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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
Or you could have the cities and significant regions done in detail, and make the rest of the globe into a fractal landscape. You can tool around forever in the fractal deserts and mountains of Mars, but "mapped locations" would be nested at important points on the surface.
This would be my favorite approach. I''m thinking about a fractal terran generator with tweaks for rivers. In theory, you could add in large mesh objects like boulders and preformed overhanging cliffs to get the right feel. Morrowind appears to mix and match large mesh objects, even embedding them right into the ground mesh, without trouble. Then you''d add beacons to call out special locations which are mostly hand built. This way, if a player comes down on an official beacon, they know they''re landing at a special location, versus if they just cursor over any location on the mercator map of the planet, they''re landing on fractal terrain.
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Desolate planets would be just the ticket for this sort of thing.
To the extent that you can drop off things like supply caches or portable factories, a desolate area could be just what you want as well. And they could link nicely into XP farming and resource raiding, as there would possibly have been others who would have thought of the same thing. Prefab structures that are randomly scattered over a fractally generated map could be a great way of encouraging exploration, and since they''re prefab you won''t really trip out if you visit next time and they''re gone.
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Optimally, I''d like to see an area so big that you could travel around it for days and days and still not find all the neat stuff.
I could see a large, randomly generated planet having a few nice attractions: Random junk and lost cargo for salvage, minerals, specimens and hostile creatures if it bears life, strange storms of particles (part of the backstory), prefab and secret bases, and ancient ruins / caves / underground base entrances. Don''t be surprised if you come across a strange ship filled with eggs.
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There was an old flight simulator called "A-10 Attack!" that had some 10,000 square miles of Germany mapped in. You could fly around forever, finding little "easter eggs" and following rivers around, but you''d never really have to deal with more than a little bit of it at a time for missions. There were whole cities (simplistic ones, obviously) and airfields that never factored into the game, but if you had a map of Germany you could figure out what they were and amuse yourself by bombing the hell out of them.
I like that these guys put effort into something like that, and rewarded you for wandering. What did they do when you reached the borders of Germany, though? In 1942 you get a message "leaving the mission area" which simply turns you back around. I know Terran Nova, which had a massive outdoor level, made you lose the mission if you were outside the bounds (lame). I like that in Morrowind if I choose to water walk into the ocean it just repeats the same textures endlessly and calls the area "wilderness." It''s a nice compromise.
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Just waiting for the mothership...
LOL! This would be, um, frustrating, yes.
