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[FeedMeCheese]

I read somewhere on the forums that you guys are considering making Anteword a game where your singleplayer world is populated by other user's creations and where there is also a true multiplayer gamemode where you can see and interact with other players.

Now, I may possibly be the only person here who thinks this, but I was wondering, could there also be a mode that is truly singleplayer? Where you can start a new game and have an entire planet to yourself for experimenting with tools/spawning things ect? Much like Minecraft's "Play Singleplayer" option? I spend a lot of time offline and I could spend hours building up my own little planet Whilst the world being populated by other users is a really cool idea, I think it would also be great to have a true singleplayer mode.

P.s: Just a little question on the side, can you "Reset" your current planet on Anteworld? I'd like to start from scratch

Thanks
  -John

[cameni]

Yes, a singleplayer mode is the default one, also the sandbox mode is supposed to take place on your local planet. The other mode is technically a synchronized singleplayer, when you would interact with other players in a kind of non-realtime manner. True multiplayer is supposed to handle smaller groups of people engaged in specific game play instances (racing, hunting ...).

You can delete every object and road created by deleting the "cache" folder in your Outerra data directory.

[FeedMeCheese]

Thanks! That sounds brilliant! So are player-hosted servers planned? Also, will one be able to have multiple singleplayer planets? Possibly all in the same solar-system?

[cameni]

Realtime servers should be definitely player-hosted. However, there's still our content-server on the background, that will store and sync the world data. The realtime servers are for synchronization and gameplay of dynamic entiites atop of it.

Anteworld is mainly about the Earth, on which we are focusing at the moment. There won't be other planets, not in the beginning, but we plan to include Moon and Mars later. Something that would allow creation of custom planets will be a different product, unless Anteworld evolves into a common platform everything on the engine.

[FeedMeCheese]

Fair enough! I just thought that in an earlier topic when you said:

We will have procedural worlds, but plan to use specialized algorithms for different stages of planet creation. But we would like to focus more on the artistic creation of the worlds, where you could predefine shapes of continents, rivers, mountain ridges etc, and have the world generated from that.

I understand that from that quote you meant that there would eventually be a way of creating custom planets? Or at least randomly generated ones?

I realize that Anteworld is primarily focused and based on planet Earth and I 100% agree that it should stay that way. I just thought that maybe there could be options or tools as well to create new planets that break away from the standardised structure of earth and allow creative freedom on a planetary scale too!

I personally don't think that having a planet creator should be a seperate game all together, I think it's too small of a feature to warrant being a completely separate game :S

I understand that it's probably too early in development to even consider these things just yet, I just thought I'd share my ideas

[cameni]

Well, the way I imagine it, a planet creator would be a large enough feature

Currently we are simply compiling the existing Earth datasets into a format suitable for use in OT. Custom artificial planets that would reach the quality level of Earth are hard to make though. You can ask the ME-DEM guys, who, after running procedural generators and erosion algorithms for one week on a patch of the size of Europe ended up making their world by blending real-world mountains into their maps because even a week of processing couldn't get them anywhere near the quality and detail of the real world.

The reason for it lies both in the existing tools and approaches and in the fact that it's really much more complex than simply using a fractal algorithm to make an artificial ridged-perlin worlds. These fractal worlds can be nice, in an artificial style, but they come with a fault that is also sold as their main strength - self-similarity. Fractals are really build on the concept that things tend to be self-similar at multiple scales, but in reality that's a huge simplification and a huge loss of information. Following the concept you get worlds that are just that - similar to each other, with similar structures everywhere. Might be interesting for a while, but it simply cannot compare to the real world.

Since the large terrain features are formed by different processes than the smaller ones, our long-term goal is to use a set of procedural techniques each built specifically for given detail level. And also to have means of artistic input into the process, where parts of each stage could be provided in a coarse and to-be-refined form externally.

So, all in all, it can be a pretty complex thing. But like I said, our focus is on the Earth and real-world locations, also because the simulation industry is interested only in the real worlds, so the artificial world maker will come only after that.

[FeedMeCheese]

You have a very good point! I wouldn't expect artificially generated worlds to be anywhere near as large or detailed as the main Earth planet that is generated from the elevation data, I merely meant that they could be MUCH smaller planets in the solar system because you're right, using just fractals can get boring, especially when the planet is earth-sized. I just thought it would be cool to create your own little smaller planets that could also be in the solar system, around but not detracting from the main Earth planet which is the primary focus of the game.

A planet creation tool is by no means a small feature, I should have said that there doesn't seem to be much point in making a separate game just for a planet creator as it would make more sense to be a part of Anteworld. Anteworld will already have the main earth planet, vehicles, buildings and everything else you plan to add to it so it seems right to make a planet creation tool as part of Anteworld, rather than creating a seperate game that may end up just like Anteworld only without planet Earth.

When you say this:

Since the large terrain features are formed by different processes than the smaller ones, our long-term goal is to use a set of procedural techniques each built specifically for given detail level. And also to have means of artistic input into the process, where parts of each stage could be provided in a coarse and to-be-refined form externally.

Are you referring to the current planet Earth or are you talking about purely algorithmicly (IE: No elevation data) generated planets?

[cameni]

I was talking about purely procedural planets there, for planets build off the externally provided elevation data we already have the algorithms to generate detail (below 100m resolution). The idea is to have an algorithm that can generate continents as shapes, with given land/sea ratio, then mountain ridges on the continents (and undersea), then major rivers and also the climates. Each of these could be replaced by an artistic input, e.g. you could draw the rough continent shapes as you want them, you could (but not have to) draw the main mountain ridges there, have the river flow this and that way, have the desert where you want it and so on.

The procedural algorithms will take these inputs, regardless of whether they were externally or internally produced, and refine the details down to the 100m level and possibly below, so that the existing rendering engine can take the output and use it for the rendering.

[FeedMeCheese]

That sounds fantastic, so we will be able to have the main Earth planet that is generated from the elevation data and then further refined by your algorithms, and be able to generate purely algorithmic planets through generation of continents from shapes and given ratios ect? Great!

I'm sorry for asking so many questions, I promise I'll let you get back to work now and try to contain my excitement for this game

Thanks ever so much!
                       -John

[GHAO]

To add: that planet-making algorithm should have a user-friendly sliding-scale mechanism (a la Civilisation V in the Advanced World setup) for the user to choose what kind of mountains, or the amount and style of rivers (I can supply a list of names and characteristics if you wish some point in the future)... and to help you, just feature real-life rivers/mountain ranges (so 'Amazon' is long, many tributaries, 'Nile' is uninterrupted and straight, 'Thames' has some serious meanders along the way, etc.)(some mountain ranges have a higher percentage of arretes, or knife-edges, than others; some are flatter; some give rise to more plateaus; some are single peak)! I wouldn't want to create an Earth-like world, because that's 70% water, 5% mountains... and the sea for me is the most boring part in any simulator (yes, even ship simulator ).
Other stuff in the menu could include jungle-to-forest ratio, maybe geological terrain choices as well.
But this is all for the far future, Outerra and Earth take priority