[MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[John Buehler]

Travis Nixon writes:

> I take the idea even further though, and say that entire worlds will
> have to be randomly generated.  Actually, I hate to use the term
> 'randomly' because that implies a sense of, er, well, randomness,
> which is not necessarily desirable.  I'd lean more toward calling it
> "automatically" generated, probably with a small amount of very
> extremely high-level direction from a human being.

I agree with what you're talking about.  I refer to it as automated
content creation.  It's why I built my planetary terrain generator,
and why I built my cave generator.  Take the two and in the very least
you get a world that you can check out lots of cave systems in :)

The next generator may very well be a town generator, or a ruins
generator.  That's all static content, of course, and is prime
material for generation.  Generating initial populations of towns and
villages is another possibility.  I hope to tackle things like that
eventually.  I'm pursuing the creation of a large, complex world on my
own, and my only recourse is to use the automated content creation
approach.

> I have all these ideas running around in my head about the future of
> content creation that I try to figure out how to convey in writing,
> but I haven't come up with just how to do it yet.  But this concept
> is at the core: the idea that things must be automatically created
> from high-level definitions.  And when I say high level, I'm talking
> about anything from "Create me a city about this big, with about
> this many people, with this sort of culture, with this sort of
> architectural style", to "Create me a world similar to earth, but
> where insects developed high intelligence and civilization before
> primates".

Yup.  The cave system generator lets you specify approximate
structure, complexity of the innards, channel dimensions and the
roughness of the walls.  With enhancements, that could go much
farther, permitting specification of veins of ore, rock types, etc.

The terrain generator permits specification of a few types of terrain
which are unfortunately all fairly similar.  You specify how much
emphasis on water, how rough the terrain should be at various
subdivisions of the terrain, etc.  The program automatically
interpolated between the various terrain types.  Again, lots of
possibilities for dinking around with terrain types.  On top of the
raw terrain generation would be code that could look for promising
sites for castles, towns, farmland, forests, lakes, rivers, streams
and so on.  Not to mention nice places to stick some caves :)

> Quests are the beginning, and the easy part.  I can conceive of ways
> to go about creating interesting quests right now, and wrote a
> little about some of those ideas a while back.  I can't quite yet
> conceive making the "create me a world" scenario work just yet
> though.  Working on it, but not just yet.  :)

I view quests as simply things to do in the world.  I hope that they
will be a natural result of the NPC wranglers doing their jobs.  There
was an article about need-based AI in games over on Gamasutra a while
back.  If the NPCs have needs and the NPC wranglers can ensure that
those needs cannot be solved by the NPCs themselves, then player
characters will get involved.  The NPC wranglers will also introduce
new needs, such as the absence of an NPC family member, a family
heirloom or a poorly-managed property.

JB


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