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Outerra Tech Demo download. Help with graphics driver issues

Author Topic: do the devs wana shrink the world size for anteworld?  (Read 6750 times)

andrew2343

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do the devs wana shrink the world size for anteworld?
« on: October 08, 2014, 04:52:00 pm »

so this seems like the perfect game for me. a realistic, 1:1 sized earth to play around with. but one thing worries me: anteworld is going to be a pos apocaliptic survival game it seems, wich im fine with. but do the devs wana shrink the world size to sell more copies? cuz this game would be a very nich game. not many people would like to walk for days to reach a certain location, and im worried the devs try such a thing. also, will there still be the sandbox mode in the final game? like besides the apocaliptic survival mmo thingie, will there still be the sandbox? because, to be honest im not too interested in the survival aspect, i just want a sandbox.
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CaptJack92a

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Re: do the devs wana shrink the world size for anteworld?
« Reply #1 on: October 08, 2014, 05:32:14 pm »

I think [And am hoping] that Outerra's construction kit when available as a first version will allow us to set the size of "our" planet if we don't use earth. This would also be SEVERELY helpful for those of us who want to make Solar System sized Space/Planet MMo/RPGs/FPS games. I have a plan in the works, but requires me to wait a LONG time for Outerra itself until it is in the stages of letting us script rather than require us to code, let us build easier, gives us better/Newtonian physics for vehicles and objects, etc.

Specifically, I have to wait until there are Four main items included in the engine's abilities.

*Body Physics: Mesh/convex hull collision with props and vehicles, etc.

*Newtonian/Better Physics: Proper vehicle control. IE. Letting a ship rotate at a more natural speed rather than the present Spin uncontrollably for the aircraft we have now.

*Ability to "quick script" using what I will assume will be a simple Outerra engine scripting language. Similar to how Source uses LUA.

*Editor VS. Play mode: Generating planets/Solar systems. Ability to edit without the game "Running" without you while you're trying to set up the map/scene. Ability to "Run" from directly inside the editor without need to compile right away, then  the ability to Export into standalone .exe which would compile everything for delivery, placing the .exe in it's own export game folder with subfolders containing the required material such as models, materials, extra scripts, etc.


Once all these kinds of things are added/integrated, I presume all your questions will be answered.

As for anteworld/Outerra being a survival/whatever game mode, I wouldn't fret. I have a feeling that even excluding my own ideas, there will be MANY different game modes/abilities available for Outerra.
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necro

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Re: do the devs wana shrink the world size for anteworld?
« Reply #2 on: October 09, 2014, 01:02:03 am »

Shrinking the world shouldnt be the common way. If you want small worlds take ARMA, or cry engine. Btw, somedays there will be a possibility to create planets procedurally. So the size of the planet will surely be parameterizable.

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ZeosPantera

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Re: do the devs wana shrink the world size for anteworld?
« Reply #3 on: October 09, 2014, 02:19:36 am »

Well the best part about the whole universe is you don't have to use it. That is the one thing I keep seeing over and over.

"Who wants to play a game on the whole earth" Well you don't have to. You can pick a great spot of land or a few and restrict your players there. Dress up 100 sq km and set your game up. Rivers, roads, buildings.. The BASE of it will be OT, all its features and landscape accuracy and its lighting engine and the back-end..

If I ever realized my dream of an Interstate76' reboot on OT the term "Somewhere in the Southwest" would be very very literal. I'd just concentrate on a 500 mile area of the southwest of America and go nuts.
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CaptJack92a

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Re: do the devs wana shrink the world size for anteworld?
« Reply #4 on: October 09, 2014, 02:31:23 am »

I would never intentionally close off the rest of the world. Especially with how common "Sandbox" like games are becoming. Rust for example. On a mega server, sizing the planet you use down a bit, then letting everyone use EVERYTHING on that planet would literally eventually generate a "Society". On top of that, it would allow for natural "Wastelands" to develop as wars ensue and "Empires" rise and fall. Imagine if the player base or a matched player base of EVE was to give a server/game like that a go if only for a few weeks. "Cities"/"Compounds" would have to be spaced to take up the actual land/world, but it would still be almost fully taken over, even if Earth wasn't shrunk. However, take the calculations, server power, internet use, and all the rest of the variables into account and you would wind up needing to shrink the planet ultimately, but a game like that would still require the entire globe. Especially if the game included space and other planets/moons.

It's not a matter of absolute answer, but a variable that requires the input of the game's concept itself to determine whether only a part of the globe is used, or if the globe is simply shrunk down.
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ZeosPantera

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Re: do the devs wana shrink the world size for anteworld?
« Reply #5 on: October 09, 2014, 03:26:24 am »

The 10 year old me would always try to drive to the other side of the world.. In this game I would escape and that would be entirely possible.
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PytonPago

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Re: do the devs wana shrink the world size for anteworld?
« Reply #6 on: October 09, 2014, 03:53:28 am »

The 10 year old me would always try to drive to the other side of the world.. In this game I would escape and that would be entirely possible.

 If hidden an dangerous had that size - "Hey guys, lets go around them enemyes" ...

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zombie00

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Re: do the devs wana shrink the world size for anteworld?
« Reply #7 on: October 12, 2014, 11:54:46 pm »

What everyone needs to understand here is that you can't think, conceive, a game in a 1:1 world scale the same way you think a game with a more conceivable size. The biggest 3D game for the moment is Fuel if I'm not wrong, that game has an area of  less than 200 square kilometers and is consider to be huge, 3 times bigger than the second biggest map (without taking MMO into account). With those games, development is likely to go this way: They grab a blank piece of paper and vaguely draw the map and determinate the size taking into account the movement speed of the players and within the hardware limitations; then they distribute the assets in a practical way and start sketching how that map will look (with an artistic view), that goes to the modelers and the map itself becomes what we end up playing on. 
The game with the biggest map ever made is Daggerfall, graphically based on sprites and it's about 650 square kilometers. The hand made part is the overall shape and the distribution of some of the cities, the rest is procedurally generated within some parameters.
Planet earth (outerra) has almost 150 million square kilometers and just taking the land into accout (30% of the planet surface), there is no point of comparison here, the sheer size is absurd.
To me, the best example Outerra could follow is the Daggerfall approach, you can't manually fill the world with worth-a-while content, you need to give tools to allow players to fill it themselves and, of course, enough mechanics and complexity to make it entertaining in the long term. No one will be capable of manually placing each spawn points for animals/enemies, no one will be capable of distribution towns/smaller settlements and or ruins/dungeons. A similar balance between "manually" setting parameters and procedural generation à la Outerra's map generator has to be found for the content too.
Animals should be given a behavior (aggressive, non-aggressive, herbivorous, carnivorous, etc) and a pre-determinate natural environment they inhabit (ie: hares living only in the forest).
Some build up areas should be handled with procedural generation too. Made some building models, assign some parameters for the disposition and the conditions where said areas can occur (ie: x amount of square meters of terrain with less than y variation on of terrain height), so the buildings aren't stuck between two mountains or sitting unnaturally standing out of a cliff.
On the player side, there needs to be tools to set up buildings with different qualities and capabilities, make it as complex and depth as possible, otherwise it will likely become boring after a while. A game that did this sort of right (or at least with the right intentions) is Planet explorers, you have a good degree of freedom when building and a variety of things you can add to your base to help you defend it. Imagine that for food gathering with methods such as hydroponic farms, metallurgic facilities that require some more interaction from the players than just putting a raw material in a small box and waiting for it to become steel, energy generators that require taking into account the environment where you are setting up your facilities (ie: Making solar panels less efficient with a weather like you will have in England and more efficient in the Mohave), and so on in all the branches of the player activity.
This creates its own set of issues from the gameplay design perspective. I'm not sure if anyone has played Dayz here (it's an ARMA mod that eventually became a standalone game about surviving in a quite realistic zombie apocalypse), but most servers become a kill-on-sight fest, no one really cooperates and the majority of the players keep to themselves, you end up surviving from the people rather than from the elements (rain, cold, etc) and the zombies. To keep a game from going that way you need to have a common treat and enough reasons to set up a base and look for cooperation. Slightly forcing people to team up giving a background story to tie them together wouldn't be a bad idea per se, but that could end up creating over powered teams abusing all the smaller ones. To me, it would be better to let people create their own groups and even give them tools to assign authority ranks and access levels (to limit the newer members from using/wasting resources without older member's approval); again, it would be necessary to make the resource generation task not completely automatic, so someone needs to actively do something with each machine every now and then to keep it working, that would motivate people to come together and work as a team.
I don't know enough about the game (anteworld) to make a specific suggestions about this, but the common treat that everyone could be worried about is crucial to avoid becoming yet another Dayz. The zombies should do that on that game, but they are way to stupid and irrelevant and no one is really worried about them, they all focus on killing people and looting them. If people needed help to deal with the zombies, that wouldn't happen.

Well, end up writing way more than what I originally had in mind, it became more of a general thought and concerns about game mechanics than just how to handle the map, but I feel everything is closely related.
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CaptJack92a

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Re: do the devs wana shrink the world size for anteworld?
« Reply #8 on: October 13, 2014, 12:29:36 am »

You've pretty much summed up what I've been saying in an array of about five or six posts about the forum recently, so. Yes.
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