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I'm sorry to tell you this, but this will never happen.

 

This has been considered and reconsidered many a times, but this will never ever happen 

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I think this idea should be at least tried, because with different maps all the time it makes the experience different every time!         ((like "Minecraft" and "the dead linger"))

 

As datkid said, it is not going to happen, but worry not! Once the mapping tools are released I'm sure that we will get to see many, many new maps ;)

 

I'd rather have perfectly crafted maps, than a random mess anyway :)

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Yes, but after countless hours of reading through discussions about why the randomly generated maps are bad I came with conclusion that the hand crafted ones are better.

They may come up with idea of how to randomize/spread the buildings around, so it doesn't take ages for them to add a big city, but to have it randomly built into the game... Sorry dude, no.

http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/78-project-zomboid-map-project/

Check this out. How good is hand-crafted maps to you? I imagine it will be a hell for you to memorize the whole city, and all of the 'encounters' always feel different every time you face them.

With hand made maps you get atleast SOME sense of direction, too. Would you like going across the road to suddenly see the city end in the middle of nowhere, which would make absolutely no sense?

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This comes up a lot.

Definitely the realm of modders.

A couple of ways you could take this, i reckon:

1. Create a shitload of asset lots and write an algorithm to place them semi-sensibly in a random terrain based on certain lot characteristics.

2. Create a plot / lot generator to stick random buildings in a random terrain.

I'd be up for having a go at 1. when there are enough community assets to use, 2. sounds really hard.

E: also

If you weren't aware of this project. Pretty easy (if time consuming)l to add 1. to this, but a bit pointless without assets.

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Just for future reference check this thread out here:

http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/192-commonly-suggested-suggestions-read-before-posting/

 

Basically a list of commonly suggested ideas that have either been confirmed or denied by the developers. Procedural or randomly generated maps is is 9th from the bottom just above 'rape'.... wait why is rape on the 'commonly' suggested list?! That is kinda worrying...

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I think this idea should be at least tried, because with different maps all the time it makes the experience different every time!         ((like "Minecraft" and "the dead linger"))

i guess its just too hard to do man. guess we'll hav to stick with this

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Read this discussion: http://www.theindiestone.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=12067&p=166406&hilit=random+map#p166406


 

Quote Lemmy101

 

 

Er why? Its the only sane way to do it. Surely having them arbitrarily overlaid on top of eachother fighting for the same space is what sounds a mess. People mod their own cells, or even just make their own buildings and people like Ringod or others take what people produce and combine them into huge community world's. Oh a new town? I'll put that to the East. An island? I'll put a coast to the south. The system seems to have worked pretty well so far. Explain what you mean please? A vague baseless unreasoned comment like this comes across vaguely trolly otherwise.

Especially when you're an advocate of random map generation. You think a hand crafted world made by the members of this community and curated by one of the PZ team would be more a mess than an unthinking computer algorithm at producing a world that made sense and was fun to play in? You're saying a computer algorithm could generate a beautiful town to the same level of quality as Mash or Andy, one designed to look like a US town AND to fit the game-play as well AND be balanced as well and all the rest of it?

Let us end this random map generation thing once and for all. If I'm tetchy it's purely because I've had this exact same argument a thousand times by this point, often in the face of rude dismissive comments like this, and my answers are always the same.

1) Let us assume that procedural generated maps could ever come remotely close to as good as hand crafted maps. Are you saying you'd like months of one of the coder's time spent making map generation system and working on nothing else? Because to get good procedural generation would take months. You may as well set back multiplayer by half a year, realistically. this is not something we can hack in in a weekend, it needs the game built around it and the game never was built around it because we don't want it and made the decision from the start not to have it.

2) What about the stories Will's spent a ton of time working out. Set in Muldraugh, the town near Fort Knox, the Bullion Repository, the army base, the location where the game is set. You know, perhaps we want to do something specific set in a specific place, had specific plans for the location, and don't want some random mulch of buildings. Or would you have us hand craft a map AND expend the time doing procedural generation? Thus taking months of programmer AND art time to cover all bases?

3) Shared experiences. Again, not going to go over this one more time, because I must have wrote that post about 100 times on this forum, once in this very thread.

4) and it's simply not possible to have a procedurally generated map that's as good as a hand crafted one. No matter how much time would be spent on it, it would still generate stuff that was weird, that didn't make much sense, was an odd shape and something an architect or builder would never build, or close to things that that building would never be close to, or have two hospitals right next to eachother, or a thousand other potential issues.

5) This is the biggy for me. You're at a town. You walk through miles of woods to get to another town. What's different about this second town? Well, it's laid out differently. That's it. If you've not explored every inch of town 1 there is zero point in going to town 2, and there's zero point in finding town 3 until you've completely finished with 2. Nowhere has any relevance since they are all constructed from the same mathematical equations, be they a mile away or 50 miles away. Everything is interchangeable.

You'll see all the same types of buildings. Again, either pre-crafted buildings that repeat, or randomly generated buildings that don't make sense as real buildings or start looking like all other buildings of their type. It's an illusion of 'infinite' because it means the exact opposite. Everything's ultimately the same. As soon as the novelty of 'layouts being a bit different' wears off, you've seen Spiffo restaurants a thousand times, in a thousand different layouts. They cease to be infinite variations and just become the same old tired thing you come to expect. Schools? Seen them a thousand times. You'd know what rooms to expect, what tiles you'd see on the walls in those rooms, but hey maybe this time there are two classrooms and three canteens, or one of the classrooms is in an L shape. Why is a classroom in an L shape? How would the kids at the back of the class see the board. Who knows, that's just how it is. Weird. Warehouse? Groan. Houses? You cease to take notice of them any more. You've seen the 20 tilesets used for houses so they never surprise you any more, except that one time you found a house that was only 5x5 tiles in size but was 12 stories tall. WTF was that about? There wasn't even any stairs because for some reason a wall was blocking them. Once you've seen all the 'types' of buildings 10, 20, 100 times, they become so mundane and are only special and memorable when they glitch out and look stupid or unrealistic in some way. In a hand crafted world, as well as every little thing being aesthetically and functionally designed to be fun and pretty, you always have the potential to find things completely new, that are only in one single place, and be the first to tell everyone about. And with every map update will come new treasures to find and explore.

Procedural generation is WONDERFUL for natural terrain and hell, we'll probably use random generation to provide an infinite map size beyond the borders (as we do on 0.2.0), but without MASSES of coding time dedicated to it, the results would be piss poor. And even WITH masses of coding time spent, the results would not be what we would want for the main game.

OR with Roguelikes. ASCII character walls, or simple square tiles, it doesn't really matter if it repeats and there's a ton more leeway for more wacky layouts, as you only have the layouts to give any meaning to the world so the wackier the better. The same rules don't apply. We're no 3D AAA game or nothing, but we are going for atmosphere and believably of the environment, and procedural generation would either be 1) heavily restricted to provide only sensible results, and therefore be uninteresting and drab after a while, or b) full of variation with the potential for extreme weirdness of layout, and thus break the illusion that you're in a town or city. Either of these extremes or anywhere in between would be of detriment to the game we are making in our opinion and we're not likely to change that opinion.

We get it though. Some people want random maps. As I say, if there's enough demand then let the modders take up the challenge with our 'mess' of modding tools. Or go buy the Dead Linger if you want it so bad, but it's simply never going to happen in PZ's base game, for practical, time, design, story and personal preference related reasons.

/rant

 

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