Heightfield vs. mesh was RE: AC2 was RE: [MUD-Dev] Total Annilation of Downtime

[Travis Nixon]

Raph Koster wrote:

>> Your post and the article are fascinating. As one of those that
>> brainstormed with Will Wright for Sim Earth and wrote some
>> continent generation algorithms, it is amazing to see how far
>> we've come.

> I firmly believe that this sort of path is the future. Why? 
> Because bandwidth is not increasing, the pace of art production is
> actually DEcreasing as the visual bar goes up, the delivery media
> size has increased on consoles but not on PCs and it's becoming
> impractical to ship large worlds on CD... and the push is towards
> more content, faster.

Absolutely.  And it won't stop at terrain.  At some point, all
content will be in some way procedurally generated, from terrain to
animations to models to stories (probably in that order, oddly
enough).  Sure, there will be human input here and there, but it
will be a guiding and shaping hand, as opposed to one dragging the
plow directly.

This is one of the many reasons I'm glad I'm on the programming side
of gaming.  No artist alive will ever be capable of making a piece
of artwork that will suddenly make it possible for one programmer to
do the work of 20.  :)

Of course, I don't imagine this happening just in the MMORPG realm,
either.  Even single-player games are reaching points where content
creation is a huge problem, and the whole beast begins to collapse
under its own weight.
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