A few thoughts after playing Oblivion

[Scott Richmond]

I wasnt aware of the fact theres id-tech6 already. No game has been relased with tech5 so it's a bit early to talk about tech6.

 

EDIT: Took a look at the .pdf from your wikipedia link and its refering to tech5. No tech6.

Ah you are correct Michael. A typo on my part. Still, you appeared to be talking about the MegaTexture implementation in idTech4 (Doom 3, Quake Wars), while idTech 5 (RAGE) takes it to a whole new level.

 

I would also bet a procedurally generated environment would not have as good a hand for balance as a human would.

 

I may not be getting what you mean by 'balance' but I disagree with you, for the most part - We have terrain generation working perfectly now. You'd be crazy to try to hand paint your own terrain (heightmap) when completely realistic ones can be gen'd at the click of ones fingers. Of course, I agree that one will need to come in a touch up and personalise the terrain afterwards.

But I think thats where games will continue to head in the future. More and more will be generated on the fly, which allows us developers to concentrate on more important assets or parts of the world we're building.

[Marcus]

Procedurally based environments are by no means out of reach. I agree with a lot of the others that it is the way of the future. It would be awesome to be able to define certain types of regions like arctic, tropical, temperate, desert, etc and then be able to specify the types of trees, rocks, ground cover, and textures you want to use in each area. I'm sure it would produce great results. The great thing is I'm not so sure it would be that much work to implement in LE now. In the end all you would have to do is erase some trees for buildings, roads, etc.

[Josh]

We already have mostly procedural environments. You can distribute grass and trees based on certain parameters. You don't have to paint every spot of ground because you have parameters for the different layers. You can generate the terrain in L3DT and get a procedural heightmap.

 

The dream is an infinite world with easy tools to procedurally generate most of it, then go in and adjust the things you specifically need by hand. That's pretty close to what we have now. But the whole streamed infinite world is a developmental nightmare, especially for an open-ended engine not locked to a simple racing genre.

 

So let's make the most of the mature technology we have now, and everything we develop in the current engine might someday be useful in a version 3.

[Davaris]

I would also bet a procedurally generated environment would not have as good a hand for balance as a human would.

 

One thing I learned while watching an interview with the makers of FUEL, is the roads are procedural as well. They also said the game would have been 20GB bigger instead of 1 GB bigger, if procedural maps were not used. So it looks to me like the artists would have no control over map layouts, unless they were allowed to use 20X more space. B)

[Scott Richmond]

One thing I learned while watching an interview with the makers of FUEL, is the roads are procedural as well. They also said the game would have been 20GB bigger instead of 1 GB bigger, if procedural maps were not used. So it looks to me like the artists would have no control over map layouts, unless they were allowed to use 20X more space. B)

 

Ah but they do. Clearly the game must have some key places and areas in the game. So they tell the procedural engine to put this and that in specific places each time and then let it work out the bits in between on the fly.

[Josh]

I think by "procedural" they probably mean they have a series of connected nodes the artist places, and the engine builds a mesh at runtime, sort of like how ours work.

[Davaris]

I think by "procedural" they probably mean they have a series of connected nodes the artist places, and the engine builds a mesh at runtime, sort of like how ours work.

 

You are probably right, but I got the impression it was random when I read this:

 

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=5237

 

On the left is a straightforward heightmap. It’s like a satellite view, with brighter pixels representing higher elevations. The right is the same thing, but with a particular elevation set to red. If you were standing on that red area, you could obviously go pretty far without needing to go up or down, as long as you didn’t mind swerving around a bit. This swerving is basically the exact behavior you see on a road. My program would basically travel on the red as much as possible. If it was forced to go up or down, then the “red” area would shift radially – outward from the tip of the hill if it was moving down, inward if it was moving up.

Top: The road system on perfectly flat terrain. Bottom: The road system in pervasively hilly country.

Fuel seems to take a similar approach. It works out a network of roads. It begins with a couple of backbone highways that cut across the zone. Between those, it will form a loose grid of evenly spaced secondary roads. And between those it makes a network of dirt roads. It deliberately tries to make them a bit convoluted. You can see this in action in White Flats, one of the last zones in the game to be unlocked. (I cheated, as unlocking this zone would have been way beyond my skill.) The land is, as the name suggests, perfectly flat. Yet the road system doesn’t just default to an axis-aligned grid. Roads intersect at odd angles and form a plausible network. However, the individual roads are perfectly straight. This suggests that the road system works not unlike the one I came up with, where roads bend due to topography. This means the bends in the road are emergent, which is pretty cool. (As opposed to the programmer trying to force the road to bend around arbitrarily to make it more “realistic”.)

 

He's not a FUEL dev, but he has written something similar.

[Josh]

That blog is just speculation, and some of the things he says are very incorrect. For example, he is suggesting the large world was achieved by combining one super low-res heightmap with a high frequency detail heightmap.

[Davaris]

I see. Thanks for pointing that out.

[Scott Richmond]

Shamus has posted a short video on some landmass generation concepts in relation to Fuel. Its worth the listen: