Development focus

[Walsingham]

I was curious to find out which creative tasks take the longest to do in making a crpg.

 

I ask because Hellgate London seems to have opted for a 'random encounter generator' for much of the fighting/level design. My first thought was 'ooh how clever', but it seems to annoy a lot of people. Is there scope in a crpg for randomly generated filler, and if so how cunning would it need to be?

 

How about all those random bits of dialogue with incidental characters? Surely there must be dialogue generators out there which coud handle trivial conversations.

[Adam Brennecke]

Most man hours are spent on content creation. For a game with a large open-world non-linear scope creating a tool to procedurally generate the content for you is a good idea.

 

For dialogue you'd probably end up with a system like Daggerfall or Freelancer - at the opposite end of the random spectrum are random worlds that are generated at runtime like Hellgate, Nethack, and Diablo.

[mkreku]

Or.. you could actually lay down the hours needed and hand-craft your enormous world.. like seen in Gothic 3, for example.

[Xard]

mkreku's G3 fanboyism is slowly making me feel sick.

[mkreku]

Gothic 3.. Gothic 3.. Gothic 3..

[Walsingham]

@ Gothic 3, which I found aggressively tedious.

 

I figured that the content would liely be the biggest issue, and (fanboy alert) this is also what makes Obs games absolute class for me. I love the content. I suppose in general one would only have two options to get ahead in this area. The first would be to acquire content in a cheaper way taht ran in parrallel to mainstream plot, perhaps by way of fan based subsidiary quests, characters and dialogue. Unfortunately this might compromise quality.

 

The second option which might be interesting is to use a mental toolkit to be creative and efficient about content. Something like what TRIZ does for creative engineering. Basically ways to accelerate the process of having a cool idea, and expand it to take in further notions and ideas. I'd been thinking about this for a while and was thinking that basic quests tend to adhere to some simple rules of architecture. However, I'm hardly a world class dev, so I wonder how this sounds to you guys.

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

For a game with a large open-world non-linear scope creating a tool to procedurally generate the content for you is a good idea.

 

(The comment is supposed to be an addition, not argumentative)

 

Whilst certainly a good idea, it only works within a specific rules framework, so while its procedurally generated you still need a certain amount of control over the result, atleast to provide the player with an adequete result, as certain factors need to be fixed, I believe this method was used for diablo where naturally certain mission specific enemies needed inclusion.

 

As for the generation of enviroments Fractals can be considered a general purpose approch, which varies in its success dependant upon the skill of the implementer, and the particular techniques used.

 

What can be said is that a good system for generating large procedural enviroments can initially take longer than content generation, but its general purpose reuseablity makes the investment worth while in the long run.

 

An example of this, take a terrain, a good 3D artist can generate a heightmap and manipulate it extremely quickly in a 3D modelling program, where a programmer would be forced to generate the code which makes the mesh, and then write algorithms to generate a heightmap, this takes alot longer than the 3D artist every would. While the 3D artist has direct control of the single result. The algorithm will produce potentially infinate results, some may be deemed inappropriate.

 

I suppose the best results yielded by such a method would be one which combines the ability to have a bit of both. I personally from results of systems I've experimented with find that so long as the scope is large enough, randomly generated terrains can be really cheap in terms of memory, and provide good results.

 

Most naturally occuring objects can be procedurally generated.

 

edit: I often argue that procedural content will finally get rid of designers, and artists, now all programmers need to do is figure out a way to dispose of management. LOL j/k.

Edited November 21, 2007 by @\NightandtheShape/@

[Kaftan Barlast]

edit: I often argue that procedural content will finally get rid of designers and artists

 

 

You will NEVER get rid of us artisty types. I know this company, let's call them *, that thought it would be a really neat idea to skimp in on art assets by outsourcing all of it to China. But poetic justice nailed their balls against the wall when they got their fancy schmancy outsourced art and none of it turned out to be useable and they had to hire proper Swede artists to fix it.

 

 

 

 

 

*I did write their name here but since google knows what i say here, I cant post it for fear of retribution. but they did make crappygame whose title rhymes with "Rust Pause"

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

I would never get rid of artists, I just think much as middleware decreases the amount of programmers needed on a project, procedural content generation has the potential to decrease certain dull artistic tasks such as modelling rocks, afterall... Who the hell actually enjoys modelling a good rock eh?

[Walsingham]

Now I'm confused. I'm not talking about a computer black box which magically creates cool stories.

 

1) I'm talking about a set of creative mind tools for making creativity more efficient. Something like the Standard Solutions in TRIZ.

 

2) A black box would be neat for handling the less than genius bits of an RPG, like the maps, and bad guy fights.

[Rostere]

Wouldn't random generation ruin all the fun of replaying a game, to see what happens if you make different choices?

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

Wouldn't random generation ruin all the fun of replaying a game, to see what happens if you make different choices?

 

Only if you randomly generated to text and story... The game world would have little effect as it would be worked into the said rules. If anything it would provide an increased ability to replay the game as area's wouldn't be repreated.

[Walsingham]

I've been playing MoTB since getting it on Friday and my views on thi topic have shifted quite a bit. This is largely because it is absolutely freaking superb. I had forgotten what a hand crafted work of genius you chp[s were capable of. Each bit has the touch of class that comes from individual attention. I'm just not sure you'd get that feeling with a part automated game. It's like the finish on a stradivarius. You know the interior is nearly as beautiful as the exterior, even though you can't see it.

 

On the other hand is that part automation necessary to keep Obsidian profitable, and allow you to go home on time. I don't know.

 

 

Stradivarius

 

 

Chris Avellone

[Xard]

I read some old developer profile of Avellone in NMA where he answered a bunch of questions - dear god did I lol much