[Ace]

I'd say that Dwarf Fortress adventure mode dwarfs (pun not intended) Daggerfall, but Daggerfall is a great example of the strengths and weaknesses of procedural generation.

It's also a case where a combo (main quest and capitals hand made, rest of world is mostly procedural) would have worked best. But "theme park" world design seems to have taken over most RPGs.

Still, imagine Skyrim's art assets used in a Daggerfall style world generation...

[Scotty]

I'd say that Dwarf Fortress adventure mode dwarfs (pun not intended) Daggerfall, but Daggerfall is a great example of the strengths and weaknesses of procedural generation.

There's only a mild difference in capability between the systems these two games were built on.  Dwarf Fortress also doesn't even bother with permanent generated cities and dungeons.  As far as I know, there isn't a single city/dungeon/whatever that every single Dwarf Fortress world shares, which is the whole point of Dragon's post.

tl;dr Daggerfall isn't 100% procedurally generated and that's a good thing.

[Dragon]

Exactly my point. Procedural generation can't do everything, but it doesn't have to be used for everything, either. A fully procedural game like Dwarf Fortress or Evochron Mercenary has to capture player by gameplay only - there's no place to experience a story. On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to set a story in a mostly procedural world. It can range from a scripted main quest with randomized locations to a handmade world built "on top" of the procedural engine. And I wish more games were like that. Another neat trick is running a procedural generator once and then fixing the seed, meaning you can make a handmade event/environment in a procedural (but nor randomized) location.

Still, imagine Skyrim's art assets used in a Daggerfall style world generation...

Believe me, I did. This was kind of what I hoped for for TES: Online, but it doesn't seem to live up to these expectations (well, that, and it's a bloody expensive subscription. Hopefully it'll go FTP someday before it dies...), at least, not yet. Skyrim's radiant quest mechanic already resembles what Arena and Daggerfall could do - namely, randomly generate minor, if a bit repetitive quests. While making cities the size of those in Daggerfall might be a bit beyond today's hardware (remember how many inhabitants they had!), it should be possible at some point in the future to match the scale of Daggerfall with then-modern graphics.

[Luis Dias]

[Luis Dias]

http://www.joshandjayshow.com/nomansskybeta/

[Colonol Dekker]

http://www.joshandjayshow.com/nomansskybeta/

 

Got three reds in a row

[Akalabeth Angel]

Looks pretty but what's the actual gameplay. The starfighter combat didn't seem that compelling.
Will wait and see.

[ShivanSpS]

The thing with the game is that sounds suspicious that a small company like Hello Games with no experience in anything like this will decide to go and build his own game engine to make the game, that does not make sence to me.

It looks like Unity to me, hell it even has the same particles fog/sun effects and 2D grass like Planet Explorers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bXANFZkcO4

1:14 you can see the grass is a "2D always face me".

[Luis Dias]

It's definitely not Unity. And it's definitely homemade. Even if it used Unity they would have had to build a lot of technology on top of it (the procedural "no loading screen" stuff).

You speak as if people are incapable of producing 3d engines, it's not that hard to do, a lot of documentation is available nowadays. A lot of libraries are available. Look at the Limit Theory dude, who is barely an adult and yet he single headedly built his own 3d engine and it's quite a beautiful one. This is not the 90s anymore.

It looks like Unity to me, hell it even has the same particles fog/sun effects and 2D grass like Planet Explorers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bXANFZkcO4

1:14 you can see the grass is a "2D always face me"

Of course, these are standard billboard procedures. Even advanced engines like CryEngine are full of 2D billboards, and all these particle effects are standard.

[The E]

Yeah, building your own 3D engine is remarkably easy these days. There's tons of how-tos and middleware out there that you can use; and what Luis says is also true. Unity isn't well-suited to build an infinite world (as the KSP devs found out), if you try to build an infinite world game using it, you'll be spending so much time hacking up workarounds that building your own engine will end up faster and easier.

[ShivanSpS]

Im not so sure yet, i played a lot of Unity games(hell im doing one) and i can smell them.
Also why so sure its that easy to make an engine? it took Egosoft 7 years to build up the really bad X-Rebirth + game engine, a way bigger company, with a lot more experience making a way simplier game.

The are 2 mayor problems with Unity with an infinite world 1) buggy 64-bit physics 2) old Physx lib, i may add old mono lib too. These problems are going away hopefully in Unity 5.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Im not so sure yet, i played a lot of Unity games(hell im doing one) and i can smell them.
Also why so sure its that easy to make an engine? it took Egosoft 7 years to build up the really bad X-Rebirth + game engine, a way bigger company, with a lot more experience making a way simplier game.

Egosoft had a lot of experience with making a terrible game engine. It took them 4 sequels to get to the point where their old game engine had a tolerable user interface.

Egosoft is a really bad example of anything, basically.

[SpardaSon21]

Actually they're a really good example of how not to do things, like design a UI.

[ShivanSpS]

I disagree, X2 and all X3 has been good games, X-R is the result of them not wanting to risk making an X4 due to cost.

[The E]

Im not so sure yet, i played a lot of Unity games(hell im doing one) and i can smell them.
Also why so sure its that easy to make an engine? it took Egosoft 7 years to build up the really bad X-Rebirth + game engine, a way bigger company, with a lot more experience making a way simplier game.

Because making a game engine is really easy now compared to ten years ago. The APIs have changed and been simplified over the years, we now have a bunch of standard libraries that we didn't have back then, and there's a large community of game developers out there willing to share the tricks of the trade.

[Colonol Dekker]

Genre-spanning-knowledge. Like a Meta-HLP?

That makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

[Luis Dias]

Don't forget they had already made their own 3d engine prior to this (their "joe danger" was also home made).

[Luis Dias]

From the latest awards show:

and

[Luis Dias]

So this was kinda way more interesting than what they (didn't) show at E3:

[FlamingCobra]

Exactly my point. Procedural generation can't do everything, but it doesn't have to be used for everything, either. A fully procedural game like Dwarf Fortress or Evochron Mercenary has to capture player by gameplay only - there's no place to experience a story. On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to set a story in a mostly procedural world. It can range from a scripted main quest with randomized locations to a handmade world built "on top" of the procedural engine. And I wish more games were like that. Another neat trick is running a procedural generator once and then fixing the seed, meaning you can make a handmade event/environment in a procedural (but nor randomized) location.

Still, imagine Skyrim's art assets used in a Daggerfall style world generation...

Believe me, I did. This was kind of what I hoped for for TES: Online, but it doesn't seem to live up to these expectations (well, that, and it's a bloody expensive subscription. Hopefully it'll go FTP someday before it dies...), at least, not yet. Skyrim's radiant quest mechanic already resembles what Arena and Daggerfall could do - namely, randomly generate minor, if a bit repetitive quests. While making cities the size of those in Daggerfall might be a bit beyond today's hardware (remember how many inhabitants they had!), it should be possible at some point in the future to match the scale of Daggerfall with then-modern graphics.

Look at how many inhabitants Assassin's Creed 1's cities have.