What Procedural Worlds are Good for

[demagogue]

I don't want to derail Sotha's thread, so I'll move the discussion here to its own thread.

It's on the Procedural World engine Miguel Cepero is working on.

 

Some of you may think this is very cool...

 

http://procworld.blo...-buildings.html

That's a pretty inspiring video!

 

I've been following that blog for a little while. I LOVE the idea of a Minecraft-like procedurally-generated world, but where it's an open world on par with something like Skyrim, and you could just walk and let it generate forever, with terrain and models and villages and NPCs. I mean just pause to think about how epic that would be.

 

And if it were moddable like Minecraft so people could put in their own tweaks and make any kind of FPS or RPG or adventure game in that world (like people are doing in Minecraft)... and maybe if the world could be directly modifiable (like digging holes, gathering materials, & building buildings; we'd have to think about how that would work though) ... But if a game anywhere remotely like that came out of this, that would IMO be close to the perfect game of the century, well decade anyway.

 

Heh, sorry... I shouldn't derail the thread. But every time I see a new development from that blog I get all giddy about it all over again.

 

Edit: And holy crap this quote!

Well now I'm totally distracted by this blog again.

I don't mind thread derailing if the topic is interesting enough...

 

Off-topic:

Procedurally generated world sounds very interesting at first, but they would need also a really interesting procedurally generated AI, economics, and that sort of stuff. You know, stuff that runs there and makes the world interesting. It is a game and it needs gameplay, challenge and balance.

 

And after a while, there can only be as many occurences as the coder could figure out and ultimately, I'm afraid, it would be boring in the end.

 

Sort-of GTA4, which is a city life simulator that stuns you at first with all the stuff that is going on: cops chasing criminals, people receiving phone calls, taxis, fire trucks and ambulances doing their jobs... But ultimately, the world is rather boring in the end and there is not so many ways to interact with it, and there is actually no challenge. It's a sandbox you play in for a while and then you get bored. First you see the versatility and are in awe. Then you see the limits and go do something else.

You don't think about what the original coders can do. You think about what the modders can do on the platform. Don't think GTA4; think Minecraft, where there are hundreds of gameplay mods, adventure maps, RPG-like variations... All the coders need to do is get the basic pieces in, ability to free-build in the world, combat, a little economy like you say, maybe make it multiplayer, then make the whole engine open source, where anything can be easily changed & it's easy to share & revert branches, and let the fans take it from there. (And as Minecraft shows, being open source doesn't stop people from still buying it.)

 

Also IMO Minecraft is the one game that competes with us & T2 FMs for storytelling fan made maps, the only difference being that Minecraft maps are made out of lego-blocks so you can't take them all that seriously; it can kill the atmosphere. But storytelling maps like that in a Skyrim looking world, now we're talking! And now the mapper doesn't have to spend time in an editor building the world. It's procedurally generated in a few minutes, he either takes over a PG village or builds his own, and then he can spend all his time on the story & gameplay. Anyway, where I think this system would shine is for story-telling maps like Minecraft has now, not so much the vanilla game itself -- except for some people that will be happy just free-building castles in-game, fighting monsters, and finding hidden dungeons to explore, like Minecraft. But the fan storytelling maps would be the real prize, that and some multiplayer games people make for each other.

Sure, but...

Hundreds of gameplay mods is not necessarily a good thing. I wanted a fresh Fallout 3 experience... Which mods to choose? Some of them are utter crap breaking balance and other things, some are brilliant. It is difficult to choose from a horde of mods. It is easy for one to think that the vanilla experience is thus the primary one, modded comes second. Trial and error searching for good mods for games is a terrible chore and it is easier to simply pick another game.

 

My main point, I think, is that procedurally created world is bound to be a sandbox world. For me, sandbox games are bound to get very repetitive. Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3... All of them are great at start, but after awhile you have seen it all and they don't throw any more new things at you.

 

Building a different village layout from same village pieces will not help. Storytelling mechanics won't help, if your options are always: Travel to location A. Kill / get dingus A. Travel to location B. Talk to someone, complete quest.

 

Add procedurality into this won't make the game interesting. I think what games overall need nowadays, is some new options to interact with the world. And every play session should have something small but new thrown at the player.

 

Give me a second and I'll edit in my response to that because I want to get at what I think is so special about this project.

 

Edit: Ok... My initial response is your comment isn't thinking about the Minecraft modding scene. I don't think Procedural Generation by itself is so much, nor is sandbox play by itself so much... I agree Fallout3, Oblivion, Skyrim, GTA4, all of them can get dull... because it's so repetitive, but also because you can't really change *anything* in the world, and also there's almost no real interactivity -- you can fight some guys, and pick up loot that doesn't do anything. Once in a blue moon you can frob a lever.

 

A game like Minecraft is different though, in just the way you were mentioning. You can interact with the world itself -- something Miguel's engine is taking from it. It means you can change every little thing in the world, so suddenly the entire world itself is interactable -- carving paths through forests, cutting lumber to build a ladder or a boat to travel down the river, then you can cut a canal to the castle you've built in-game and build a moat around it, and put lots of secrets in the castle, etc... Then you look at something like the Tecnic pack... The level of interaction is staggering, something like 600 individual objects that all do something to you or in the world, and you can combine them in infinite ways to do a billion different jobs. Then you could build an entire city in the world and populate them with all these gizmos and let other people explore it.

 

What procedural generation adds to this is now you have a pre-made world to start shaping from there. If you had a freely changeable world without a world to change (or always the same initial world), it wouldn't be worth as much. It's the 2 pieces together -- procedural generation & freely changeable -- that is magic I think. It not like the open world games like Oblivion & Fallout IMO, where it's just recycling the same kinds of quests but the world itself is static. Being able to change the world adds a whole new dimension of interaction I think. Also just being in the world with other people is special. We had a TTLG Minecraft group where we built a city together, we all had our houses & stuff like a bank & post office, and we worked together to build security, or go exploring or fighting together, etc... There's something special when you can change the world like that. The only downside, I mentioned from the start, is it's just these lego blocks. But if the world were like Oblivion or Skyrim and I could freely dig a hole or cave out with a shovel, cut down trees, build our own houses from timber & bricks (I'm sure he'll simplify it a little, but it'll be realistic houses)... It would have been even more special.

[Sotha]

But if the world were like Oblivion or Skyrim and I could freely dig a hole or cave out with a shovel, cut down trees, build our own houses from timber & bricks (I'm sure he'll simplify it a little, but it'll be realistic houses)... It would have been even more special.

 

Agreed.

 

Okay, let us assume we have minecraft(*) with oblivion graphics and multiplayer. Thus we have a freely changeable virtual world that you can hang around in with your friends and strangers. (* I admit I've never played MC and my knowledge is very thin on this.)

 

But what is the game? What is the challenge? What is the aim? It is a sandbox game, thus without an overarching goal. It is a multiplayer game, so you approach the nearby player and say "Hail, noble knight!" And he says: "OMG N00b 3lit3z haxorz skilllllllz!!111"

 

I'm probably old fashioned, but to stay with a game there must be a motivation and a purpose to do the things I do in the game. An arching story with choices that makes a difference, with challenging obstacles that require me to make important decisions to get forward.

[demagogue]

With the vanilla game it's usually about just free-building some castle, even better if it's with a group. But the real actual game comes with the adventure maps people release. The goal is to go through their adventure map and do whatever they have you do... Like I was saying not too different from our FMs. Exploring, solving puzzles, fighting, digging & making stuff...

 

Like any fan made game, it varies a lot by the personality of the author. But they give you objectives you have to meet... And often you have the sandbox stuff still going on (monsters spawning, environmental effects, etc) around the scripted adventure they write. Here's an example.

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OcXkizTXlI

[jaxa]

I'm probably old fashioned, but to stay with a game there must be a motivation and a purpose to do the things I do in the game. An arching story with choices that makes a difference, with challenging obstacles that require me to make important decisions to get forward.

 

RADIANTQUEST!!!11

 

Yeah, I know.

Edited September 19, 2012 by jaxa

[SeriousToni]

I want a game of this - now!

http://procworld.blogspot.de/2012/01/introducing-voxel-studio.html

[Psychomorph]

I'm probably old fashioned, but to stay with a game there must be a motivation and a purpose to do the things I do in the game. An arching story with choices that makes a difference, with challenging obstacles that require me to make important decisions to get forward.

 

Reason why I don't like open world sandbox games.

[demagogue]

Sandbox *by itself* can get dull, granted.. But an objective-driven quest (in a similar form to our FMs), with sandbox still going on *around it* is very cool. This is my argument.

[elwing]

this one looks also neat:

http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=1837

[Professor Paul1290]

I think it's really limiting to assume that procedurally generated worlds need to be sandboxes as I don't think that's necessarily true. Sandbox games tend to be the more popular and obvious use of procedurally generated content, but it's not like the technique is bound to that genre.

 

Many Roguelikes use procedurally generated content of some kind, and they're not really sandbox games. On the contrary, they're games with goals, challenges, and balance. They generally have set goals that are set by the developer and are not very dynamic, but the stuff between the where you start and your goal can often involve a lot or random content and procudural generation.

 

Some genre's that aren't really sandbox games have been using some form of lightweight procedural generation for a long time, even if we don't often call it such.

This is fairly common in ARPGs or "Diablo-alikes".

Some strategy games also apply random or procedurally generated content as well X-Com: UFO Defense being a classic example.

 

Agreed.

 

Okay, let us assume we have minecraft(*) with oblivion graphics and multiplayer. Thus we have a freely changeable virtual world that you can hang around in with your friends and strangers. (* I admit I've never played MC and my knowledge is very thin on this.)

 

But what is the game? What is the challenge? What is the aim? It is a sandbox game, thus without an overarching goal. It is a multiplayer game, so you approach the nearby player and say "Hail, noble knight!" And he says: "OMG N00b 3lit3z haxorz skilllllllz!!111"

 

I'm probably old fashioned, but to stay with a game there must be a motivation and a purpose to do the things I do in the game. An arching story with choices that makes a difference, with challenging obstacles that require me to make important decisions to get forward.

 

As I mentioned above, you don't necessarily have to pair procedurally generated worlds with procedurally generated goals. It's not really a black and white thing, a lot of games use some kind of random or procedurally generated content to varying degrees, and the games we call "procedurally generated" are just games that use more of it.

 

On the topic of goals, there are a variety of different ways to make goals dynamic while still keeping them as goals. Maybe you don't let them emerge purely out of a simulation, but you can definitely do better than writing everything by hand.

 

Generally a game is going to have a single, very general, and somewhat vague overarching goal that defines the overall "plot" the game. Unless you're making some kind of pure sandbox game or something like that you're always going to have that. It's probably going to be something like "save the world" or maybe "win the war" or something really general like that. However, the sub-goals that lead you to that ultimate goal don't really have to be as set in stone.

I've already mentioned Roguelikes as doing this quite a bit, but there are some other specific examples outside that genre as well.

 

One example is how Soldak's Din's Curse and Drox Operative handle goals. They have "quests" like any other RPG and these quests have a lot of elements that are written by hand, but the way they use the hand written elements is a bit more dynamic.

For example, Din's Curse has the idea of mobs grouping together occasionally gaining higher status sometimes by killing each other. When mobs gather on a given floor and become organized, that is where "kill this group of mobs" come from. When mobs kill or overthrow each other and gain status, that's where "kill this boss" eventually comes from. When they eventually gather enough to come to the surface and attack the town, that's where "protect the town" comes from.

This by itself is relatively simple as you have a set of pre-made events that may occur randomly, and that by itself that isn't all that interesting. However, these games do something else to take this idea even further, they arrange these events in chains of "cause and effect" that may affected or interrupted by the player or each other. This means that what starts as a series of pre-made events that get put into the world randomly can eventually mix with each other and what the player does to create even more situations.

For example, maybe the RNG decides that a mob kills another mob and "levels" up. This is more or less arbitrary to start with, but this sets off a series of events that may eventually turn out different depending on how other events turn out. If the player chooses to ignore this mob, or simply doesn't notice this mob, this mob may eventually become more powerful as long as it doesn't get killed off by the player or another mob. If this happens, and it might not, this mob may eventually become a boss. A boss might make a doomsday device, they might gather an army, they might send some of their minions to the surface to cause trouble, or they might all of those as well as a few other things. Maybe the player will pay attention to the new boss and kill him off, or maybe they'll be too pre-occupied with other things. Maybe the boss may be overthrown by another new boss, and the army changes mob type or dissolve completely.

Now when you have many of these "cause-and-effect" chains going on and branching off at the same time, with things like mobs organizing and causing uprisings, food poisoning raising goods prices and killing the populace, merchants getting killed or setting up shop, and random storms/curses, you can get a lot of mileage out of what originally starts out as a relatively small number of well understood pre-made events.

It's up to the player to attack these problems and fulfilling a set of "victory conditions" to achieve the large overarching goal.

 

Another somewhat less structured way of doing things is to not try to name "goals" or "quests" all that specifically, but only explicitly name a large overarching goal and dynamically put things in the player's way that create interesting situations. This way, short term sub-goals emerge as the player plans his way towards his ultimate goal. This is more or less how some roguelikes and some strategy games work.

To name a specific example. AI War: Fleet Command does this a lot. In that game you always have the goal of defeating the evil AI, but the stuff that gets in your way is subject to a lot of random number generator as well as elements that interact with each other to create even more unusual combinations. You may encounter an enemy that is powerful against a certain unit type, or might do something very bad if you attempt a certain action carelessly, and a variety of these might be found in the same system where their effects overlap. Maybe the AI might decide to attack or do something else on top of what you are already encountering and cause problems that overlap with those you already have.

Again, you still keep an large and very general overarching goal. and you have relatively simple pre-made objects and behaviors that can interact with each other to multiply the amount of variety you can provide with them.

AI War: Fleet Command combines this with a variety of options for starting conditions, available units, AI behaviors, and in-game events. This allows the player to set up a variety of games that have a tendency to behave differently on top of the variety the game provides already.

Edited September 20, 2012 by Professor Paul1290

[SeriousToni]

Placing random humanoide creatures you can slay en masse always worked for me as a good game objective / quest.

[demagogue]

I agree with what Paul said.

 

Dwarf Fortress had a sort of good balance with a procedurally-gen'd world. Every season you'd get a new influx of Dwarfs you'd have to bring in, and more and tougher monsters coming at you. You had to keep leveling-up your fortress with the world around you. And there were long term goals like getting a nobility and all the jobs accounted for, etc. So you always knew what tasks you needed to be doing right now.

 

Or a game like Civilization is probably the consummate game with a procedurally generated world but objective-driven. The world is always different, but your end goal was always the same to conquer the other nations.

 

It just turns out my favorite strategy for this, to balance procedural world with objectives, is what Minecraft has been doing, which is having adventure maps with storytelling and clear objectives and architecture the mapper built, BUT the map also has all these sandboxy systems still running too, as they always do... You still have random monsters spawning, and you still have to find resources to build armor & supplies, you can trade with villagers, etc (sometimes there are rules in the map that you can only break certain blocks or not craft though).

[Sotha]

Yep, those roguelikes always were interesting games due to the randomness and the finality of death. Those games had great replay value.

 

The RIT system brings some of this into TDM, the AI is never exactly the same. Also PB utilized location changing loot and objectives.

 

I wonder if some of the other good sides of those could be brought in? Say the mission changes a bit after each replay. Access routes would be randomized: the mapper designs 3-4 possible entries to the location. Play session 1 the sewers would be collapsed, balcony heavily guarded and back door quiet. Play session 2 the player gets unlucky and all the routes are either blocked or guarded: clever measures are needed. Play session 3: is easy like pie: guards are sleeping in their posts. Implementing a few changing interlocking things would not seem to be an enormous task... Gotta think about it.

[demagogue]

There was talk in the past about an AI "Idle Vocation" system (AI behavior in their idle state; tied with the pathing & idle animation systems), which would be a hook for AI to have their own quasi-open objectives -- maids go (designated) room to room cleaning, cooks stay in a designated "kitchen" and pick up jars to pour into pots, maybe walk into a pantry to get food and bring back, etc. I mean Springheel was already starting things like the AI playing cards animation sequence, as a set-piece state you could put AI in.

 

But then somebody a mentioned a generic system for *any* kind of sequence, so it's not just the AI following animations but "accomplishing tasks", and you could give conditions for it right through DR (not having to go through the sourcecode every time)... like you give conditions for the AI to look for action-calling objects (like exploring designated areas for certain designated objects, or like markers) and if they saw them they'd perform some animation and accomplish some "task" there (e.g., on the object, taking it, etc), then continue on according to their assignments (using the object they picked up elsewhere). Or if it were AI, you could make the AI have to talk to certain people, then carry the "information" to other AI. Or it could be on markers, where the AI sees a whole scene, that causes them to want to do other things. With something that general, you could make AI from all sorts of walks of life going freely about their "daily life" in their idle period, not just following path markers, which wouldn't just make the world a lot more believable, but it adds a lot of randomness & variation to every game.

 

Edit: It's sort of like a Conversation system, with the difference being that a Conversation system is specifically triggered, and it doesn't have forks by conditions. It just follows the script. A Vocation system is general behavior throughout the AI's idle state, and it can go down different forks by conditions (if it sees certain objects, etc), and it will perpetually cycle through its various assignments until alerted or released (to standard idle behavior, or maybe another vocation).

 

I don't know if anyone will ever get around to coding such a system, but I thought it was a very cool idea and would love to play with it if it got up and running.

[demagogue]

On the topic of procedurally generated worlds, take a look at Space Engine.

http://en.spaceengine.org/

 

Here's a post I wrote on it:

I'm still on my space exploration high.

This, Space Engine, is more like a sandbox astronomy sim, like Celestia on steroids, but holy shit: http://en.spaceengine.org/

 

 

 

It's free. In a nutshell, visit any planet around any star in any galaxy. Descend to the surface (a bit like Infinity). Explore the mountains & rivers. Speed up time & watch the sky show. Search for life.

 

I believe its location is a seed for some statistical engine, so when other people out there find planets, you can visit the same ones they find & still have trillions of systems & planets generate-able. Maybe that's a bit gimmicky for some people, but I'm totally a sucker for it, and one has to admit it's very pretty to look at, as far as scientifically accurate astronomy sims go. You guys ought to try it out. It also gets the spirit of Carl Sagan's seal of approval.

 

 

And another post where I connected it to this thread:

 

What would be epic IMO is if he could combine forces with this guy -- http://procworld.blogspot.com/ -- who is designing a general procedural world generator that goes into a lot more detail with the features, so nature looks like nature, and you could have a very rare percent with intelligent life with buildings, villages, or even futuristic cities you can explore. That guy is also putting Minecraft like elements into his proc-worlds, so you can arbitrarily deform them and dig caves, cut trees, build houses, etc.

 

 

Add some survival elements and it'd be like the perfect survival sim. Go out in the universe, find an inhabitable planet at any level of development (from only plant life, to animals, to intelligent life at the primitive to very advanced stages), and try to survive on it... plant food, hunt animals, build shelter, explore your surroundings... All procedurally generated but commonly seeded so you could put up your finds for others to visit, all scientifically grounded (except for the traveling part). Sounds epic to me anyway. I'm liking just the pure exploration part alone, but adding that part to it would be amazing... I just can't help noticing this other procedurally-generated world project going on, and wondering if they two could be cross-polinated if someone had access to their code & worked on them enough. (I don't have any illusions that their engines are very different though, and that wouldn't be a trivial project at all. I think it'd take gobs of work; I just think it'd be worth it.)

[Sotha]

On the topic of procedurally generated worlds, take a look at Space Engine.

http://en.spaceengine.org/

 

 

Hm. I wonder if the system allows manual sculpting of planets. That would be very handy for generating skyboxes for TDM missions. Terragen only allows 960x960 maximum resolution images...

[demagogue]

Voxel Farm would be much better for that, and you can sculpt in VF. The planet generation is actually the weakest part of Space Engine and only looks good a few kilometers above the ground, or from space basically (hence my dream to combine it with Voxel Farm.) The sky in SE naturally looks cool though.

 

Edit: Also, in case you don't want to dig through that Voxel Farm site, the guy making it has confirmed that he's going to make a Minecraft like game out of it. IMO it will blow Minecraft out of the water when it's ready. I mean it's Skyrim-like terrain & architecture that's completely modifiable ... You can cut it out & add to it individual blocks at a time, individual bricks if you wanted. Looking at the Cathedrals people make in Minecraft, I can only imagine what they'd make in Voxel Farm... And it's going to be in Skyrim-like procedurally generated terrain. It's amazing on so many levels.

[7upMan]

It might be worth mentioning that Limit Theory, a project that already secured its financing on Kickstarter, is massively using procedural generation to generate... well, everything, really, except music and SFX. Though the wallpapers don't really reflect this atm, the planets will look quite nicely (for the first steps, please have a look at the first link). Please keep in mind that the latest entry on this is quite old, and when the full game will be released sometime in 2014, planetary surfaces will look much better.

 

Also, LT's creator draws much inspiration from Giliam de Carpentier's Scape. Sure,

, but this is nice enough, I think. Also, Outerra (

) and

haven't been mentioned here.

[Sotha]

The problem with sandbox games is that you are free to do what you want: ultimately there has to be some motivation in the game: some goal. Reason to go forward. Some challenge to beat. A mountain to climb.

 

I need a reason and a challenge to play. Sandbox games never really interested me, but rogue-like procedurally generated perma-death games are very intriguing. They are difficult, challenging yet always changing. And since the risk of death is so solid, you'll be on your toes and very worried when a deadly situation comes up. Or when you see something unusual. And sometimes it looks like your fate is sealed and by a clever decision you escape just to go a little bit forward. Great moment!

 

It is easy to pick up, enjoy for a while, die and then later start again for an unique experience. But commercial perma-death games fit poorly in the era of easy modern casual gaming.

[demagogue]

I think sandbox can mean two different things, a mechanic and a type of game. Elite-style games and possibly some 4X games have a sandbox mechanic, there's no set path just an open world, but you still have defined goals -- build your empire 4X, or your career with trade-mine-scavenge-pirate'ing. And then there's sandbox games like Minecraft where you just build and there's no real goal, although people do invent their own goals sometimes (it works for multiplayer, exploring & building a city together with friends, and adventure maps) -- although there are goals you can go after like getting to the end and fighting the Ender dragon that the game has in there, but that part isn't as strong as a well scripted game, just something nice to do while you're in the game doing other things.

 

Edit: Survival games are maybe another category, from Survival Quest Z to Day-Z, possibly Dwarf Fortress (early Minecraft to an extent). You do have a goal, survive & build protection for yourself, but you don't always know where you're going or when you've "arrived", or what to do after you've arrived. I think survival mechanics are fun, but tricky for the full game.

 

So anyway, I'm a fan of the Elite-style sandbox mechanics, that are still a goal-oriented game, which calls for a living economy you can participate in and manipulate (resources get mined, refined, processed into goods, sold & consumed, and disposed, and supply & demand drives prices and everybody's behavior at every level of the economy). Hardwar is my favorite example because everything is packed together in cities on a single planet. It's the right scale IMO (I wish there were a version for Medici style medieval cities), and all the bigger if you add other planets with their own cities. It's addicting to me for the same reason Civilization is... One more move and you can build your empire a little bigger, or knock a rival down a little more, and you keep going until you've conquered everything and are king of the world or universe or whatever. So you still have a driving motivation and goal you're after. If anything, I think 4X & Elite-style games have an even more compelling goal than even scripted games, because your own ambition is driving yourself rather than some plot device.

 

---------------

 

Edit: Rogue-like is another thing. I like it sometimes, but it doesn't drive me like Elite-style, because I don't know exactly what I'm after. A quasi-Rogue like game I liked was Transcendence. I think what I like about the Elite style is that it's not about finding & playing new territory. You have the set world right at the start that doesn't really change. Your goal is personal power within that world that you take over in any order you want one bit at a time. It just fits my personality better I think.

[demagogue]

Speaking of Limit Theory, I'm reading Miguel Cepero's blog on Voxel Farm, and Josh Parnell the guy doing Limit Theory is posting. It's fun to see them interacting and trading ideas and inspiration.

[demagogue]

I just read this on Miguel's blog. I thought I'd read every idea for a game before, but this is something that honestly never occurred to me but sounds very cool how he describes it. Make your own AI & creatures in-game by painting its bulk & skin on pre-scripted skeletons...

 

Let's say you want to build some sort of menacing quadruped to guard your ruins. You could start by picking a skeleton for it. Then you could use a brush that does muscles and hang some meat on the bones. The brush would be smart, so it would create a nice muscle definition depending on where you paint.

 

Then you could use a brush that adds fat, or maybe you will skip this one at all since you want this creature to be very lean.

 

And last you would use a brush that adds skin and hair. This brush would be only a few voxels thick.

 

Voxels are well suited for this kind of layered constructs. Once the creature is done it will be stored and rendered as polygons, but all the information that came from the voxel layers (the bulging muscles, the blobs of fat) will be there.

 

For what it's worth, the last video on laying down architecture is pretty cool too. In the comments, I recommended he use the TDM system for rotating objects before you place them & he acknowledged it. I really like following this project. It's all very cool to me.

 

http://procworld.blo...r-may-2013.html

[Obsttorte]

The idea is not bad at all. Basically I think that it would be a good feature in general to only hint what you are want and let the editor handle the rest, with some slide modification possibilities afterwards. Just think about how much time mappers spend in DR to create hallways and such, so connection pieces, that has only a minor effect on gameplay but still should look good.

 

I mean you could just *say* give me a hall with a stone texture on walls and floor, some boards at the top, support, some banners or so on the walls plus doors here, here and here and add me some torches and voila, done.

[demagogue]

If it's as easy to build in-game as Minecraft, then you'll get a horde of people that would never build in an editor building things in-game, so there will be tons and tons of content. But the advantage of this over Minecraft is that people can then make prefabs out of their whole structures (or modular pieces) & share them online, and you can work with full-on pieces in the modular way we talk about here. So much potential in this project; it'll be bigger than Minecraft if it plays its cards right.

 

Edit: Ah yes, also, he has a "grammar" approach where the engine procedurally generates towns with culture-appropriate buildings according to rules that you can tweak in the code too to give you the type you want without the micromanagement.