[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Non-cliche content creation

[Joshua Clausen]

I've been a long-time lurker, and I thought it would be time to come out of 
the shadows and start [trying] contributing ;)



> Thus spake Damion Schubert...
>> This depends on whether or not you figure out how to make your randomly
>> created
>> content both engaging and interesting.  Is it possible?  Maybe.  It's 
>> worth
>> noting,
>> though, that the randomly created content in both Diablo (map) and
>> Daggerfall
>> (maps and quests) were pretty miserably bad.
>
> Naturally - how good the system is depends on...how good the system is :P 
> I have high hopes, that, even if it isn't an immediate solution, it'll 
> help identify what is the solution, however.


Does the quality of procedurally-generated missions depend upon them being a 
natural outcome of the environment in which the mission-producing NPC finds 
itself?  Procedural algorithms produce results only as good as the assumed 
inputs, so if the algorithm is running on what amounts to approximations of 
the factors that would elicit said NPC to issue a mission or quest, then if 
those approximations are off, the mission or quest will be, well, "off".

The approximations I am most thinking of are those assumptions on the 
motivation for the quest.  If the motivation is not an immediate, actual 
need of that NPC, then there will be a noticeable disconnect between the 
mission requirements and reality, such as it is in an MMO.  "I need you to 
kill 10 swamp rats because they're eating grain stores," make sense only if 
upon completing said quest there is an actual noticeable improvement in the 
lot of the NPC issuing the quest.  "I need you to go take out the Orc Bandit 
outpost that has popped up at the edge of the city limits," only really 
means anything of true substance if that outpost's presence is actually 
hindering the NPC town's situation- implying that once gone, the NPC town 
will actually perform better (grow, pay more for goods, etc).  The 
implication, then, is that the creation of the procedurally-generated 
mission must be elicited by environmental changes that have actually 
influenced the state of the mission-issuing entity.  Completion of that 
mission must actually allow for the issuing entity to experience a net 
benefit, and this benefit must be [potentially] observable by the player 
base, though it does not necessarily have to be immediate.

It seems that a virtual ecology of sorts is what is required, with the 
mission-generating algorithm a natural part of that ecology rather than a 
"contrived" system placed upon it.  I think the missions in a game world 
are, simply put, the most advanced forms of entity interaction; like the 
combat scripts but at the more abstract level of spawn spots and their 
interaction with other spawn spots.

I realize this implies a rather significant revisiting of how the game 
environment is run, but I feel like we have a toehold on how to really 
capture it.  Besides, how exciting will it be when we see individual spawn 
spots making calculated decisions on courses of action to maximize their own 
benefit?  It reminds me of the Southpark episode where Cartman raises sea 
monkeys who actually think, and begin to create statues in his honor and 
worship him, eventually going to war over their Cartman-centric religion and 
blowing up their fish tank.




> _______________________________________________
> MUD-Dev2 mailing list
> MUD-Dev2 at mud-dev.com
> http://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/mud-dev2