[MUD-Dev] Wilderness

[Brian Hook]

At 11:05 AM 7/31/01 -0700, John Buehler wrote:

> Algorithmic generation of terrain produces perfectly wonderful
> results.  You just have to work on the algorithm.

This is true, however the general problem is that you lose artist
and designer input.  So while you can make vast, impressive worlds
ripe for exploration, you end up having little fine grain control
over specific areas, e.g. wanting a river to turn left instead of
right.  You can control coarse variables, like input seeds,
roughness factors, tile sets, etc. but that still doesn't offer the
level of control that many creative types want to see.

For generating lots of huge and detailed worlds, I think procedural
generation is the way to go.  When I have the time I want to get
around to writing a massive space exploration game.

The ultimate goal, at least for planetary content creation, is that
there are worlds based off a set of random number seeds which
determine the details of that world (at least in terms of
topography, climate, etc.).  These worlds will have never existed
completely on anyone's systems -- they're just random number seeds
-- and the first explorers will be, literally, the first people to
ever see them.  Even the game developers have never seen them.
Those first few player maps will be the real maps.

And ideally players will start off on far flung corners of the
galaxy, so everyone will have a chance to explore.

Brian

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