i doubt it, it wouldnt make sence if the landscape or caves change every time you visit them
i doubt it, it wouldnt make sence if the landscape or caves change every time you visit them
WARNING: The above post may contain sarcasm and/or sophisticated satire. Any psychological damage sustained is purely your fault!
I meant at world creation by the devs, will it be 'hand made' or procedurally generated?
I would bet that the initial world generated will be procedural. If the world is going to be as big as they say it would take quite a while to build the entire thing. I would imagine they will use a generated world as a base, then go in and polish it to a finished product. Think about most of the Minecraft worlds that are really large. The devs of those servers arent building it block by block, they just go in and build the main city and maybe add some things where they want it. Or they could have a world designer that works overtime and is going to flesh out the world rock by rock.
I'd also like to point out that there was mention of world building events that players will be able to participate in. This could be a way to get the world finished and populated.
Or they could create a program which creates towns and cities automatically between many parameters (climate, location in the world etc..)
The town building program exists already, again look at Minecraft. It generates buildings and NPCs already. We havent gotten an exact, or even a good estimate of the size of the world. If the world is going to be so large that it has hundreds of villages, towns and cities already populated then I would think the towns will be auto generated. I would still think the staff would make a run through them, maybe not all, to make sure they are how they want them. If they are going to start the game like most MMOs with a dozen or 2 dozen towns then I bet they are all hand made.
Great question, Zultra. Much/most of the world will be procedurally generated. Remember, each of our servers will have completely different continents in order to guarantee that stuff discovered on one server doesn't ruin it for another server.
We have an incredibly smart set of world building tools that create terrain, weather patterns, finite resources, water tables, vegetation, etc... Then we populate the world with starting villages near good sources of fresh water, places with scarce resources, along major trade routes, in strategic military locations, etc...We also populate the starting villages with NPCs ranging in age along a similar distribution of what’s found in our world. In specific, about 25% of the population will be below age 18, an additional 40% will be within the range of 18 and 45, etc… The older the NPCs get, the fewer there are. We also control the distribution of male and female characters over time. So only about 35% of NPCs over 90 are male.
As a result, the world feels very familiar. Things are basically where and how you'd expect them to be.
Beyond that, the Soulborn Engine keeps track of where people go. If an NPC decides they want to set up a camp, recruit soldiers, and then invade a nearby town, they'll head out into the wilderness in a place not often visited by people. In this way, when someone stumbles upon a new encampment, it'll look and feel natural. Like it has been built there over time, by someone. It shouldn’t feel like it just magically spawned one day.
Similarly, if some ancient evil decides to take residence in the mountains, it may head to an area not often traveled and begin digging out cave structures. Eventually, it'll make its home there.
However, PC's who encounter the cave system early enough can notify the town, build up defenses, and scare the evil away or whatever else. It's through these types of explorations that people have the ability to change the direction the story is heading.
With all of that said, the level designers are working on key areas we call “scenes”. These are important locations that, while they may be in different locations on each server, are likely to exist on all servers. These are areas that we’ve created specifically for some visual effect, or for some specific role in the storyline. So not everything is procedurally generated, but a lot of it is.
Ah cool, I like that, for example you could burn down a village and 60% of the NPCs would become 'refugees' and 40% could make a bandit camp?
and remember to make the birth rate far greater than the average natural death rate. injecting a couple thousand psyico MMO players into the world will have a... detremental effect of population growth of the NPCs.
Uau :o
For someone like me that understands 0 of programming, Caspian's post is really inspiring hehe... Really sounds like the Cardinal Engine in the SAO anime ahahahahah
http://i1351.photobucket.com/albums/p795/SilDarklight/Chronicles%20of%20Elyria/Forum/Sigs/Luccheno%20600x100altzpsuev3knqe.jpg
