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

[Dubious Advocate]

From: "Travis Nixon" <tnixon at avalanchesoftware.com>
> Raph Koster wrote:

>> 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.

> 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.

Agreed on the first paragraph, disagreed on the second.  The
solution comes about as the NWN model becomes more pervasive.
Thousands of hobbyists, each slowly inching their way up the
learning curve, and the parent companies incorporating their efforts
in subsequent resource kits and expansion packs.  Free content, the
only expense is vetting & requesting tweaks from the customer.

When two of Raph's colleagues can build an entire world in two weeks
with the right tools, imagine what those thousands of hobbyists will
be turning out.  Yes much will be crap, especially at first.  But
eventually (actually pretty quickly) those "monkeys" will be typing
out Hamlet from prologue to pithy conclusion.

Blue sky?  Nope.  The latest expansion to NWN has significant
content gleaned from player efforts.  Eventually the corporations
will realize the power of a content stream generated with nominal or
no layout beside simply owning the framework and the builder tools.

Really just a natural progression from indie outsourcing, except the
contractors are paying the company for the privilege... ;-)

-----
Dave Scheffer
"Questions are a burden to others, answers a prison for oneself"

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