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Original post by Anonymous Poster Quote:
Out with the hard coded, in with the dynamic
So you saying everything will be great because it is dynamic? Why not stop there, lets make dynamic sound generators that produce dynamic music for each setting, that is different each time around? What about dynamic planets and dynamic this and that...
ANSWER: Because it just will never be as good as a good scored peice of music, by someone that knows what they are doing. It will never be as good as a well designed level.
That being said, Im not against dynamic representation. It is good for SOME things. You have already seen this in proceedurally generated textures. In this example it is useful and can get a nice and non-repeatative texture, but in reality a real texture created by an artist will blow it out of the water.
So now we come to "make every game dynamic and proceedural" thought. I say no! Some things fit the bill and some do not. Spore uses proceedural stuff for the skin textures, ground textures, landscape, ect.. But how many of these things are actually new? Ive seens generated textures before and I know you have seen fractal base landscape generators before (even ones that you input random values and and reproduce procedurally to get the same result again). Out of all the things that I have seen, I am only impressed with the custom IK walking, being able to place parts on the creatures and manipulate them to an extent, and the same thing with the buildings.
But now what are these? IK is just cool, but that is not proceedural to me. This has been studied in numerious animation course for years. Granted they did a good job, but that is just inverse kinematics (or whatever the other one is). Nothing new, although cool and better developed than usual. As for the rest of it, it really looks likie lego peices to me. There seem to be hard-points to place in the demo (an attacking thing, a leg, maybe an eye). This again is nothing new and has been done is space-sims for years, although he is doing it better with creatures in his demo. Lastly is the budging of the parts, this is really the key to all the character hype. Just like some games let you customize your characters by buldging and sizing the parts he did a very slick job on this. Agin its nothing new, just taken to the next step. The buildings seem to work in the same way, so I will skip that, since it seems to be hardpoints, buldging, and random placement of generic shapes)
Second is the textures, this is also nothing new. Also most of the textures that seem to be different are the crazy style textures. Out of the things this seems to make the most sense to make proceedurally to me. Because people's textures will be differnt each time around to an extent (giving them the feel of different skin). The textures for the planets also have thier place, because you can make really weird looking textured planets.
Third, generarated planets/terrain. This is a must for his type of game. ALthough do you think you are going to really be visiting that many types of different landscapes. Again no, becaus eit is fractals, with craters punched in them (seems to me). It is very cool, dont get me wrong, but it has been done before. Do you think you are going to ever visit something that doesnt look like a moon or a generic mountain world? I would guess not.
Lastly, putting it all together. I think why his game is cool is not because of the proceedural nature, but because of changing game mechanics as you play. I think people like the amount of customization and could care less about dynamic/proceedural things. People have always like creating things and building things like legos (comeon - who didnt like legos here). I think this game will be fun to toy around with to create characters. Although there better be more than, eye, leg, and attck thingy in the release. Planets will be whatever after you have seen 2000 moons with craters in different spots, 10000 planets that have some bumps on them that are different colors. You will eventually place you attacker thing in basically all the possible positions (or most likely become bored before this). It will be fun the first couple of times, but then you will realize that it is the same thing over and over again. The procedural plantes will not matter, the proceedural textures will be unoticed, and the the buldged shapes attached to to other shapes will get boring to people (unless they provide a lot of different things to attach - but is that really truely proceedural?)
WHAT IS MY POINT? - the proceedural aspects will make your character feel more customizable, but will be the downfall of the gameplay. In the end it will be the non-proceedural parts of the game that will make it interesting. That is where the gameplay is comming from. Gameplay mechanics should not be proceedural. If they are it is eaither just repeating pre-defined sub-mechanics, or something that the gamer could never adapt to (because it is ever changing) and would become frusterated/bored and quit.
I trust that you then think that spore will suck utterly as a game then, if procedural aspects will kill gameplay. And polymorphism is horrible, and sandbox games suck?
BTW, spore has procedural ecosystems, planents, creatures, everything. I'm not quite sure you understand how it functions. The creative aspects of the game are enabled by the more technical procedural creations - it's not just IK that allows joints to move - IK algorithms find the most efficient path for a joint to take, walking and moving have other constraints.
I'm not talking about procedural gameplay dynamics, I'm talking about a world where you can actually change the environment, where it reacts to you and others. A world where you blow up a building and it stays blown up, or you kill a special monster and it stays dead, and then something else can take its place to server its purpose while not breaking immersion for other players. No more "kill named monster x" for every player ever, no more static worlds. How does this kill gameplay? Would you rather have a poorly thought out but human written quest to kill some monster - the same monster that everyone has killed eighty million times - or one just as poorly written for a different and more plausible foe? If I'm killing evil bad gnolls, I want them to stay dead. I don't want to just get some "reward" and have nothing change - I haven't actually accomplished anything in that event. Its about reuniting the impact the single player has on the world with the social aspect of an online world. I think that the suspension of disbelief requried in most MMO's is much worse than any worries anyone has about procedural simulations being "synthetic." In fact, what you're really comparing is two different types of simulation - synthetic static simulation (E.g. an MMO where monsters just "spawn" into existence out of nowhere, with no logic and explanation behnid it), and procedural simulation (E.g. your monsters come from somewhere - but more importantly FOR A REASON. Like the negative feedback loop ideas posted above, you get more foxes when you have rabits, but they eat the rabbits and so you get less foxes etc.. You can always just put in a wall to stop your fox or rabbit population from going beyond certain bounds, thus maintaining maximum boundaries for your simulation. But that's really just nitpicking - procedural simulations have already been done, it's a matter of application).
[Edited by - Nytehauq on March 28, 2006 9:25:37 AM]
