Advertisement

Game Design Theory

Started by December 11, 2013 02:42 AM
13 comments, last by Stavros Dimou 11 years, 1 month ago

In that above article he"s talking about what I put forward. They are creating a set of rules, not a game. Everything within that "200km" square reacts around those set of rules.

They are building this with only 4 people on the team! I feel like if they can pull this off, and it takes off this could definitely be revolutionary in developing games.

why are physics engines convincingly fake when we have all the equations and the real physics data that we could input to create a real-life physics engine?



Because nobody has the computer power to simulate even an atom using the actual, real laws of physics. There are people using months of running time on supercomputers to approximately simulate single protons. Yes, we know the physics, but it's just insanely frackin' intractable.

Ok, so maybe you don't want to do things down to the level of quantum chromodynamics. You never got all that quantum stuff, anyway. Plain Newton and Maxwell is good enough for a game! Very good. We'll put in Newton and Maxwell, and arbitrarily designate atoms as the, um, atomic minimal objects of our physics sim. How many do we need? Well, in a gram of hydrogen there are Avogadro's number of hydrogen atoms; 6.02 x 10^23. The number of interactions per time-tick is, of course, O(n^2) in the number of atoms. So, if we optimistically assume that an interaction can be calculated in one floating-point operation, a computer would need to run at (*)... 181 GGGGGHz to do one frame per second. For one gram of hydrogen.

* Footnote: A GGHz is a billion GHz; a GGGHz is a billion GGHz... Yes, I'm aware I'm somewhat simplifying the conversion between FLOPS and clock speed; bear with me, it doesn't affect the argument.
To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
Advertisement

Thank you guys for your insight. I had some speculation that was a case of lack of technology. I just don't know about these things in-depth so I appreciate you guys filling me in. Excuse my ignorance happy.png

Would it be possible to do what I suggested on a smaller scale? Maybe cut parts out and shape it to how the developer would want it but have a system of laws in a game?

Could someone explain what No Man's Sky is trying to do with it's game a little more. With the procedural system and all. It says in the trailer that every atom, rock, leaf, planet, etc.. is procedurally generated. But as you guys stated going by atoms would be a nightmare for computers right now. Take a look at the trailer:

My guess is that the game has its assets modular,and that there is an algorithm that is randomly picking up pre-created content modules and places them in the world.

For example lets take the Shark model. This game has Sharks. What the developer might have done is to split the Shark's body into different modular pieces with a given number of "slots" and have let's say 3 types of fins,3 types of eyes etc. So he can have an algorithm that when a Shark has to be placed somewhere,the system picks up randomly one body part for each slot for each Shark from a stack of pre-made Shark pieces,and thus each time the player visits that area,he meets a different model of a Shark. Note that it doesn't has to be a Shark. It can be a planet,or a gun (that's how Borderlands has millions of guns) or whatever.

That is doable. But isn't a phsyics thing.

It's just an automated process where the cpu randomly picks up parts of content that were already created and generates variations in random.

This is being done at least since the 90s,and it's what kind of technology gave The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall the largest in-game world ever made. But it's not doing that by simulating real world physics laws - it is doing it by picking up and placing pre-made content pieces randomly.

The use of procedurally generated worlds systems have some pros and cons,like the following:

pros:

# The space on the hard drive the game will be needing is less,as it won't have to store data for what goes where.Means smaller hard drive space requirement.

# You can have huge worlds with it.

# Every time the world will be different.

cons:

# Either the initial loading time will take much longer,if the random generation happens during a loading screen,or the frame rate will be slower if random generation happens while the player is playing.

# Every time the world be different.

So apart from the trade off that you shorten the hard drive requirement for longer loading times or slower frame rate,it's also a matter of if you want your game's world to be the same each time,or different. I think it' obvious that if the world changes each time the player is starting the game,that navigation problems can come up,and player confusion. Because if you remember that the last time you stopped playing the game your character was outside a house that was opposite a river,and the next time you load your save there is not a house or a river where your character is,you will be confused.

In a space game that has you travel to a number of individual planets,and in which the quest structure is such that you will never have to visit the same place twice and every time your character died you started at a specific point that is not randomly generated,or it didn't let you to save in an area that is procedurally generated on the fly, perhaps that could work without confusing the player.

But do you see how limiting this is on gameplay ?

Another way of implementing such a system is the way Minecraft is designed.

Minecraft is designed in such that the first time the player will start playing in a world it will be generated completely randomly,but after a player saves his progress,when he loads his save again,the world will be the same.

What Minecraft does is to create a random world and then have that specific world layout / map data saved on the user's save file.

In that case the amount of data that would be included in the basic game's files,is instead included on each individual save file.

And of course as the player explores more of the world and more generation is happening,more data needs to be written,and thus the space of save files inflate over time.

@Stavros - algorithms like these are rarely random, so one should avoid using the word in this context. There'll be rules that govern which are selected, and instead the seed that the rules use is generated randomly. The distinction may seem subtle, but it's very important :)

In that above article he"s talking about what I put forward. They are creating a set of rules, not a game. Everything within that "200km" square reacts around those set of rules.

They are building this with only 4 people on the team! I feel like if they can pull this off, and it takes off this could definitely be revolutionary in developing games.

You are completely misunderstanding what is happening in that video.

They are not talking about divisions of chemical elements, they are talking about mathematical atoms - i.e the smallest possible positive element that can be represented. It is likely that in their engine this is conceptually similar to a voxel. Likewise, the rules they are writing govern how their universe is created (procedural generation algorithms). This has very little to do with real physical laws on how universes are created (and besides, we couldn't simulate that in games as our best and brightest have only the vaguest understanding and theory anyway!).

Put simply, what you're proposing is patently absurd. We don't have knowledge nor the computing power on the planet to build such a thing, it's genuinely silly.

@ambershee: Please excuse my wording. English is not my native language and for the most part I self tought speaking it. :)

This topic is closed to new replies.

Advertisement