moultanoCreator of ns_shiva.Join Date: 2002-12-14Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
What about expanding the edges of the map with an infinite DEEP DEEP sea? In the ocean on earth, most of the biodiversity is in the relatively shallow areas near land masses. The open ocean is mostly barren. You could populate the edge of the map with subnautica's equivalent of open ocean, all you need is a sand-dune generator. You can populate it with leviathans, the krill-like things they eat. If the floor is featureless, that would effectively mimic the open ocean seafloor on earth. The main areas could be a submerged continent.
I don't have any objections with the size. The way the game world is explained and crafted it has its own advantages:
It has lots of caves that are far more interesting than those dull rpg caves. Even Skyrim caves won't be able to match them.
The game has a natural depth advantage. If it can cover space down to 3000m it's more than those Skyrim mountains, because this game allows a true 3D map, while other games only allow surface maps with height changes and some interior cells. The depth is also a natural limiter to difficulty and game progression.
The game not only allows exploration, but also crafting of underwater structures in a modular way. That's almost like inventing some "Underwater Tycoon". Those type of building games don't need much space to create fun. All that matters is a big library of things to build. So everyone can customize his own underwater world. Let the game building library expand and this game will allow a rich underwater architect community.
Subnautica world is a world of islands floating in the ocean above a deep unreachable core. So the game boundaries are the most natural possible - the endless ocean below and afar. If one travels too deep he will get killed by pressure, currents or some deep sea life, if one travels to the horizontal map edge he could meet sea leviathans to keep him back. Any DLC, mod or expansion can easily bring in another islands region. If the map engine is at its limit, teleport portals could allow to connect two different maps. Warpers in the game also suggest that there can be space separated regions.
The game could include overlay heat and current maps, making traveling much more interesting. It would be dangerous to travel in hot or cold environments or get dangerously pulled from course with currents. Fauna and Flora could react and play with temperature and currents.
We'd love to have a huge, huge world, but it's an issue of resources. As other folks have pointed out, everything in our world is completely hand-crafted. We experimented with procedural generation, like Minecraft or No Man's Sky, but we weren't happy with the results we were getting. So we made the trade-off and decided on a smaller world, but one with a visual quality with which we were much happier.
Out of curiosity, was there any experimentation with combation of handmade elements scattered into a procedural environment or so? I really have no particular preferrence as long as the devs manage to embrace whatever strengths their solution has, but I'm really curious of the game design thought process in general.
We'd love to have a huge, huge world, but it's an issue of resources. As other folks have pointed out, everything in our world is completely hand-crafted. We experimented with procedural generation, like Minecraft or No Man's Sky, but we weren't happy with the results we were getting. So we made the trade-off and decided on a smaller world, but one with a visual quality with which we were much happier.
Out of curiosity, was there any experimentation with combation of handmade elements scattered into a procedural environment or so? I really have no particular preferrence as long as the devs manage to embrace whatever strengths their solution has, but I'm really curious of the game design thought process in general.
Yes, that was the first thing we tried, after it became apparent that procedural generation by itself would never hit the feel and quality of the concept art. Unfortunately this approach created more problems than it solved, since the difference in visual quality between the hand-crafted and the generated areas was really quite stark. I believe there may have been performance implications as well, but I can't be certain of that as I was working on Future Perfect at that point.
On that note what about doing the core central map the way you are now and then instead of having void around it do some procedural generation, the now NEW void would not need the high attention to detail that the main map.
Having a procedural generated void space would also give us endless biomes to explore for resources or space to go crazy with the transformer without ruining the core map.
We Appreciate your attention to detail it's beautiful looking , we just don't want to feel like were stuck in a small circle world , at the moment the map's far to small in terms of raw radius I think it needs to be at least 3 times larger, You could cheat this in simply by scaling out the world or by adding in more biomes.
Personally I think a 3X larger map with more biomes and then procedural void space would be really good, the ocean floor on our world is bleak and seemingly endless so having massive procedural kelp or grass or sand dunes etc would fit with reality.
I just thought; Elite Dangerous is the game I have played with the biggest non-random generating map as it maps the entire Milky Way galaxy, or so it claims.
The stars and planets are in fact randomly generated, the only exception is planets and stars that are well documented, which the ED team will handcraft.
No, they are procedurally generated according to set rules, basically the Elite galaxy is a fractal that's similar to the Milky way. 'Random' is something quite different.
Comparing Subnautica's map to any other games map is like apples and oranges. Quality over quantity as stated. Instead of making everything bigger, having new diverse biomes to explore would add tremendous value to the game. Having generated landscapes with nothing new to see would just be a detriment to the game.
Comments
yep
It has lots of caves that are far more interesting than those dull rpg caves. Even Skyrim caves won't be able to match them.
The game has a natural depth advantage. If it can cover space down to 3000m it's more than those Skyrim mountains, because this game allows a true 3D map, while other games only allow surface maps with height changes and some interior cells. The depth is also a natural limiter to difficulty and game progression.
The game not only allows exploration, but also crafting of underwater structures in a modular way. That's almost like inventing some "Underwater Tycoon". Those type of building games don't need much space to create fun. All that matters is a big library of things to build. So everyone can customize his own underwater world. Let the game building library expand and this game will allow a rich underwater architect community.
Subnautica world is a world of islands floating in the ocean above a deep unreachable core. So the game boundaries are the most natural possible - the endless ocean below and afar. If one travels too deep he will get killed by pressure, currents or some deep sea life, if one travels to the horizontal map edge he could meet sea leviathans to keep him back. Any DLC, mod or expansion can easily bring in another islands region. If the map engine is at its limit, teleport portals could allow to connect two different maps. Warpers in the game also suggest that there can be space separated regions.
The game could include overlay heat and current maps, making traveling much more interesting. It would be dangerous to travel in hot or cold environments or get dangerously pulled from course with currents. Fauna and Flora could react and play with temperature and currents.
Yes, that was the first thing we tried, after it became apparent that procedural generation by itself would never hit the feel and quality of the concept art. Unfortunately this approach created more problems than it solved, since the difference in visual quality between the hand-crafted and the generated areas was really quite stark. I believe there may have been performance implications as well, but I can't be certain of that as I was working on Future Perfect at that point.
Having a procedural generated void space would also give us endless biomes to explore for resources or space to go crazy with the transformer without ruining the core map.
We Appreciate your attention to detail it's beautiful looking , we just don't want to feel like were stuck in a small circle world , at the moment the map's far to small in terms of raw radius I think it needs to be at least 3 times larger, You could cheat this in simply by scaling out the world or by adding in more biomes.
Personally I think a 3X larger map with more biomes and then procedural void space would be really good, the ocean floor on our world is bleak and seemingly endless so having massive procedural kelp or grass or sand dunes etc would fit with reality.
No, they are procedurally generated according to set rules, basically the Elite galaxy is a fractal that's similar to the Milky way. 'Random' is something quite different.
I think Morrowind beats it with all the mods over the years. I remember Morrowind being ranked number 1 on size like a year ago.