Huzzah! Basic outdoor town functionality is complete! Now we can move onto interiors! Once that's done, we'll be linking it all together and passing it on to our test team!
Now when we say 'basic outdoor town functionality' we mean BASIC. B.A.S.I.C. Our aim right now is to just get it working. Now that it's working we can add in all the little features and functionality and assets and polish to make it perfect, but at the same time we can always be happy and confident knowing that it's working just fine. Here's a video, but keep in mind that it's BASIC FUNCTIONALITY ONLY!
With the asset creation, we've also got a little behind the scenes clip for you. Lately we've been showing you the behinds the scenes work of Nicolas and Natalie on their areas of the game, so here's a little peek into the work of Alex, our 3D modeller, working on a new building asset for the towns:
Also, while we've got you, we've noticed that some people are a little confused as to what Malevolence will actually be. Apparently a lot of you are hearing "infinite world" and assuming that we mean random world generation. Just so that everyone is on the same page, we want you to know that we'd never stoop to that! Malevolence has a true, persistent, procedurally generated 3D world which is literally infinite. You can walk for a million miles in one direction, then return to the spot you came from and it'll all still be there. Not only is that the case, but everyone else playing the game will be in an exact copy of the same world. So if you, for example, find an amazing catacomb somewhere that you particularly enjoyed, you'll be able to tell your friends about it and they'll be able to go and explore the exact same catacomb that you did (although item generation is based on a time coefficient, so the loot might be different for them). But the same goes for towns, dungeons, forests, mountains, NPCs and virtually everything else in the game. You're going to LOVE it.
Still, we get our share of nay-sayers, trolls and flamers in our line of work, but we have one simple thing to say to them!
To the haters, we say, look elsewhere for your gaming experiences. To our fans we say, you are in for a real treat with this game! And we thank EVERYONE who has taken the time to send us nice messages, post supportive comments and tell everyone they know about us! To a humble indie team, the dedication that some people have been showing to this project is just staggeringly awesome. You guys ROCK!!!
We'll be back with more soon! In the meantime, join us on the social networks!
Wow, nice work dudes. Love the way your building the world.
To the haters and trolls: It's so damn easy to criticize someone else's work. You're always free to create your own games! You can't? Then be grateful to the people who do.
Thanks, man! We're excited to show you more and more of the outside world in this game as we progress. Stay tuned for more! And thanks for the support!
Great to hear about the progress. One thing, though. What do you mean when saying "you'll be able to tell your friends about it and they'll be able to go and explore the exact same catacomb that you did"? Is Malevolence going to be an MMO??!!
haha no, no. It's hard to explain it without people thinking that though! It's kind of like in Skyrim. Everyone who plays the game is playing a copy of the same game, so if you find something on your PC, you can give a friend directions there and they can load up their own game on their own PC and go find it. It's the same in Malevolence. Even though the world is infinite, it is persistent. It doesn't disappear when you've walked a certain distance. Everything is always there!
Although, if the game sells well enough, our first expansion will add multiplayer ;)
Uffff...You got me scared there :). Thanks for the explanation.
Hahahaha good response! No, we'd never make an MMO out of this, nor will we sell out the technology for one! It's classic roleplay or not at all!
While I would've liked to have seen a random, procedurally-generated world, it's still pretty sweet that you're using procedural methods to generate the game map!
Have you talked with the folks at Introversion Software regarding the procedural city generation technology they were developing for their now-defunct game Subversion? From the looks of it, they were pretty far along with it, and they were trying to achieve the same things you're trying to and more. I'd imagine they would have some good advice regarding procedural generation.
Also, can we please have some of the characters in the news article image as proper cameos in-game, as in normal NPCs? (If you remember my comment from "Things Will Be Great When You're Downtown!", you'll know who I'm talking about. ;) )
haha all the characters are procedurally generated with an infinite number of combinations, so you might actually get to see them!
If we might ask though, why would you prefer the game be random? If it's so you play in a different world each time, then never fear! The world is infinite, and each new game starts in a random location, so it will essentially be a new game map every time! Except if you travel far enough you'll be able to visit places you've been before ;)
Hmmm. This inspired another set of questions. Will there be a story in the game? How will you go about quests in a game world that big? Will there be reasons to go to those far away places other than sheer exploration and monster hunting?
There IS a story, though it is quite open-ended. The gameplay has a sense of "this world has a long history, but you are now making new history" if that makes sense...
Quests are generated through a procedural quest generation system. Most quests affect your general area and short travel times, but there are occasional quests, requested of you by powerful people, that require LARGE travel distances to far-off lands. It's actually quite cool how it does it and we really can't wait to show it to you all!
I see. That should make it interesting. I wonder if you thought about chaining some quest together to form randomly generated small campains?
Yes indeed! Well... Sort of... Some of the quests are what we call "Multi-Tier" quests, which involve a number of stages. Sometimes only a couple, other times MANY.
To an extent, I would agree with your statement about how there is no need for a random world because of its infinity, especially since people will be able to brag about a place they've seen and challenge or invite people to find it so they can experience it too - a good thing for publicity on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
However, I would argue that there is a certain value in having a randomized procedural world because one user's world won't be the same as another's - even though the world is infinite! This means players will get to see and share people, places, and things which no one else will ever have. Also, because no two worlds will ever be the same, I think people will have a greater sense of ownership over their unique worlds not just for the aforementioned reason, but because they won't be shaping the same world everyone has - instead, they will be shaping THEIR OWN world.
To summarize, I'd prefer randomness over sameness because no two users will ever have the same world, meaning challenges and experiences will truly be unique for each player. Of course, if you should ever decide to create a multiplayer component for the game, allowing people to enter other's worlds could very well be a major stumbling block.
Hmm... Perhaps then, we should put in a console cheat to randomly regenerate the world ;) What would you say to that?
Why not go further and make that command an option? That is, you have the main world, which has the "Master Quest" (e.g. the grand, over-reaching quest your team has been so diligently working on) and the main experience, and the "Uncharted Realms", which would be the option for the randomly-regenerated worlds, complete with their own sets of randomized and/or procedural quests and sub-quests.
Of course, if the above wouldn't be worth the effort, a console cheat would do since it would be better than nothing IMO!
Well, we're really going to be trying to push the social networking aspect of the game as a means of exposure, and that only really works when everyone's experiencing the same world... Being a small indie group we don't have much to go on when it comes to advertising, so this plan seems fairly solid for now...
It also gives us room for expansion packs later on :) We already have the first couple planned in case the game is popular. We know that an infinite world will eventually get repetitive, so we have plans to fix that ;)
This is all a bit overwhelming thinking of an infinite world... Very Genius!
I like the option of choosing which world would suit the player.
The Static worlds seems great because I can revisit areas that I know where certain treasures/weapons/NCP's were at, but at the same time, if I replay the game from the beginning, I would like a whole new experience.
Replay is a HUGE factor!
Well the thing is, the way the story is set up, when you start a new game, you start in a random point in the world. Given that the world is infinite, you WILL start out with a whole new experience! :D
I'm sure you've heard this comment before, but I'm seriously confused.
I don't think you're using the word "infinite" correctly. An infinite world would be a world that grows without bound (you can begin walking in a single direction and never return back to your starting location).
The way that you are explaining it sounds like your are emulating a spherical world (like the earth, I could take a plane from the United States traveling west through asia and europe and eventually I will end up back in the United States).
Please clear this up for me.
I'm going to have a go at this!
The world is infinite in the sense that, as you walk in one direction, the world will continue to generate as you go. However, it generates the same way for each copy of the game, so the infinite world you explore matches the one generated for other players in their own copy of the game.
When Alex said you can walk a million miles in one direction and still return to your starting point, he didn't mean walk in the straight line and end up where you started, he meant walk in a straight line, turn around, and retrace your steps back to your starting point. Meaning that the world does not just generate a little bubble of content around you, erasing itself behind you as you move forward... when you explore an area and generate it, it stays there permanently so you can return to it. Or, you can walk forward for infinity and you will never see that area again.
Spot on ;)
Finn got it 100% correct :) Sorry for the confusion. The world is actually infinite. I meant it just like Finn said. If you walk a million miles in one direction, then TURN AROUND and go back the way you came for a million miles, everything will still be there. It was just to illustrate that the infinite world isn't randomly generated. Everything is persistent and static!
Your comment made me think of something I hadn't thought of before: how do you fit an infinite world into a size which modern computers can handle? After all, since the world is persistent and the same across all copies of the game, all of that data has to be stored somehow!
The answer to that question is precisely why we feel people should get excited about this game :) A game of this scale with this level of detail has never been done before, and we've had a lot of people say that it CAN'T be done, but it's actually working over here! All in raw data form at the moment, but we're gradually linking it into the 3D world and that's what we show you guys (as it gets done)
Trust us, it's really true!
Unlike the folks at Euclideon, the company who makes the Unlimited Detail Engine, which I believe to be the worst scam ever conceived, I don't doubt AT ALL that you managed to fit a static version of infinity into a reasonable size! I say this because, unlike Euclideon, who refuse to explain anything concrete about their engine, you guys, on the other hand, have been detailing your work at every step.
Speaking of which, might you be willing at some point to explain in news article how you 'shrunk infinity'? Your methods could also prove useful to college and university students if you were willing to write a published paper on it as well. (Sort of like Valve did on Team Fortress 2's shader technology; see Valvesoftware.com )
Well, a couple of things I'd need to point out:
1. I've met the Euclideon guys (they live very close to me) and have seen their tech, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that what they are doing is 100% genuine. The team lead is a bit of an eccentric, but all the best minds are :) We've considered teaming our infinite world generation up with them, but we aren't quite ready to "sell out" and aren't sure if we ever will be.
2. When it comes to our infinite world generation, we keep it fairly close to our chest as to how it's done, as it's a new technology and we don't want other people ripping it off and stealing our thunder before Malevolence is out!
3. We CAAAAAAN tell you at least a good chunk about how it works, though... Just because we're nice and we like to keep people informed lol we don't ever want to be one of those game companies that closes it's doors and never allows people into the candy factory. We want to be as open as is realistic and let people in! So to that effect, we actually did up a fairly verbose article going into as much detail as we felt comfortable with, and you're welcome to have a read of it! You can find it here - Swordofahkranox.blogspot.com.au :)
Just read #3, and I'm curious...are you treating the 4th dimension like a regular timeline, or are you using some crazy math to sort it all? I would imagine the former would be far easier to visualize using a debugging utility.
Also, I think I'll leave my proper comments to #1 to a PM - it would get too off-topic, and Euclideon's engine and their advertisement methods usually tends to generate a troll-storm whenever they're even MENTIONED.
Oh, hell yes. They cop a lot of flack, but, like us, they don't really care, since they know it works ;-P we get quite a bit of ammo thrown at us say "you can't have an infinite persistent world, it's impossible!" but we don't care too much haha
As for the time, it's a bit of crazy math involved, but not as complex as you'd think :) Everything is repeatable, which, as you said, helps with debugging :)