On 1/16/2012 8:36 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
I like minecraft's take on this.
Julian
in which particular way?...
well, Minecraft is a fairly interesting game, and allows a lot of room
for people building stuff, ...
the downside is:
how well does the technology work for considerably different gameplay
styles? (not based on mining and building)
what about world voxel density?
...
for example, making voxels 1/2 the size would lead (very likely) to an
8x memory-requirement increase, and 1/4 (250cm) could require 64x the
memory.
a similarly sized world-space with a 1.5 inch (~ 3.75cm) voxel size
would require around 18963x as much memory.
some people have tried "fundamentally different" ways of dealing with
voxels (namely "Sparse Voxel Octtrees" and ray-casting), but these in
turn have different tradeoffs (on current HW there are significant
problems regarding resolution and performance). I suspect it "may be a
few years" before this strategy really becomes practical.
a big issue though is that it probably still wont make creating of
compelling worlds all that much easier (so, probably a lot more
random-generation and similar, with its inherent pros and cons).
I guess it may ultimately be a bit of a "wait and see" thing.
On 17/01/2012, at 2:31 PM, BGB wrote:
On 1/16/2012 6:47 PM, Casey Ransberger wrote:
Top post. Heightmapping can go a really long way. Probably not news
though:)
I am still not certain, since a lot of this has a lot more to do with
my own project than with general issues in computing.
I had messed with a few technologies already.
height-maps (long ago, not much used since then, generally randomized).
the issue was mostly one of being "not terribly interesting", but it
makes sense if one wants terrain (and is "fairly cheap" in terms of
memory use and performance impact).
a more advanced variety would be to combine a height-map with a
tile-map, where the terrain generator would also vary the texture-map
to give a little more interest. I have considered this as a possibility.
also tried randomly generated voxel terrain (similar to Minecraft,
using perlin noise). issues were of being difficult to integrate well
with my existing technology, and being very expensive in terms of
both rendering and memory usage (particularly for storing
intermediate meshes). one may need to devote about 500MB-1GB of RAM
to the problem to have a moderately sized world with (with similar
specifics to those in Minecraft).
I suspect that, apart from making something like Minecraft, the
technology is a bit too expensive and limited to really be all that
"generally useful" at this point in time and on current hardware (I
suspect, however, it will probably be much more relevant on future HW).
I also tried randomly generated grid-based areas (basically, stuff is
built from pre-made parts and randomly-chosen parts are put on a
grid). I had also tried combining this with maze-generation
algorithms. the results were "functional" but also "nothing to get
excited about". the big drawback was that I couldn't really think of
any way to make the results of such a grid based generator
"particularly interesting" (this is I think more so with a
first-person viewpoint: such a structure is far less visually
interesting from the inside than with a top-down or isometric view).
it could work if one were sufficiently desperate, but I doubt it
would be able to hold interest of players for all that long absent
"something else of redeeming value".
the "main maps" in my case mostly use a Quake/Doom3/... style maps,
composed mostly of entities (defined in terms of collections of
key/value pairs representing a given object), "brushes" (convex
polyhedra), "patches" (Bezier Surfaces), and "meshes" (mostly
unstructured polygonal meshes).
these would generally be created manually, by placing every object
and piece of geometry visible in the world, but this is fairly
effort-intensive, and simply running head first into it tends to
quickly drain my motivation (resulting in me producing worlds which
look like "big boxes with some random crap in them").
sadly, random generation not on a grid of some sort is a much more
complex problem (nor random generation directly in terms of
unstructured or loosely-structured geometry).
fractals exist and work well on things like rocks or trees or
terrain, but I haven't found a good way to apply them to "general"
map generation problem (such as generating an interesting place to
run around in and battle enemies, and get to the exit).
the "problem domain" is potentially best suited to some sort of maze
algorithm, but in my own tests, this fairly quickly stopped being all
that interesting. the "upper end" I think for this sort of thing was
likely the .Hack series games (which had a lot of apparently randomly
generated dungeons).
it is sad that I can't seem to pull off maps even half as interesting
as those (generally created by hand) in commercial games from well
over a decade ago. I can have a 3D engine which is technically much
more advanced (or, at least, runs considerably slower on much faster
hardware with moderately more features), but apart from reusing maps
made by other people for other games, I can't make it even a small
amount nearly as "interesting" or "inspiring".
On Jan 16, 2012, at 8:45 AM, David Barbour <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Consider offloading some of your creativity burden onto your
computer. The idea is:
It's easier to recognize and refine something interesting than to
create it.
So turn it into a search, recognition, and refinement problem, and
automate creation. There are various techniques, which certainly
can be combined:
* constraint programming
* generative grammar programming
* genetic programming
* seeded fractals
You might be surprised about how much of a world can be easily
written with code rather than mapping. A map can be simplified by
marking regions up with code and using libraries of procedures.
Code can sometimes be simplified by having it read a simple map or
image.
Remember, the basic role of programming is to automate that which
bores you.
Regards,
Dave
On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 4:18 PM, BGB <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I am generally personally stuck on the issue of how to make
"interesting" 3D worlds for a game-style project while lacking
in both personal creativity and either artistic skill or a team
of artists to do it (creating decent-looking 3D worlds
generally requires a fair amount of effort, and is in-fact I
suspect somewhat bigger than the effort required to make a
"passable" 3D model of an object in a 3D modeling app, since at
least generally the model is smaller and well-defined).
it seems some that creativity (or what little of it exists) is
stifled by it requiring a large amount of effort (all at once)
for the activity needed to express said creativity (vs things
which are either easy to do all at once, or can be easily
decomposed into lots of incremental activities spread over a
large period of time).
trying to build a non-trivial scene (something which would be
"passable" in a modern 3D game) at the level of dragging around
and placing/resizing/... cubes and/or messing with individual
polygon-faces in a mapper-tool is sort of a motivation killer
(one can wish for some sort of "higher level" way to express
the scene).
meanwhile, writing code, despite (in the grand scale) requiring
far more time and effort, seems to be a lot more enjoyable
(but, one can't really build a world in code, as this is more
the mapper-tool's domain).
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