Atlas Question
by Will Pall · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 06/10/2005 (9:44 pm) · 24 replies
Okay, I'm sure this has been answered, or at least that everyone except me knows about it, but I'll ask anyway. At some point in time I thought I remembered something stating that the TSE terrain would be able to have a continuous terrain/mission thing going on. Meaning, that we could have a non-stop world (much like Morrowind's was my understanding). It is highly possible that I have misread this, and that nothing like this was planned. I know that, really, the new terrain can go about as far as I want it to, but for an RPG I would like to be able to split it up into managable chunks but still have it run together smoothly. I don't think that Atlas can currently support this, but if it does it would be nice if someone would introduce me to it. Other than that, I'd like to thank Ben(and anyone else who happened to work on it) for giving us this incredibly astounding and awesome terrain.
About the author
#22
Monsters inside "dungeons" are (re)generated each time you enter, but the same ones start in the same place each time.
Friendly NPCs inside buildings (such as shopkeepers) also start in the same place each time (they don't actually move except to turn as face you as they're billboards). I'm not sure about those outdoors, as there are usually hundreds of them moving around in each town, and there were hundreds - possibly thousands - of towns.
Non-storyline objects are randomly generated however, as are sub-quests, weather conditions and certain events (such as plagues and wars).
Morrowind is almost the exact opposite, as everything was created manually.
06/16/2005 (2:46 pm)
Stephen: Although the terrain, buildings, trees etc. were originally randomly generated during the development of Daggerfall, they were subsequently stored as static files on the CD. Several people have created programs to read that data and display the dungeons etc. I think someone even managed to convert them to .3ds format.Monsters inside "dungeons" are (re)generated each time you enter, but the same ones start in the same place each time.
Friendly NPCs inside buildings (such as shopkeepers) also start in the same place each time (they don't actually move except to turn as face you as they're billboards). I'm not sure about those outdoors, as there are usually hundreds of them moving around in each town, and there were hundreds - possibly thousands - of towns.
Non-storyline objects are randomly generated however, as are sub-quests, weather conditions and certain events (such as plagues and wars).
Morrowind is almost the exact opposite, as everything was created manually.
#23
@Ivan: Yeah, we're cool like that!
06/16/2005 (5:28 pm)
@Wysardry: Well, I was a beta tester for Daggerfall, and I can tell you right now all of the dungeons were randomly generated except for the main quest line ones. In fact, a good portion of our time was spent debugging the random dungeon generator ;)@Ivan: Yeah, we're cool like that!
#24
A number of people have created (or are working on) various DF file readers, including some that read dungeon data for display or conversion.
If you think about it, randomly creating dungeons in a game the size of Daggerfall would be problematic, as the data for each would need to be permanently saved as the player entered so that they remained the same on subsequent visits.
Much smaller games like Diablo can get away with having random dungeons, but not one where walking from one end of the world to the other takes over 2 full weeks in real-time (Bethesda supposedly tested this).
06/20/2005 (8:26 pm)
Maybe the dungeons were random during beta testing, but like so many other features it was dropped for the final version.A number of people have created (or are working on) various DF file readers, including some that read dungeon data for display or conversion.
If you think about it, randomly creating dungeons in a game the size of Daggerfall would be problematic, as the data for each would need to be permanently saved as the player entered so that they remained the same on subsequent visits.
Much smaller games like Diablo can get away with having random dungeons, but not one where walking from one end of the world to the other takes over 2 full weeks in real-time (Bethesda supposedly tested this).
Torque Owner Ivan Lazarte
quantum states over beers huh? ;)