levels fit well with the lonely space exploration theme: this time you really go where no man has gone before! At the same time, the theme is not too serious, so that generated levels that are a bit odd don't seem out of place. Also, the generation really impacts the Runescape gameplay and is not just a backdrop. The selection of objects enemies, explosives, burners, items and features gravity, layout differs for each container, creating ingredients that the Runescape player can combine in various cool improvised ways.In other areas, I tried to steer away from features of procedural generation that wouldn't be effective. For instance, a notoriously hard thing with level generation is to ensure that levels can be solved 'can that ledge with the key be reached, using the items that are available?'. Though there are a few checks to minimize impossible situations, the level destructibility and space navigation make sure that the Runescape player almost always can create a route somewhere, and because containers can be skipped, it's not a big problem if one cargo item is unreachable. For the sector pass containers, that are more like a puzzle and do need to be solvable, I kept the randomization to features that wouldn't influence this, and relied on handmade levels for the rest."2. Remember that randomness is random"The levels of Cargo Commander are randomly generated. The sector name that Runescape players can pick from a list or type freely determines the random seed, and all levels in that sector are generated from random values based on that seed. However, it's important to take the attributes of randomness into account when deciding how to use the random values for generation.The usual way to look at randomness is by using statistics. For instance 'the container size picks Cheap MU online diamonds a value between 3 and 9, so on average containers have a size of 6', or 'each container has a 25 percent chance to spawn a medkit, so on average they're encountered once each 4 container'.