Case in point for my 'anything is possible' argument.

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Original post by hplus0603 There, based on an previous version of Olive, which is my day job, simulates a planet almost the size of earth (about 5% off). In current versions, we use a fully-earth-size planet. We have a system where artists place detailed terrain information (elevation, texturing, flora, etc) where they care about the specifics, and where a fractal generator will generate the in-between space based on coarse parameters set by artists (hilliness, average height, etc). We start with the entire earth at 10 km resolution or so, and refine down where necessary. We have used the same terrain and simulation basics for several years, and the min-spec for There is an 800 Mhz Pentium III with a GeForce, so yes, this can absolutely be done, to at least some degree of fidelity.

It's one thing to have a map, it's another entirely to make a game out of it. If you have 10,000 square miles of terrain to explore in the game, but your game only takes up 50 square miles with encounters and things to do, the last 9950 didn't buy you much. The real problem in virtual world creation isn't the topography, it's making the topography meaningful. If you look at a game like WoW or GuildWars, the worlds are big, but when you get down to it, if you put all of the explorable areas together without the breaks, the actual area isn't nearly as much as many people expect. Your character could run the circumference in a fairly short amount of time. Really fleshing out huge areas is beyond daunting even for big design teams.

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Original post by Eber Kain Case in point for my 'anything is possible' argument.

I think you need to define "anything".

I think its possible to make a Game Earth size, and even more!

You people should play and learn with Elite 3 and Daggerfall.

Daggerfall (old predecessor of Morrowid) had countless cities and caves full of characters and interaction. You could actually enter in any building, some with more than 1 level, could enter in a guild, steal a house, sleep in a tavern, do some tedious work, etc...

Elite 3 have billions of stars, each one with planets and cities inside them. You could even land on each city, without any game transition (You could actually fly from deep space to the planet). And all this in a very large scale, and a very small/old game made in Assembler!

How it was all this possible? Just use and abuse reusable algorythms. Fractal is an example. Elite 3 used fractals to render each planets landscape (the landscape was unique to each planet!) (you could enconter even oceans, rivers and mountains). Darkfall used pre-generated cities over and over again. If it was possible to make this in a 640kb DOS RAM imagine in the todays computer with 3GHz, 1Mb RAM and 1-10Gb disk space???

Other good examples are XCom's and Diablo's random map generation. For the world continue the same just use aways the same seed in the random generation.

The advantages are very numerous, however there have its cons:

- The processing should only be wasted where the player(s) are. So it wouldnt be a lively active world. But you could simulate it other ways (like calculing what each NPCs should be there at that time when the player go there). And lets face it: Very few games have a simulated lively world.

- The map would be very static. Itens and changes left in a unactive area should be erased over time, to reset the area.

- It would be specially difficult and pointless to make well designed and unique areas, as it would be only a very tiny parts of the world, or it wouldnt be unike, and used over in the world and over again (Like the caves in Daggerfall)

- The maps could get very repetitive and boring. You can minimize it by adding more diversity in the random/fractal elements. Other way is using fractals to map generation to make each area/city/cave unique.

- Plot line and customized events would be almost impossible to find. It can be avoided by triggering the events where the player are, or aways giving the locations and directions to the player somehow.

- It is highly dependable of random and fractals algorythms. So a poor designed one will be disastrous.

SSP

[Edited by - John Kowawsky on November 4, 2005 4:48:04 PM]

it would depend on the level detail and control i guess

therortically you could just have random terrain genrator but seed it with your x and y corridantnts and have a limatless amount of terrain without having to store it,
if the maps are client side you might want to keep the size down, and the number of players will be more of a problem than world size, the biggest thing is just making it,

start small
get a small world going
add more content until you have server problems
if you have server probelms
A: upgrade hardware
or
B: optimize game engine