Talk about maps here!
Or pirate ghosts.
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[color=#ff0000]Project Lead[/color]
Thu, 11/19/2015 - 19:21
#1
Discuss: Moving On Up - Maps
Discuss: Moving On Up - Maps
Great update. I love to hear the technical aspects of the game making process.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Yea! Maps!
If you still have the data, you might want to make a note of the location of some of those holes. They may make good spots for extra-dimensional incursions. ^_^
I'll be looking at this again, after work.
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
Cool beans! Let's do try to avoid building any roads to nowhere. Also, roads that suddenly swerve 20 feet sideways, because a cow had a hiccup 200 years ago, are... a little annoying. I know this is New England and they never heard of urban planning on a grid... but anyway, have fun building the Sim City!
Be Well!
Fireheart
Several spots for things like that jumped out (often quite unexpectedly) even during the earliest passes, when trying to figure out things like "where can we run major roads that will not screw up plot / theme requirements but also won't be so implausible that it breaks immersion".
The biggest problem with holes, especially the small ones, is that the engine is built to handle "landscape at a distance" efficiently by taking smoothed averages. When most of your dataset has a "baseline" of about 32k, and you have a spot that says "0", the average is still only at 16k. Or well over a hundred meters down. This resulted in fascinating canyons that got worse as you moved away, and vanished when you moved closer. Neat to watch, but maybe not so good for a playable game...
And I swear before man and sheep, hoof on heart, that the bird *was already there*.
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Conveniently, there have been several points in the lore at which *parts* of the city have been... "wiped clean", as it were. Not as if anyone did an analysis of the lore's catastrophic events and how the civic planning of any particular era would have affected the build-out of parts of the city that happened during it. Er... *flashything* No, sir or madam as the case may be, we have no evidence of abnormal cattle behavior in this area in the past.
More seriously... how much of it will make it into the final result is more or less impossible to predict and depends on what actually ends up *working*, but I was not the only person around who had, shall we say, a penchant for attention to details of this sort. But the concept of "start with reality and modify what is needed to make it a good story" was very much in play, and presumably still is.
So if there is something like a road to nowhere, it'll be there for an actual reason (and probably have specific lore associated), rather than just "enh, make it go that-a-way". If a road acts like a cowpath, it will probably be because it *was* a cowpath, for some reason it actually survived into the modern day... and it doesn't hinder enjoyment of the game.
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Aww...but map holes are part of the fun! How will the flyers get outside the world and do weird things, like hover underground with a helmet-fin and play landshark? ;)
That actually did spark a thought, however. In superhero fiction, there are plenty of characters who, one way or another, travel "outside" the normal world. You've got dimension-walkers, teleporters, phase-shifters, light- and electrical-travelers...a whole slew of people who, in their various fashions, might sometimes have a very different perspective on the physical world. What if there were a completely legit and supported way to travel outside the game map and do stuff, possibly for specific missions. Say, you've been phaseshifted, and can't interact with normal objects, but you can pass through walls to reach isolated areas. You're converted to magical energy and follow a ley line under the map. You're lightning flowing through power-lines.
I'm a worldbreaker by nature and habit--finding holes approaches a hobby. I kind of like the idea of sharing the view from outside.
Ohh.. ok.
I'm surprised that Houdini isnt used for the 1st Issue of CoT, even if 80% of the buildings wont look so pretty, leaving the Procedural stuff just in Houdini for a bit, till the game is in beta. The other 20% of the buildings could be hand made that Need to stand out, peppered throughout the areas.
As you know I'm a big fan of supporting Procedural landscapes being generated at runtime, but i felt it took up allot of time and could be put on a backburner for the foreseeable future. If Houdini can do it, but it means we have to download 1 GB additional data, let us just download it. :/
Maybe Torrent can help alleviate bandwidth issues!? :/
Same thing with Substance procedural materials/textures. If its going to take Allot of time, pass on it. Let the artists use Photoshop or whatever, and get it done Now! ;)
Plugin Support. Fu*k it! Maybe in the 3rd year after going live!
Just like in the Martian! If it adds too much weight to the rocket, Dump it! ;D
It's OK if CoT's Alpha build looks unpolished like Valiance Online did 1st time they released it.
Focus on the Game Mechanics, making sure its fun, seemingly balanced, has basic ingame chat.
Dont focus on any Quality of Life features, but keep them in the back your head while building the framework.
But above all, MWM has to show us what they are prioritizing. Meaning.. Avatar Builder.
Dont show us things about the game world unless you can pepper in a peak into the Avatar Builder also, even if its a single screenshot with one short paragraph.
Arghhhh.. Dang it.. I dont want to play the responsible adult. :<
Everyone loves the COOL Dad more! :/
There is a reason why we don't keep the generation purely in Houdini, download size. By having the engine assemble the bits, you don't need to download as much. If Houdini does that final assembly, you'd have tens of thousands of Brick Window #2's, each one adding to the storage footprint and needing to be downloaded. There is a role for Houdini, but it cannot be the final assembly stage for this reason.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
Note, you can still construct it in Houdini, but don't merge the pieces in there, and instead export the procedural instructions into a format the engine assembly system understands.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
Interestingly, Unreal has the things necessary to support that concept built-in, although you would have to go to a fair amount of effort and be very careful in how you configured things. But the system already handles the fact that collision rules can be different for, say, any of the following: a character, a vehicle, clothing, a camera / point-of-view, physics-enabled objects, projectiles... and several other pre-defined categories. Plus quite a handful of "slots" left open for definition by each game for whatever they need.
Now, that said: there are a whole *host* of other problems that make such a proposition... not nearly as simple as it might seem. Although things like following a pre-determined path are a lot easier to deal with than general "free roam". One of the biggest problems, for example, is that game textures are normally "one sided" for efficiency -- which means if you get on the "wrong" side of them, they effectively don't exist.
As for underground, well... all I can say is that the ground in Unreal has thickness, by default. So even if you managed to get "outside the map" you wouldn't be able to landshark very well. The flip side of that is that if you expect landscape *everywhere*, it is easy to automate a tool that guarantees you won't have any *accidental* gaps to fall through and ruin people's fun because they get stuck halfway into the ground. :P
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Unfortunately, even with compression and all that other good stuff, the amount of data it would take to model a city in the sort of detail that is required to not look like... well, let's just say "old" barely starts to cover it... isn't anywhere near that small. The full set of source data for the landscape alone weighs in at something like four gigs, and while you do get compression from cooking stuff down, you *also* end up needing something like four different chunks of data to make that displayable in real-time in the engine, which tends to cancel that out pretty well.
That's *just* the ground. No buildings, no walls, no... well, basically, nothing more complex than what you might expect to see in a landscape painting. Of open fields -- trees aren't part of the landscape system in most cases.
It is worth keeping something in mind, here: all of the systems you seen to date have been under development, in at least some "design and architecture" sense, since *before* the Kickstarter happened. While several folks have multiple hats or work on multiple things, there are also folks who tend to stay focused in just one or two of the technical aspects.
I can state for a plain fact that knowing how to work with map data, even in the Unreal engine, has about as little in common with the stuff for the Avatar Builder as... well, engineering roads and making clothing mannequins. True, they both require some basics, but there really is remarkably little that carries over between the two. Not zero, no, but they're about as un-alike as it is possible to be and still involve "something in a video game world".
Also, in both cases there are a lot of folks doing big chunks of work who aren't coders, and outside of the code pretty much *nothing* carries over. Still technical work, but the amount of "workpower" that can be shifted around from one part of the work to another is actually fairly limited. The work on maps, even going at full bore, would likely have a minimal impact on AB work, at *most*. Quite probably almost no impact at all.
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
To be pedantic (before someone else does), and really to explain to folks playing along at home:
The problem is actually that you *don't* have tens of thousands of Brick Window #2. You have assemblies that are *made* from tens of thousands of them but are unique and have to replicate every part of every brick in order to work. Pretty much like gluing the LEGOs together with superglue.
Getting from "all the data for tens of thousands of X" to "one copy of X and tens of thousands of tiny data snippets saying how to arrange them" is the first big step, and is known as "instancing". That technique gets used even after "expansion", in order to minimize the amount of data that has to get pushed out to the GPU for each frame; having it draw one thing ten thousand times is only slightly more expensive than having it do so once. :)
The *next* big step is the procedural one: rather than having to say "put it here" ten times, you say "make a stack of them of them here" once.
Unfortunately, working in Houdini and then exporting the result as a finished product (or, for that matter, doing so in *any* modelling package) means that you definitely don't get the second step, and you very rarely even get the first step. Sometimes, if the stuff involved is written really well *and* you're doing just the right sort of thing, but... not usually.
[hr]
[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I wasn't trying to imply AB and Terrain needed every dev to put their hat in the ring. I went out of the way to avoid implying any such thing actually. ;)
Honestly... as far as the WORLD is concerned, I would start Small.. and with each update, expand the world Terrain and all. If it turns out an additional 1GB is required for download in the next Update because it includes a small Terrain zone addition, so be it. :/
This was a really fascinating glimpse under the hood. As much as we grew to love our old City, a lot of it didn't really make sense, layout-wise. I think this approach will make our new City seem so much more [i]real[/i] on levels that will sometimes be almost subconscious.
Thanks, and keep up the good work, folks!
Spurn all ye kindle.
I did a rough calculation once to determine the size difference. We're not taking 1GB here. We're talking 40-90GB difference once all is said and done.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
Perhaps take advantage of work others have already done like the Nature Pack for UE4?
ex:
...
or Base Building using Smooth Vogel Terrains for those Base Caves! Like MineCraft, just Smooth'er! ;D
ex:
Google Maps? j/k ;D
I wonder, how much larger is it compared to all the zones combined in City of Heroes say... or City of Villains?
Is it x10 times? x20?
How much land do we need?
How many Kickstarter Moguls were there anyways? :P
So, what are those gold lines running through the sky and rising from the ground? Reference markers of some sort?
And since Izzy mentioned them, how are the Mogul designs progressing? ^_^
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
Trust me, I had no intention of implying that it would be simple. I still quote the Standard Code Rant, now with handy [url=http://imgur.com/ad5Tulb]flowchart[/url]. (The one-way transparency would be a feature in what I'm picturing, though. :D)
More about being careful that what *I* said wouldn't be read as implying it was easy. :)
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Sort of. They are the edges of volume-of-space "objects" in Unreal. That can be a lot of things -- the BSPs mentioned in the post are one example -- but when there is nothing "real" to represent the space taken up by an object, the engine shows you lines that bound the area.
Think of it as being sort-of-the-same idea as the "target box" that showed up around whatever mob you had targeted, only... without the mob. :P
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Its actually closer to that than you might realize. The overflight reference photos for that area are higher resolution than Google Maps / Google Earth normally have, and Google Maps definitely doesn't have anywhere near that scale of accuracy for contour / topo data. They may be getting it for SF soon, with the laser-scan-of-the-city thing, but that's basically how the data that the map is based on was gathered, at least for the above-ground part: LIDAR sampling.
I want to say that the entirety of Independence Port would fit comfortably inside Liberty Harbor, which is the next district north from Lotus Hills. But anyone who has access to ICON could presumably figure it out themselves, by just determining the length x width and then comparing. Lotus Hills is labelled on the map in the post as 137 hectares. Sizing IP is left as an exercise to someone who is less fried than I am right now.
"Space is big. You may think its a long ways to the corner druggist, but that's just peanuts compared to space".
If the video showed Lotus Hills and/or Liberty Harbor, then they've only shown stuff from about "medium" zones if you go by shirt sizing. For a feel as to how large some are expected to be, check out the previously posted maps of the entire game area.
As a point of mild interest, even this large a map will require compressing things to be far closer together than they would naturally occur. Real cities are a whole lot larger than most people realize, even the dense ones such as one finds along the eastern seaboard of the US. Ones out here in the west can extend ridiculously far. And if you start counting "dense enough to be touching without any significant gaps" then you have multiple urban areas in the US that are literally hundreds of miles long.
But when you're a superhero, most of that is, to steal a phrase, "flyover country" -- making folks fly somewhere for fifteen minutes just to reflect real distances doesn't make for good gameplay. Better to compress the distance in physical terms but use various psychological tricks to make the *perceived* distance stay large enough. Because the "mental map" most people have in their heads is almost always based around landmarks or major routes, rather than detailed knowledge of everything in between.
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Every time I see one of these threads for discussing updates it throws me for a loop. Where are these updates to be found? They don't show up on the News page or the see what's new page. When I use the search it just brings me to this thread. Where am I supposed to look?
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
take a look here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/missingworldsmedia/the-phoenix-project-city-of-titans/posts/1420666
Good stuff. Good, good stuff. I can't wait to begin cursing one or the other building for being there when I try to get around with super speed. (I'm a hero, damn it. I have right of way!)
To ask the (perhaps not so) obvious question, what's under the hood?
As Izzy pointed out, if all else fails look to the Kickstarter page. Sometimes the updates get a little staggered across the various media, especially since access to the Kickstarter account is restricted out of necessity. I believe technical updates such as this one, in particular, tend to show up first on KS and then the PR peeps get around to throwing them up on here, Facebook, and Twitter. It tends to be the reverse for lore updates.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
I feel bad for the dev that has to do all this work! :<
Hmmm, I wonder if its possible to Update the panoramic textures of the Skybox'es cubemap with the farthest parts of the terrain, as well as the lowest LOD level Objects (hide them from the main camera, but visible to the probe that generates the new Skybox textures) every few seconds when traveling across or vertically (segmented) in the zone?
Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads!
Love the update! Can't wait to see the maps get filled with awesome looking terrain and buildings
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Assuming Independence Port was 2 km x 1 km (I don't have exact numbers right now, but that's close to correct for N-S and probably on th high side for W-E) that would be 200 hectares.
[url=http://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html]If the Moon were only 1 pixel...[/url]
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
And @DeathSheepFromHell. I believe Izzy just talked about the AB because we are all excited to see some sort of update or info on it. It's been a while since we have heard anything on both the AB and the moguls, anything Design related really. Don't take that as complaining or anything, just anxious is all :D But we all believe in you, and I for one appreciate the consistent updates, so keep up the great work!
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
I found this update both exciting and daunting. It did a good job of "reality checking" my expectations.
Clearly, amazing work has been done, amazing potential has been created, but there is LOTS of work ahead!
Within reason (and, whether anyone likes it or not, for MMORPG development "within reason" is measured in months and years), I'd rather wait a bit if it means a significantly better result.
Keep the course steady, Cap'ns. And good luck in navigating the waters--and the grumblings of the crew and passengers along the way :P.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
What really surprises me is the low level of grumbling I've seen on these forums and the project overall. I have backed and seen quite a few KS that people go crazy as time goes on but it's a real sight to see everyone on here happy and supportive. It's amazing :D We have a really great community here
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
True dat. For every bit of armchair quarterbacking MWM gets, they get a ton of constructive criticism and support from this great community. Didn't mean to overstate it, just making a silly comment :).
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
I'm just saying that because I am currently following the Sesame KS and there is a lot of hate generating in the comment section, so it is refreshing to come here and feel the love <3
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Very kool update. I'm glad to see things are progressing nicely.
All this terrain and map pics got me curious as to what is currently available out there in the market place. I came across these two in my searches.
[url]https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/urban-construction-pack[/url] The companion video for it looks pretty kool and may offer some tools and shortcuts to city building. check it out it might be worth the small investment to save on time.
The other thing I came across was dynamic weather effects. [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YPgVlBbtcs[/url] Now this one one wasn't available for purchase but it did really impress me. Is this something that we can incorporate into our game? Rain, snow, fog, you name it, it has it. It can create puddles from rain, heat waves for deserts, and even snow accumulation. I know that this may present a problem for lower end machines, but for us high end users its candy! :)
Keep up the great work guys! Looking forward to seeing moar of my city!
These are my bases:
CoH Base
https://imgur.com/a/HbskR
Citadel Forged With Fire
https://imgur.com/a/9okUuf1
@meta brawler - I also hope that this will be something they consider. Project cars has some really cool weather effects. It would be awesome to see something similar to this in game.
[youtube]tO4y4iUoKJg[/youtube]
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
I saw the news today, oh boy.
So I have to ask, which has more holes: Blackburn, Lancashire or Lotus Hills, USA?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Oh, also, are all of the Mogul buildings going to be in the same suburb, or will they be spread around all over the place?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
News? Are you speaking of the update or something else?
I wish I could answer the question about the moguls but I haven't heard anything since update 110 which was last year, jeez how time flies
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Radiac is quoting a Beatles song.
Be Well!
Fireheart
@Kiyori Anoyui That looks really great too. I would love for some form of dynamic weather to be included into the game. Maybe even having it set on auto pilot for seasons and such.
These are my bases:
CoH Base
https://imgur.com/a/HbskR
Citadel Forged With Fire
https://imgur.com/a/9okUuf1
There are fractal map generators, include public domain ones.
I am shocked there aren't games with life sized planets all over the place.
__________________
[IMG]http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll38/Gnurl/a72b7fba-8da2-4ac8-8e18-0f8453f7d3ee_zpscc5b27b5.jpg[/IMG]
The very existence of the taunting tank irritates, for it requires idiotic AI that obeys the taunt.
Its funny you mention that because today i came across a company called I-Novae Studios who have a game engine that simulates a fully functioning solar system where you have seamless transition from space to atmosphere to landfall with no loading screens. The developers claim that the engine can support an infinite number of solar systems to comprise a galaxy. Everything is done procedureally. Pretty amazing stuff. Imagine for a second if you will..... [b]Galaxy of Titans![/b]
Here is the link to their tech demo [url]https://www.inovaestudios.com/Technology[/url]
These are my bases:
CoH Base
https://imgur.com/a/HbskR
Citadel Forged With Fire
https://imgur.com/a/9okUuf1
Speaking of all this game stuff, if anyone is trying to make a game or something of that sort, Mixamo has a ton of free character skins and animations right now, I don't think they will be free forever so if you are interested I just thought I'd throw that out there. They look really amazing, they have a magic pack, sword and shield, gun pack. I am trying to make a sword and shield game in Unity currently and they should really come in handy.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Sounds like No Man's Sky
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Because sometimes you end up with maps that are not suitable to play. So you have to spend time getting those filtered out.
Edit, and just *filling* that space with anything useful would be impressive
People complain about travel times in other games.... imagine how bad it would be for a *complete* world
Took me about a month to get the coastlines set up. Part of the point of using the existing data was to avoid having to do all the work by hand, though -- as the post noted, it would have taken years to get that level of detail if things were hand-built. As opposed to just being *modified* by hand in the spots that needed it.
As for the skybox and distant information: it isn't done with the skybox. The name UE4 uses for what you're talking about is, if I recall correctly, "Massive LOD".
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Essentially it is the same type only with better graphics.
These are my bases:
CoH Base
https://imgur.com/a/HbskR
Citadel Forged With Fire
https://imgur.com/a/9okUuf1
Like fuel where it takes around 2 hours to go from one end to the other lol
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
I believe that Dr. Tyche mentioned, at one point, that it might be in the cards at some stage but almost certainly not at launch. However, I may be mis-remembering (this would, for the record, have been a public statement).
I actually did a dynamic weather system for a game as one of my very first game coding projects, back in, er... the early 90s. Online text game, obviously. Unfortunately we had to shut it down, even the simplistic approach proved to be enough to bring the game engine to its knees for minutes at a time, with each update. Although the fact that the person who assigned it worked at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) and it impressed them that it could be done at all was kind of neat.
The *good* news is that if all you're trying to do is simulate weather patterns and leaving the actual "make weather happen" to existing code such as the stuff that is already being done in UE4, it isn't actually all that much more complex today than it was then. And what took minutes, then, would be so fast today that you would have to be using a higher-accuracy clock than most programming languages support by default just to get a time more than "zero". The more complex models today aren't *quite* as cheap, but one complex enough to drive a realistic set of weather patterns for a fixed place on the planet's surface is still pretty darn cheap. Even more so when you get to define it as being correct, rather than having to try to update it as you get new information. :)
Clearly it is time to expand my repertoire of minions to include butterflies...
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Having written them: getting fractal planets that are "good enough from a distance" is easy. Getting ones that are *good*, not so much. Getting ones that can handle things like *realistic* city generation and can be tweaked enough to produce a map that is compatible with good storytelling when you have an existing lore, is... beyond the current state of the technology. In fact, so far as I know, it is beyond the *foreseeable* state of the technology for the moment. Mostly because it would require almost as much work as just hand-building something equivalent, and probably producing a less satisfactory result.
At least, that was true as of, oh, say, about the time the KS happened...
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
A random cloud generator and a random bad weather generator(with rain, lightning, and thunder) would make me more than happy, it doesn't have to be any real life simulation that aligns with the stars. But static always sunny is borrringgg :p
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
I mean, games are literally just being able to do this, and that's fully funded Triple A games so I would not expect to see something like that in any immanent future. I'm sure as more games apply this type of feature it will be a lot easier to implement but currently it seems like a big stretch
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
4992×15360 feet, 712.4 hectares.
They have to put [i]something[/i] in the holes.
[size=10]Did any Moguls ask for the Royal Albert Hall?[/size]
No, no, you use the holes to [I]fill[/i] the Royal Albert Hall. Or you can dump them in the Sea. You can put one in your pocket....
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
When people talk about building cities for video games and the like, I always think of something interesting; How did the presence of weird stuff in the world change the city?
Like, a friend of mine mentioned that there has to be Civil engineer tech supers - people who don't actually want to be power-armored vigilantes or villains and instead go for something they know will benefit a lot of people. I'm also certain there's at least a few people out there whose powers can be summed up as "superhuman planning". Get these two working together on a city grid, and you could theoretically end up with something absolutely amazing.
It'd also explain any outstandingly strange or unusual buildings in the city. That skyscraper that goes up three times higher than normal, but is all twisty with an artful inside? A reality bender helped put it together as a trade center. Perfect layout for a neighborhood, allowing for easy navigation through everywhere there? Superhuman planning. Convention center built to provide sustained power to large objects far beyond what should be available to the rest of the city? Tinker-built generators set aside from the grid to let them share ideas. Entire neighborhood is built up into a runic pattern utilizing the streets? There's a warlock on the layout team.
Just little things. people are still people, so they'll always end up similar, but differences arise when you introduce unsual people
An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".
What you could be thinking of is more Procedural generation, where you give it a fixed seed, and off it goes building something weird and quite possibly wonderful.
Its doable. There is no doubt about that, but then you have to fill in that stuff. And there might be something that you don't want to happen, that you would have to filter out... and then edge cases which crop up (what looks "good" at the start turns out to have a HUGE major flaw (Elite or Elite 2 had systems that you *couldn't* jump to, but were included[1]. Hell, the same applied in Elite Dangerous... there are systems that are (at the moment) totally inaccessable, because there is NO WAY to cover that gap *as it stands with the game today*. I think the largest "gap" so far found is in the region of 60 light years between two systems... granted, far side from where you start, so only 54000 light years to cover, and they are above the galactic plane so out of the way as well)
But it would also crop up with "impossible" planets. Someone made a website ([url=http://universalcartographics.org/]Universal Cartographics[/url]) that tracks all of the discovered "records" for worlds in the Elite Dangerous galaxy. A lot of them (if not all) are quite obviously *impossible* but they were generated by the game server *as and when* they were discovered. And this includes some systems that have been discovered with 2 or 3 black holes inside them... so its "like our galaxy but not our galaxy".
They were not generated without rules though. But they are quite interesting edge cases... and when you start dealing with 400,000,000,000 systems/stars (and their associated planets/asteroid belts) that is a LOT of chance of something *strange* popping up. How you deal with that strangeness is another matter.
Now come up with a way of ensuring that those edge cases DO NOT appear, without breaking the generation of *known* systems/planets[2]
But that is NOT to say, that you cannot use procedural generation to *quickly* create something, and then adjust that as a basis for what you actually want. Sure, the finished version might take up more space. It does have it advantage, it is *customised* exactly as and how you want it. If the program put something in the wrong place, you put it in the correct place.
But that requires (as DSFH said) possibly more work than hand crafting it in the first place. It all depends on the scale of what you are dealing with, and how much detail you are wanting it to have in the first place.
[1] This is ignoring the filtering of system names that would get generated because they were curse words. Just the occurance of *one* of those system names meant that the whole seed was thrown out. You have to remember that back then *storage* was at a premium, so it was better to generate a new galaxy than try to find a way to fix it. And even then, it wasn't perfect.
[2] Frontier have been willing to adjust the data of any discovered systems to match up with their real world counterpart as and when new data arrives. I believe Pluto and Charon already have their ingame models changed to be closer to real life as a result of the New Horizons probe. They have done the same with some of the planets that Kepler satellite has revealed as well.
But that means changing the actual data *After* they have been generated. Which means that the longer it goes on, the less reliable that "seed" becomes (and the more data that has to be *stored* correctly, instead of generated as and when it is needed).
We are Heroes.
It's what we DO.
I would like to take an aside from all the "ooh"ing and "ahh"ing over this update to ask for something relatively simple.
I don't think we've ever seen a map that actually NAMES all the districts around Titan City. You know ... one of these:
[img]http://paragonwiki.com/w/images//thumb/6/6c/CoH_GvE_Map_1_Front.jpg/800px-CoH_GvE_Map_1_Front.jpg[/img]
Every time one of the districts of Titan City gets named (Lotus Hills, for example), I keep wanting to pull out my Map of the City (or just run up the ramp into a [url=http://paragonwiki.com/w/images//archive/3/37/20110123011644!Monorail_station.jpg]tram station[/url]) and look at the MAP of where all these districts are in relation to each other.
Any chance we could get to see a "District Map" of Titan City, with all the districts named on it, sometime in the next month (or so)?
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
There was the one in the DragonCon panel PowerPoint, but without specific authorization from the devs I'll not put the screenshot I took of it online. ^_^
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
I could of sworn I had seen in a thread a map with names on it, it was a thread talking about moguls and such. It was a while ago that I saw it so I really can't remember what thread it was from
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Yeah I recall seeing a map somewhere around here as well.
Formerly known as Bleddyn
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WCqnt88Umk]Do you want to be a hero?[/url]
[url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/nyktoss-character-cove] My characters [/url]
Such a thing certainly exists. While I could swear at least the hand-drawn original was posted somewhere at some point, I can't recall where. And unfortunately, while I have the tools to generate one of these in about five minutes (and there are, or at least were, several "floating around" internally) it wouldn't be appropriate to post them here without permission from the folks who are responsible for deciding when and how to show that stuff.
But one of the nice things about using GIS tools to manage the data is that they happen to be written with the idea of "making maps" in mind rather centrally. Whether that is an overall map with district names, a map focused on each district showing its detailed statistics, a road map, a map showing which quads have not yet had their coastlines finished out, a map showing proposed line-of-sight buffers around each district, a map showing slope and drainage networks to make sure streams flow the direction they are intended to flow, a map showing which parts of the current terrain need significant "rework" by hand... just to name the ones I extracted at least once (and which don't give away anything not already public knowledge).
That said, they may or may not be comfortable posting something beyond a certain level of detail, for certain technical reasons, or at least may not be comfortable doing so quite this early. Although I would think that a standard "four-color block map" (much like the Paragon City map above) for just the zones would avoid most of the concerns on that front.
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
All I can say to this, without breaking NDA, is that if you go back and read the lore that has already been posted in detail, you will find several things mentioned that probably aren't possible-as-described without superhuman engineering / technology being involved.
Well, that, and the fact that I know that "how would a world with supers work?" has been a very specifically asked question in both Gameplay and Lore on a regular basis. The answers have been somewhat surprising at times, although a couple of examples can be seen already -- again, by reading the already-published lore in detail.
And that doesn't even start to cover what they might let Mogul buildings get away with.
... I actually have no idea how much that will end up encompassing, or even all of what it encompassed when I bowed out. But I have trouble imagining that with as many Moguls as there were, there won't be at least a few with buildings that require suspension of normal physics to stay upright and intact.
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Funny you should mention stars...
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Ah, here we are: Back in the [url=http://cityoftitans.com/content/state-game-june-2014]June 2014 State of the Game Statement[/url] we saw this:
[img]https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/002/103/284/d64910c54f8b6acccd09ca7edeb5d85c_large.jpg?1401934149[/img]
Alas, no names yet on it.
But this one, from the same update:
[img]https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/002/103/291/65cff232d35b6259ee51b702f5872e14_large.jpg?1401934246[/img]
has names! Some, at least. ^_^
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
Difficulty: Norway.
>.> <.<
Speaking of procedural generation, [url=http://gamasutra.com/view/news/258594/Sublevel_Zero_creators_on_the_perils_and_rewards_of_procedural_generation.php]this article[/url] is worth a read. Pertinent quote:
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
That point has been made abundantly clear with rouge-lite games like say The Binding of Isaac nowadays. You can tell that every room has had a lot of work put into it from enemy placement, to general room layout, to item placement, to the items themselves, and then there is the ridiculously large amount of rooms and designs that you can get.
So yeah....procedural generated levels certainly have a lot of work put into them....
Oh yeah and thank you Foradain for that map.
Formerly known as Bleddyn
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WCqnt88Umk]Do you want to be a hero?[/url]
[url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/nyktoss-character-cove] My characters [/url]
Yep that's the map. Good find Foradain, I guess I was recalling the bottom map. I'm sure we could piece some of the known locations together but I'm sure at some point the map will be updated by the devs
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Yup. That's the one I've seen (and marked up) before. The thing is, as already mentioned, no district names are on it.
Fortunately, I can now recognize the shape of Lotus Hills there on the right side of the map, facing out into Puget Sound.
Put I do want a larger map (3000 pixels tall?) that puts district names onto all of the colored districts. In fact, I'll even get so greedy as to say that such a resource ought to be put into an easily accessible place somewhere on the website here so that it can be used for Word Of Mouth Campaigning such that we can all easily refer to it and say ... "THIS is OUR city!" ... when discussing the game with people who aren't already following these forums.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
The thing is they might not have made concrete decisions on what all of them will be named/located. But we could possibly make a thread with a labeled map with what we know.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Not to put too fine a point on things, but I'd rather have an "official" map of that sort of thing than a fan sourced one. Ye ken hoo i'tis. ^_~
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I mean yeah, that would be nice, but it might not be on the priority list of the devs, then again it might be. Who knows. But we can at least initiate the conversation, if it gets enough attention it could expedite the results you are looking for Red
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
A bit old now. If you'd note, two zones west of Lotus Hills have shifted positions, and a channel dug turning one into an island.
I'll see about grabbing a map with all the names on it to make sure it is easy to find.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
Here is a quick draft using launch districts. This is only a fraction of the total, but are the ones mostly nailed down at this point. The post-launch areas we expect to change a lot, and even these may shift some, but this should give a general idea of the initial group of zones for everyone.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
Forgot to mention: flyover country could be player housing... ^_-
[b]Fsck, we're gonna be able to astronavigate?![/b]
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Oh yeah, forgot to mention how it could be argued that "procedural", "fractal", and so forth systems can be seen as compression (space-saving) algorithms a lot more than labor-saving algorithms. I'm reminded of Strike Commander, a sibling to the Wing Commander series, back in the stack-of-floppies days, which apparently had a fractal terrain generation algorithm with a preset "random" seed that would run during installation and generate all the map data so they didn't have to ship that many more floppies. Likewise, when X-Plane shipped on DVDs, there were one for the game, eight for Earth, and four for Mars.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
The coastal zone north of Highpoint is unlabeled...
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
That was when we had KM and miles mixed up.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
It is part of Ironport actually. Hard to tell in B&W.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
Please tell me the names are just placeholders...
N.E.R.D.? Seriously?
If that is not a joke name placeholder...I will be highly upset.
Northeastern Research District.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
And yes, names are not finalized. You'll note we have two very similar sounding named districts, for example.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
Alright, that makes sense...but if you can, please call it the full name in game.
I'm all there for some lightheartedness in game...but from someone who has played both CoH and CO...I absolutely hated how everything about CO was some "tongue in cheek" parody or joke. It was so bad that CO basically just became a parody of itself and a mockery of anything in the superhero genre...while CoH was, to this day, one of the best as it took it's own lore very serious. Which is one of the main reasons I loved CoH.
I would hate for CoT to be similar to CO. I'm not trying to overreact to one little detail, but I hope you see what I'm trying to say.
Anyways, I do apologize for seeming like I'm only nitpicking on things I find "wrong". I definitely appreciate everything you all are doing in getting this game going, and I cannot thank you all enough.
Slartibartfast himself would be impressed.
Also, you now have me expecting weather that tracks perfectly with the real area of New England that Titan is in as well as a scientifically accurate star field in the sky at night. No pressure :)
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Thanks for taking the time to get that for us @Doctor Tyche
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Crowd Control Enthusiast
love this technical updates.
great work guys, thank you for all the good work you're doing.
looking forward to see the maps when they're completed.
I will step in to say that NERD is not even the appropriate acronym for the district - it's N.R.D. And will remain so. NERD was a joke that stuck around, but not actually the name of the district.
It is probably the in-universe nickname of the area, though, much like Boomtown for Baumton.
[color=#ff0000]Project Lead[/color]
I would be upset if NERD went away, whether that's the City Hall Approved name for the area or not.
I'd like to request a locked and stickied thread that contains the maps we have, so far, so we needn't go hunting up different threads (and searching within those threads) for them.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
^^ Here Here!
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Fixed:
Which, naturally, is in the northwest part of the map.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
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