The Elder Scrolls Online

People are experimenting all over the place. Hell, my company has internal tech prototypes of a procedural MMO.

I don't think you understand how procedural generation works, you aren't storing whole zones on disk, just the "pieces" of the world and an algorithm for constructing it. Those pieces can either be very cheap (Minecraft sprites) or very expensive (Diablo 3 zone pieces). The actual disk size can vary wildly. Those 2 games are actually excellent examples of just how different procedural generation can be.

Denaut_sl said:

People are experimenting all over the place. Hell, my company has internal tech prototypes of a procedural MMO.

I don't think you understand how procedural generation works, you aren't storing whole zones on disk, just the "pieces" of the world and an algorithm for constructing it. Those pieces can either be very cheap (Minecraft sprites) or very expensive (Diablo 3 zone pieces). The actual disk size can vary wildly. Those 2 games are actually excellent examples of just how different procedural generation can be.

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Can we have betaz?

Abefroman_sl said:

Can we have betaz?

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Just a tech demo. The design concepts are awesome though, I know because I helped write them Anywho, we have a ton of projects in the works so it probably won't see the light of day. Generally speaking you work on projects you get paid for, right now this isn't one of them. I think, by the time we got around to it, that ship will have sailed and it would be competing against Trove, EQ Next and probably other stuff we aren't paying attention to. Especially those 2 big ones will have had a much larger budget and more development time.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

Those structures are pure blocks though. They just sit on top of a generated flat area.

I am not disagreeing with you by the way, I think I am just trying to explain why I don't think it is anywhere near ready for an MMO to launch like that.

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I mean, it depends. An MMO can be anything, Minecraft could be an MMO, Diablo 3 could have been an MMO (it almost is techincally). Both use procedural generation. They are just different.

Stop arguing with a_skeleton_03. His name is "genius" but backwards.

Troll_sl said:

Stop arguing with a_skeleton_03. His name is "genius" but backwards.

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I just got that. I'm afraid to think about what that says about me.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

It says worse things if you follow the advice of somebody named Troll.

Anyways I don't think anyone here is arguing. The reality of an EVE type fantasy MMO would be something we would all like to try we are just discussing how easily one aspect of it could be done.

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I meant your name

And I agree we are having a discussion, not an argument. I know that is rare on discussion boards, but it happens from time to time. I don't think biggest challange on an EVE style fantasy MMO is the world building, it is dealing with the network traffic.

Denaut_sl said:

I meant your name

And I agree we are having a discussion, not an argument. I know that is rare on discussion boards, but it happens from time to time.I don't think biggest challange on an EVE style fantasy MMO is the world building, it is dealing with the network traffic.

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I think this is only an issue if you don't use instancing and truly follow the EVE one giant server model which would be cool. Even then you could do phaseless instancing of areas and circumvent the bandwidth caps server side. Network traffic shouldn't be an issue, I wouldn't think as long as you aren't too draconian with how you handle client offloading of data files and have a good memory monitor in place server side.

The bigger problem would be solving the 'procederual generation' and empty areas design problems listed above that EVE suffers from in it's current incarnation. Exploration of rocks and hills ain't very exciting and is why so much of the MMO landscape is themepark nowadays, even if it's simply the lesser of two evils.

/armchair design hat off

Half of those problems stem from the fact that EVE greatly encourage a numbers race through pvp, that might be less of an issue in our fictional fantasy-EVE It would certainly help to encourage people to spread out instead of clustering up like EVE does (PVP obviously, but the spread of lvl4Q20 agents had the same bad effect in PVE before they started spreading people out). If you have a vast landscape, the first thing to do is improve loot/xp/rewards on anything that's been alive longer.

When someone says an EVE style game, I generally assume they mean the hundreds of people fighting in a single zone thing, which is the challenge. If you divide people up into instances and cap those instances like you guys said it does mitigate the problem greatly, but then that being "EVE Style" is debatable. We probably all have slightly different definitions in out head about what that means.

Memory management and data off-loading to clients doesn't help the network traffic issue. Broadly speaking any MMO has 3 major constraints: Client Processing, Network Traffic, and Server Processing. Network traffic is the hardest to deal with because of physical constraints completely out of your control (worldwide network infrastructure, the speed of light, etc). You can think of the network traffic limitation as a "total player action interactions per second" problem.

Traffic has a roughly n^2 curve, with n being the number of players. There is essentially a hard cap on that you can't change, so you get creative and try to minimize that portion of the game design/tech design. There are lots of ways to do that, but they all involve sacrificing one constraint for another (e.g. faster game-play but fewer total players).

Denaut_sl said:

When someone says an EVE style game, I generally assume they mean the hundreds of people fighting in a single zone thing, which is the challenge. If you divide people up into instances and cap those instances like you guys said it does mitigate the problem greatly, but then that being "EVE Style" is debatable. We probably all have slightly different definitions in out head about what that means..

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See, when I see 'EVE style' I think of one server and no shards for all players, but not necessarily hundreds of people in close proximity.

That said, with converged 10GIGE adapters and multiple throughput's server side, the limitations of bandwidth right now are far less than they were just two years ago. The part that is muddy for me is how do you draw all those clients and keep them synced, like you said player interactions altogether.

Seems like we need a John Carmack 2.0 to come along and figure out how to make MMOs really massive.

Creed, I like the idea of more people in a big city setup, personally. Also, huge battles are a big draw to me also. If they can do this in a seamless EVE style one server setup with a minimum of instances that'd do a lot to build community.