A few thoughts after playing Oblivion

[Davaris]

Yes it can. That is why in the original post I was talking about large open environments, like Oblivion. If you haven't played Oblivion or have no idea what it is, then I can see why you were confused. Haven't played Far Cry 2, but if it is one seamless world, that is what I am talking about.

 

As Josh has explained, what you are asking for will make the game engine a lot harder to use and one of the reasons why I chose the LWE, is because it is so easy to use.

 

As for your comment "I personally believe the days of corridor shooters is drawing to a close.", that is ridiculous. The best RPGs ever written used areas/levels that had to be loaded. See Fallout 1 & 2, Baldurs Gate series, any game made by Troika. Fallout 3 had open areas feature, but did not make the game better than the games that came before it.

[Paul Thomas]

Fallout 3 required loading when going into any structure or subway station. Far Cry 2 does a load map when you eventually venture further south after you finish the first missions for the factions. You'd have to load going into that area and load leaving that area, they just tend to keep all the missions within that specific loaded area, but you could venture back if you wanted to.

 

I've never played World of Warcraft, but I thought I've seen loading screens once you get a certain distance and have to load the next block of terrain. I could be wrong, but like I said, I've never played World of Warcraft; I've seen people play it but never payed much attention to it.

 

My project requires terrain similar to Fallout 3, but I also don't want to have the player load each interior, and it defeats some of the proposed features of the game. Therefore, I'm going with terrain loading instead of interior loading, and most likely will use a strict set of heightmaps to ensure the terrains are seamless. I have yet to get to that portion of my project but it's something that's always on my mind.

[Scott Richmond]

There are a great number of ways to do it. Oblivion/Fallout3 uses a 'Cell' system similar to your concept Eternal Crisis, with the exception that it loads the 8 cells around you procedurally and you can therefore roam between the cells without a loading screen. The problem it had, and this is most evident in-game, is that if you get to a position to view several cells ahead (a distant mountain) then it can look quite bad as it is little more than a tiled texture and terrain.

[Marcus]

As for your comment "I personally believe the days of corridor shooters is drawing to a close.", that is ridiculous. The best RPGs ever written used areas/levels that had to be loaded. See Fallout 1 & 2, Baldurs Gate series, any game made by Troika. Fallout 3 had open areas feature, but did not make the game better than the games that came before it.

 

How many games like Fallout 1/2 and Baldur's Gate games do you see now? Are those games even corridor shooters? No.

 

"The best RPGs ever written used areas/level that had to be loaded."

 

So you are saying those games were good because the levels had to be loaded or they were just good games? I'm confused at what your point is here...

[Niosop]

I was looking over the terrain shaders and the functions that are available for terrain currently. I don't think you have to make any changes for us to do implement our own psuedo-streaming. The only thing would probably be vegetation since the format isn't documented and there's no functions for loading like there is for terrain data. Expose some vegetation loading/setting functions and we'd be set.

 

To add to the above list Dragon Age: Origins was area based and it has to be one of the coolest RPGs I've played. It could have been made in LWE, as far as I can see it didn't use any technology that LWE doesn't offer, just a ton of assets.

 

Anyways, Josh, your current priorities seem to be fine to me. Single state Lua, more terrain texture layers if possible, maybe some sort of GI someday if you figure it out. I think we can do a lot right now just by swapping out terrain heightmaps, textures, and alphas in a controlled manner.

[Paul Thomas]

There are a great number of ways to do it. Oblivion/Fallout3 uses a 'Cell' system similar to your concept Eternal Crisis, with the exception that it loads the 8 cells around you procedurally and you can therefore roam between the cells without a loading screen. The problem it had, and this is most evident in-game, is that if you get to a position to view several cells ahead (a distant mountain) then it can look quite bad as it is little more than a tiled texture and terrain.

 

Yup, there seems to always be a trade-off in the world of game development, lol. I believe Fallout 3 used 512x512 terrain cells. I wanted to go their route but like you said, distant terrain looked fairly horrible, and figured I'd just use very large 4096x4096 terrain or so. Force terrain loading but at such large terrains it wouldn't be very often. I see a lot of trail and error in the future when I get to this portion of my project, lol.

[Josh]

I do like the idea of an infinite world, but if I were designing such a system...

 

-I wouldn't allow mesh modification.

-There would be a stricter "model" class. It would not be possible to make changes to the mesh hierarchy after loading a model.

-The engine would differentiate between static and dynamic objects. Static objects that are part of the scene would be be alterable in any way.

-It is likely scenes would require some kind of baking/pre-compiling step.

 

So it would really be an entirely different project. You might not realize how different the design would be, but to me it is like you are saying I should start over from scratch.

[Davaris]

How many games like Fallout 1/2 and Baldur's Gate games do you see now? Are those games even corridor shooters? No.

 

"The best RPGs ever written used areas/level that had to be loaded."

 

So you are saying those games were good because the levels had to be loaded or they were just good games? I'm confused at what your point is here...

 

The point I'm making is nifty features (like the AAA's have with all the resources they can bring to bear to solve cutting edge technical problems) do not a good game make. When you have completed your first game and try to sell it, you will understand what I am talking about. Also if you want to see an example of the only Indie RPG maker I know of that has made a living for 10+ years making and selling RPGs, look up Spiderweb Software and marvel at the high-tech engine he uses.

 

The other thing you don't seem to understand is Josh is a one man company. The companies you are comparing LWE to spend 20+ million making and marketing their games - we are minnows by comparison and so have to think creatively to make games that will sell. Josh has explained the technical difficulties involved, which would be beyond the abilities of average programmers to solve, so for now I'd take him at his word and think of a way to make your game fun without this feature.

[Josh]

It's not that hard to make, but the problem is it would make the engine into a different kind of engine. One that was highly specialized and more restrictive. Most people would not like the changes. It's also a deep-down fundamental design issue, and I am not going to scrap everything now.

[Paul Thomas]

All games will have a loading portion. Fallout 3 doesn't have terrain loading, but most of it is loading each structure/underground portion of the game, much more loading than Far Cry 2. Fallout 3 sacrificed terrain loading with structure/underground loading, and if you ask me, way more loading screens as apposed to a loading screen to load another 4096x4096 terrain. Depending on how your map is designed, it could take a player a long time to reach that point. Far Cry 2 requires no loading when entering a building and only has a single loading portion when traveling far south passed the first terrains size limit.

 

Fit the engine into your project or find another engine and/or make your own. Josh isn't blurting out sentences just to go against you, he's telling you that it basically requires another engine built for that specific need, and has no plans to change this engine drastically to fit that need.

[Davaris]

It's not that hard to make, but the problem is it would make the engine into a different kind of engine. One that was highly specialized and more restrictive. Most people would not like the changes. It's also a deep-down fundamental design issue, and I am not going to scrap everything now.

 

From what you were describing, it sounds like it would be quite difficult for the end user (us) to manage. If it ever became fool proof and easy to use, I'd be for it because I don't want to spend a lot of time on technical issues, I want to use that time to make games.

[Pixel Perfect]

I don't believe Marcus has done anything here other than vigorously explored the possibility of seamless world loading in LE, as this is obviously important to him, and as such I am certainly not going to criticise him for it. I also believe Josh has clearly stated his reasoning for not wishing to do so and I have to agree that this engine cannot be all things to all people ... as no engine can possibly do so.

 

My personal take is, whilst I would have liked to have seen all three features implemented, I am happy to sacrifice seamless loading of levels (as an inherent function of the engine) if the other two requests are likely to be implemented and consider two out of three a good result! I also believe that whilst seamless loading of levels is a nice feature, not having that would not in any way detract from game sales if the game has compelling game play (Dragon Age: Origins being a perfect example as pointed out by niosop).

 

Josh has, I believe, struck a fine balance in the design of this engine making it a highly desirable game development vehicle and I'm happy to work within the confines that brings as I don't believe (with the other two changes in place) that this prevents the successful implementation of any genre of game.

[macklebee]

well seems to me that a 25 sq mile or 64 sq km is more than enough for a world unless you are making a flight simulation type game... does anyone even have the assets or the resources to detail that much terrain? someone mentioned fallout3 which was a fairly large open expanse... but 75% of that game was loading a different map every time you went thru a door... but whatever... seems like either way that would be left up to programmer to implement not Josh.

[Josh]

Maybe LE3 will be designed that way from the start, but that's a long ways off. I do kind of like the idea.

[Flexman]

Just Cause 2 is looking really impressive with that huge open world, weather systems and cool black para-glider McGuffin. Again, another highly specialised engine. I think the Playstation 3 really excels at that kind of streaming.

 

I'm still impressed with Grand Theft Auto on the PSP.

[L B]

Trying not to be harsh, but it's hard:

• Has any of us filled a 4096x4096 map, even at the scale of 1meter/tile?
• Has any of us released a game or is really implicated in the release of a game with such a feature?

I think we're asking for things we don't need, which is a failure at being productive.

[Flexman]

Well....hmmm...I'm using a 4096 res map @ 10m per tile. I'm happy with the way things are. If I wanted to populate such a map with objects, without a good culling, grouping system it wouldn't be practical, a map would takes ages to load.

 

After chatting with a couple of very nice members of the LE community the consensus was that if there's anything really needed, it's not more features, just a few fixes, examples and documentation. Documentation, documentation, documentation. Take the whole Corona thing for example, people were trying to get them working and failing until Josh stepped up and said you don't do it like that any more, do it like this.

 

I'd love more info on vegetation data, most of my terrain is empty desert, most features are already stored as GIS data which I want to import at some point. Certainly don't want to hand-paint it all, that would take ages.

 

As for little fixes, well....vehicles, give them brakes and or the ability to make them active/inactive. Racing games are perhaps the easiest and cheesiest to produce on a new engine and it would be easy to make one in LE now there are roads and vehicles. But it would be an incentive if you could populate your starting line with vehicles that didn't roll off the track at the start. Josh is very capable and he'll get it sorted in time I'm sure.

[Josh]

I have to say, I love the idea of an infinite world streamed from the hard drive. It's a long way off, but I dream of a world like STALKER that's completely continuous.

[Scott Richmond]

I don't think its too far off. Carmack's Rage is about to pretty much remove any problems to do with textures. IMO the biggest hurdle is us, the humans. The bigger our worlds get the longer it takes to build them or the more watered down they become. I think the answer lies in perfecting procedural environments. You guys should check out the game Fuel - Its a truely HUGE world and its pulled off completely procedurally. Check out this article: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=5134

[Josh]

From the technical specs I have read of RAGE, it doesn't even allow terrains as big as what we have.

[Niosop]

This is kind of cool too, results are very pretty: http://code.google.com/p/pixelcity/

 

Josh, any chance of adding a function to TTexture that will give us a pointer to the actual raw texture data? So if we use mytexture = CreateTexture( 512, 512, TEXTURE_RGBA ) then we could call mytexture.GetTextureData and get a pointer to an array of RGBA values or something? Maybe we can already do something similar, I really don't know how it works. I'd like to procedurally generate some textures at runtime I just can't figure out a way to get access to the data to modify it.

[Scott Richmond]

From the technical specs I have read of RAGE, it doesn't even allow terrains as big as what we have.

 

Well I think your comparing two different techs here Josh. Your terrain is just that, a plane of terrain. RAGE uses one giant texture for EVERYTHING. Buildings, roads, the lot.

As far as I know you can technically make the size of the texture as large as you want. Your only constraint is space to store the thing.

[Josh]

Terrains in id tech are just a mesh made in a modeling program, so the geometry is very limited in size.

[Scott Richmond]

Terrains in id tech are just a mesh made in a modeling program, so the geometry is very limited in size.

 

*shrugs* I was talking more about the texture itself, not the geometry. My guess is that geom/polys will be Carmacks next big project after this.

[Davaris]

I have to say, I love the idea of an infinite world streamed from the hard drive. It's a long way off, but I dream of a world like STALKER that's completely continuous.

 

 

Why not go further than the Stalker people and create a map system that can wrap around onto a planet or asteroid shape? If this could be put into orbit with other planets, it would be tres cool. I am joking because it sounds ridiculously difficult, but if you came out with an engine with that capability, it would blow the competition away.