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There are plenty of similar generators, it's not very difficult work. What I'm more interested is making this a 3D world with procedural geometry, make cities,
by jokoon 5y ago
There are plenty of similar generators, it's not very difficult work.
What I'm more interested is making this a 3D world with procedural geometry, make cities, make it run as a multiplayer game... Not to mention you cannot store all that geometry, it's too large, you can only generate the place you're exploring on the fly and save it to a cache and then render it.
Then you would have to explain all your artists and game designers how to make all of this work. It's a lot of constraints. The multiplayer side won't be interesting unless the world is persistent, so you have to split the world into several servers to not overload servers, because players need to cross the path of other players for the game to feel alive.
AND THEN, you would have to adapt netcode strategies in very densely played areas like cities where you have a lot of players next to each other.
In the end, such game would be very popular, but I don't think you would need a map generator like this, the map would still be done by a human because it would yield better results. What matters is the high resolution procedural geometry, at a low scale: trees, terrain, buildings, etc.
So yes, that's essentially the story of developing world of warcraft, except world of warcraft has several world instances and phases, because their world is not very large when you look how many players they have, they can't have a single world, even when they use phases, which is not a cool feature.
- Azgaar 5y agoPlease name all these similar generator. I don't know any that covers at least 50% of functionality.
- rickosborne 5y agoIf you haven't already seen it, you may be interested in Introversion Software's retrospective on their unreleased "Subversion" game: https://youtu.be/1giu6sMnAxY https://youtu.be/1giu6sMnAxY (That whole series of videos is interesting for anyone who has an interest in procedural generation and simulation.)
- jokoon 5y agoIt was abandonned
- y4mi 5y ago> The multiplayer side won't be interesting unless the world is persistent, so you have to split the world into several servers to not overload servers, because players need to cross the path of other players for the game to feel alive. Honestly, you only need some shared towns to be persistent. Everything else being ephemeral could be made a feature through lore (i.e. reality destroying mists which eats the world whenever nobody is watching, player characters try to fight against the neverending destruction by venturing out into the world, temporarily reclaiming parts for harvesting etc.) The biggest issue would be to actually generate towns, npc story etc on the fly. I think you're really underestimating the size of that challenge. Generating assets like that is generally the most expensive part of game development with multiple people working on each one. If you automate that away, you'll be able to make a ton of money just by providing modules for unreal engine and unity.