[MUD-Dev] Wilderness

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nathan F. Yospe [mailto:yospe at kanga.nu]

> Most of the random generation leads to an intense fractal tree
> with last minute instantiation of nodes, and no true
> leaves... which allows both a huge amount of generated/stored data
> mingling, and a reasonable means to avoid doing a bunch of work
> that will never be appreciated.  Create that rose only if someone
> stops to smell it... until then, it's a featureless rose.

The only possible problem I see with the on demand generation is
that certain features like rivers would need to have the terrain
fully instantiated if you want to calculate them based on gradient,
and possibly erosion modeling. i.e. the things that need a second
pass in traditional rendering. Of course I'm no expert and the last
time I played with a generator was Vista Pro on the Amiga, but I'm
certain the water was added on pass two.

I still contend that we need some leaps in auto content generation
to make anything random at all compelling. A pretty landscape is a
pretty landscape, thats not enough to make me want to walk through
it for hours with nothing to do. If AI evolved along with it such
that creatures built their own settlements, then I'd be interested -
at least the first time. Of course you'd have issues modeling this
on non-instantiated terrain - especially if you want to put sensible
things in such as settlements being near water supply and fertile
land etc.

Dan 
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