Landscape creation

[silentpolygon]

Hello,

I had a first look on Multiverse3D and must say, that this is just impressive. Keep up the very good work.

I think the first step to building a hole game would be designing the landscape(the world). You speak about the possibility to have huge worlds like in Gothic 1,2,3. But how to develop them? How does the server manage them? Is there one huuuuuuge Landscape build out of a heightmap or will there be severeal "pieces" like zones in WOW?

thx and cheers
silentpolygon

[SirGolan]

Hi there,

In MV3D, you can have as big of a world as you like (assuming you have enough servers to handle it). There are no zones in the traditional sense where you have a bit of a pause when you go between them. Everything is seamless. To explain a little further, at the bottom level, you have individual objects-- players, monsters, trees, chunks of terrain. Those are all contained by Areas. Areas don't have any specific size or shape, they are just containers for objects. I've made a single area that was about 1/3 the size of the state of Rhode Island (and on one server, too-- just this was only possible because there wasn't much going on in the area). Then, you have a collection of Areas which is called a Realm. You could think of a Realm like a continent or even a single planet (for a land based game). In a space game, it could be a solar system or maybe even a galaxy. It's really up to you how you partition things.

Currently, I'm not sure that it is possible to seamlessly move from one Realm to another, but that is planned to work. One of the things that make this hard is that two Realms can have completely different game rules or physics, so anything that crosses the boundary between the two has to also be adapted for the different rules.

A little more about terrain though. The terrain is made up of many chunks. Each chunk has a small part of a height field. They behave like all other objects in the game, so they are completely dynamic (if you edit them with the editor, other players within view will see your changes more or less instantly). This also means that there is no reason you can't have overlapping terrain, caves, or whatever you want basically.

Hope that answers your questions.

[silentpolygon]

Thanks for this detailed answer.

So I paint a heightmap and the seperate it into lets say 4 chunks. Then in the code i have to create 4 terrain objects?
How many chunks do you had in your "Rhode Island" program?

I am planning an island with about 10% of Rhode Islands size.


thx
silentpolygon

[SirGolan]

At this very moment, the heightmap is automatically generated using perlin noise. In the past, there have been two other ways-- loading via an image and then automatically splitting up into chunks (like you said), and also editing in game. I'll be bringing both of those back soon.

I suspect the most often used way of generating a height map will be a combination of those methods-- generate the large scale map based on perlin noise, then edit sections of it manually or by importing an image based heightmap. The aim is to allow content creators to have flexibility but also speed in creating areas they aren't too concerned about the details of.

[silentpolygon]

Thank you very much.

Greetings
silentpolygon