I don't know about you, but a confirmation window would be nice just in case you accidentally press the "delete blog entry" button rather than the "create blod entry" button. I'm not sure quite how that happened, but the last post was deleted!
Before I recap on the previous post I realized that have yet to share with you the whole idea, the big picture, of this project that I'm currently undertaking. I think it's now time to share with you that idea. So, it's always been a dream of mine to create my own Massive Multiplayer Online RPG ever since I first dived into programming at the age of 13 (thanks to Mark Overmars for GameMaker!). But... no matter how many great ideas I came up with there was always one major obstacle keeping me from making these ideas into reality: manpower.
As my brain constantly thinks about innovative game ideas it came to me. What if there was an MMORPG where a player could essentially "create" their world and have people explore it? Now by create I mean have the server generate a world randomly based on parameters that player sets. This seems a little more realistic to me as the contents of these worlds are not made by hand like other MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft or Everquest. The content are generated by algorithms with parameters set by players. Do I want a big world? A small world? A desert planet? Or maybe an island world? Should it be cold? or maybe hot? What kind of technology do I want in mine? Modern? Medieval? Maybe futuristic! Now, what about monsters? What races do i want? What classes? What if I want to create my own class? Do I even want magic in this world? etc.. etc.. Then, at the push of a button that world is generated! Other parameters the player could also enter are the names of the world, perhaps deities involved, what kind of influence they have, and so on.
There are a lot more ideas that I don't feel are appropriate for sharing this early in development, but there will be more!
Anyway, progress! I was not happy with the way the old generation system played out, it was clunky and it just didn't look good. So I've decided to start over. You probably noticed some new pictures or videos, and I hope you enjoyed them. Progress has been coming along nicely, despite the fact that these algorithms give me headaches.
Some of these procedural generation algorithms seem very simple until an amateur programmer like me tries to implement them into code then manipulate that code to present a product of that algorithm! Its a not a bad thing, though, it feels like a sort of accomplishment when you actually figure it out and get it working!
Anyway enough about that. There has been quite a bit of progress in the last few days. In the video you can see that there was procedural texturing going on. Well, I sort of cheated in that video, as I used a pre-existing asset in unity to do the job for me. BUT... I did end up writing my own procedural texturing script since that asset had more than what I needed and now the project is produced 100% by me... so far!
Another thing that I've completed working on for the most part is the "step 2" of the world generator (step 1 was fleshing out a low-res version of the whole "world" as seen in the videos). Step 2 involves taking each section of that low poly map and generating a 1km by 1km high-poly map that is more detailed. Curious to know what potential sizes this produces? Well the maps rendered on the video are 128km by 128km, which is 16.384 square km!! Now I know that's nothing compared to the size of the earth, but that's just an example.
My dilema, though, is whether or not to have the generator generate the whole world at the start, or have the world generated as the players explore. The former allows for easier development on my part, and the latter allows for much larger areas to explore (potentially multiple times the size of Earth). But do we really need that big of a world? That question I leave up to you.
