Developers Corner

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Can this mojorworld application be applied to a MMORPG?

Creating a big world with a fractals seems to be quite easy, but as they say, the devil's in the details.   If you and your development team has never been in an area, how have you playtested it?  How do you keep players from exploiting terain features if you've never seen the terrain?

I vote for option 3.  I see a mix of the two, combined with player interactable/alterable terrain as a viable option.

Player interactable is like Civilzation where the players themselves can alter and modify the land.  Player housing could be an example of this, but I think technology exists for players to make larger scale or scope alterations without destroying game balance or ruining the world's consistancy.... it is an idea to ponder anyways...

Rendering terrain is useless unless there is something to do.  I get a kick out MMO's bragging about landmass size when much of it is empty, scenery, or simply just filled with wandering mobs.  In this case, it is not the size, but what you do with what you got.  Points of interest is what matters.

Take Perfect World MMO as an example.  The terrain is gorgeous.  There are canyons and mesas with waterfalls and all folks after level 30 can fly.  But what do they do with this incredibly well rendered 3-D scenery?  Nothing!  The only thing there are wandering mobs if you are lucky.

Give me caves, ruins, enchanted forests, toxic wastes, anomaly zones, ancient battle grounds, landfills, points of interest rich in lore, history, etc and most of all with some point to it all beyond, "Kill this."

Random terrain works great for caves, dungeons, buildings and small side areas.  The same can be said for instancing.  As long as each is used with care and thought, it can breath life into a world by giving the illusion that the whole world is not formulated or pre-planned. Obviously, main dungeons and such should be crafted to preserve the world's sense of  consistancy.

That said, the over all world must be designed so that it maintains its internal consistancy which in turn fosters immersion and makes it much more easily balanced which then leads to greater depth.  That means smaller landmasses, but what areas are depicted should be fully exploreable and player interactable.

More important than all that, is a very simple fact that many devs forget: Put some REAL thought in your setting from the ground up.  Do this and the rest will follow. 

Some random dungeons can be fun, Diablo proved that.

But a totaly random world get's totaly illogical.

A design world with both designed and a few random dungeons is what I prefer.

Spawning can be a bit random too, and resources nodes. But  I mainly agree with option 1.

Originally posted by techlord

Originally posted by Mitara

Its a curious thing...

if you get an artist to create the world, you will end up with a unplayed map, with mountains everywhere and beutiful but highly impassible landscape.

If you make it random, the artists wont work for you, and the landscape will not be optimal in its design, and might not end up as beutiful as an artist can meke it.

What do you prefer?

 

An Artist Created Map unplayed and impassible? Why do you feel this?

Terrain Generation can be tedious and I'm all for automating the Random Generation prior to use in the Game. However, I'm not so much a fan of Randomly generated Terrain on the fly inside the game because the landscape should be recognizable after you pass through it a few rounds. Perhaps players may have interest in Cartography.

Techlord... just a comment... try go in to AoC (sorry) and look at the landscape there. It is very well designed by an artist, but it is also very uninteresting in its layout, and many places just impassable.

Then try go into Entropia, and see the different each area really is, and how free you can feel moving around in there. The difference is huge.

An artist created world does not have to funnel people into certain areas and make use of impassible terrain, likewise, if you put the logic into the terrain generator you could have a randomly generated world that funneled people into areas with impassible terrain. My point is that randomly generated terrain maps need not always be open and artist created worlds need not always be closed.

But I would prefer artist created, they could use a generated map as the basis and then doctor it up if they want or make it from scratch.  The reason is is even with a great terrain generator that made realistic terrain I think it would still require an artistic touch to make it interesting, and besides realistic isn't always good.