World generation and Once Lost Games

[jayhova]

This post is related to the Wayward Realms Devlog 1: World Generation Systems thread, but different enough that I felt it deserved its own topic.

There is a developer, Eagle Dynamics, that makes flight sims. There have been several of these developers over the years, Microsoft, EA Janes, Microprose, etc. In general, these were one-off games. Eagle Dynamics did something new. They created an ecology for all their future games to live in, DCS world. This is important because it makes every part of the game modular and compatible with everything else. This means that the world you are flying in is the best it can be and you are playing with the most current engine. It also means that the game you bought in 2008 is just as current today as it was then.

You might think the DCS world and an RPG like Wayward Realms would have little to do with one another. However, that is not the case. Both are simulators. Both benefit from realism which is as good as it can be made to be. Finally, both are 1:1 representations of reality. However, there is an issue with DCS world. Maps in DCS have a baked-in time period. That could be WWII or the 80s or today. There is one more thing I forgot to mention both are role-playing games. In DCS you are playing a pilot flying a particular plane from a particular era. The problem is if the map does not match the era it breaks immersion.

This got me to thinking, 'what if instead of making maps for every era you just changed the buildings?'. This would allow you to just remove buildings that had not been built yet from the map and possibly replace them with earlier buildings. With this in mind I thought you could add metadata to structures and then create a map for an earlier or later time by just applying the changes to the map. With this in mind I commented on OLG's Youtube video. Here's the exchange:

Jay Hova

My thoughts about this sort of creation is that there should be a method of tagging constructions with metadata that describes the structure and places it in time. Age of structures is important as you move forward and backward through time. This seems unimportant while creating a game, however, what happens when you set a games 1000 years in the past? Very old structures might still be there some might even be under construction. Castles built on the ruins of old castles might be replaced with the original. Bridges and roads would be different. Even rivers might have altered their courses. Forests may have been cleared for wood to make charcoal to forge swords.

OnceLost Games

Yes, that is absolutely correct. We do have plans for that. The entire Archipelago originally belonged to the Orks, so ancient structures will have that ancient Ork theme. The capital city of Splendour is likewise built on the ruins of an old Ork city, so those city structures will noticeably have layers to them.


Jay Hova

@OnceLost Games I brought this up on the discord server a long time ago but did not know if anyone thought it was a good idea. The idea sprang from DCS world (the flight/combat simulator). DCS has a modular construction around a world simulator. The problem is that areas in DCS exist in different time periods e.g. wwII, 70s, modern, etc. This creates simulation problems when you want to have say modern carrier operations out of Pearl harbor but the map is in WWII era. If you could have a map and then apply human changes to it that would allow you to move forward and backward in time and just apply a change patch to update differences in the map.

1:1 world simulations like DCS, Daggerfall and, OLG can benefit from incremental improvements. In 20 years when the technology improves you can benefit from those improvements by decoupling the story telling from the technology. Daggerfall Unity is a great example of this. DFU shows just how limited the later games were by revealing huge vistas the original game had but was unable to show because of the limitations of the technology.

To answer the unspoken question 'How does this make OLG money?', allows for a sandbox that anyone can play in. Of course OLG will publish games in this sandbox and expand the sandbox as they wish, but also others could do the same. e.g. fan generated content, and officially licenced content.

[Werewolf]

I hope Oncelost Games shows a town/city generator soon. Showing a video of a realistic medieval city being generated would really drive up the hype and validate the devs. I’m tired of every modern RPG having medieval cities just be large villages whereas Daggerfall’s actually had a thousand people in them. Showing a realistically-sized medieval city being generated is 10x more exciting then some dungeons in my view

[jayhova]

I hope Oncelost Games shows a town/city generator soon. Showing a video of a realistic medieval city being generated would really drive up the hype and validate the devs. I’m tired of every modern RPG having medieval cities just be large villages whereas Daggerfall’s actually had a thousand people in them. Showing a realistically-sized medieval city being generated is 10x more exciting then some dungeons in my view

It's pretty cool from looking at it. It seems like they will be having world curvature. This means that the time changes when you teleport.

[Werewolf]

In Daggerfall the time changes when you fast travel as well, it’s just the world is almost entirely static

[jayhova]

In Daggerfall the time changes when you fast travel as well, it’s just the world is almost entirely static

I am speaking of teleporting, not fast travel. On a globe teleporting moves you to a position on the globe where the sun is in a different position in the sky. For instance, if I teleported to Japan, it would be morning whereas here it is night.