
The Quest to Make Massive Gaming Worlds Realistically Complex - DiabloD3
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-quest-to-make-massive-gaming-worlds-realistically-complex
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jblow
The article is not good.

It is true that games tend to be overly simplistic in this way, but it is
really a design problem, not a technical problem.

Technically, we can litter the ground with stuff and have plenty of permanent-
world changes. Design-wise, it is usually unclear how to make that a playable
game. Using someone's middleware is not going to help this.

The premise of this article is another example of what Frank Lantz calls the
Immersive Fallacy:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JzNt1bSk_U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JzNt1bSk_U)

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Animats
Right. Such a world would need huge numbers of semi-intelligent NPCs cleaning
up after the players.

In GTA, after you bashed a car or knocked over a sign, tow trucks, ambulances,
fire trucks, and repair crews would show up. NPC firefighters and EMTs would
extracted injured drivers from the wrecked cars and put them in ambulances,
which then drive away to hospitals. Tow trucks tow away the damaged cars to
impound lots or scrapyards. Repair crews show up and replace poles, restring
wires, replace signs. Damage to buildings brings out owners, then insurance
adjusters, then contractors, then construction crews with all their equipment.
Like Sim City, but with more detail.

Running the world where nobody's watching uses a lot of compute power. Game
design has traditionally avoided that. It might be affordable today.

Once the NPCs get good enough at running realistic simulated worlds, they can
start taking jobs in the real world.

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ovi256
>Running the world where nobody's watching uses a lot of compute power.

That should not be true with proper design. The game would just store "car
accident of type X and severity Y at time Z" until someone comes to watch.
Then it would show the appropriate cleanup efforts that the watcher would
witness.

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Animats
That's what games do now. Switching between levels of detail like that tends
to create artifacts, and requires lots of special casing.

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flohofwoe
I'm not getting any useful info out of that press release. It sounds like a
work distribution system to improve scaling, but what has this to do with
fetch quests? The 'boring' quests in MMOs are not designed that way because of
technical restrictions, but game design restrictions to keep the game world
under control despite thousands of players exploiting the game mechanics
(that's the actual 'game play' in MMOs, trying to 'gamble the game rules'.

Simple linear quest lines, unlimited resources, limiting interaction between
players (trading, etc...) help to keep the game world balanced for all
players, and most importantly, enable the game to provide an interesting
'hero-story' to each player instead of just being a simple 'pawn'.

Older MMOs like Ultima Online provided much more freedom (and power) to
players then current MMOs which are much more 'dumbed down'. I think the
current state of MMO monoculture can be traced back to WoW's success. WoW was
simple, linear, accessible, and extremely successful. Obviously this is what
players wanted instead of the complicated and unforgiving Ultima Online, and
everyone wanted to create a WoW killer.

May be the wheel of reincarnation is now turning again, there seems to be a
small revival of 'sandbox MMOs' which are less about individual story and more
about player interactions.

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Zikes
Minecraft flips this on its head. It has permanence, massive world scaling,
and endless potential for per-player experiences thanks to its purely open-
ended nature.

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AndrewKemendo
Back in the 90s when I wanted to be a game developer I thought that the
perfect game engine would be a scaled up particle emulator - making every
"object" just a complex of particles. In effect emulating the way the world is
built with stable elements.

Having finally come back to development 2 decades later and doing work with
virtual worlds I definitely think this is the right approach. It's basically
what is already being built with nuclear simulation models and the like so I
think there is definitely room to work between game engines, doing it at a
more abstract level and the supercomputers doing it at the particle level.

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zokier
Why do you think emulating our real world so closely would make the perfect
game engine? How would you approach (semi-)abstract games in such engine?

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cowardlydragon
Oh, so worlds will no longer cater to the magic teenage suburban fantasy that
everything magically fixes itself in the background after they mess it up and
leave the room?

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auganov
Sounds like they're abstracting away the backed for MMOs with some interesting
defaults and ideas.

I'm sure it might be huge for MMO devs, but as a person that occasionally
plays games, unless someone comes up with a way to have thousands of players
in close proximity, in a FPS-complex world all served under 100ms I'm not
really excited. That's pushing the frontier gaming-wise IMO.

I don't see this tech producing fundamentally better gaming experiences. It
just might level the playing field for MMO ppl.

EDIT: they actually don't seem gaming focused, so perhaps it's just the
article

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rmtew
What this curated press release reminds me of, is when OpenCyc was released.
Defining an ontology it contains detail and rules, which model things from
materials and processes, to projectile weapons and of course swords and what
not.

In theory, something like this should provide a technical resource of standard
things, which designers could then employ and build on. And which programmers,
could generate a more immersive world to build gameplay on. In practice
OpenCyc is a resource hog, and the details and rules it contains are when
examined found to be very limited.

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lazyjones
I'm surprised that neither the article, nor the people here have mentioned
[http://www.wurmonline.com](http://www.wurmonline.com) as the probably most
successful implementation of the sandbox concept, where one player's actions
affect the virtual world for everyone else.

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nemitek
Sounds to me like they're using actors to build MMOs.

