1. #7381
    The Lightbringer
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Mar 2014
    Posts
    3,084
    Quote Originally Posted by Kuntantee View Post
    These guys are still going?

    - - - Updated - - -



    This is the easier way to do it. Generate cave entrances randomly, and then upon entering the cave, generate the cave as well or at some prior point. You can probably tie generated maps on the actual terrain, but that would be technically difficulty and probably pointless since teleporting works just fine.
    I believe this is how Bethesda's creation kit does it (Skyrim, Fallout 3/4 etc). And this is why you never have line of sight into the cave from outside, or vice versa. That first corner you turn is where the invisible portal is. When executed well, the player seamlessly passes through it and appears in the "cave" which isnt actually connected to the exteriror terrain. The player is none the wiser.
    Last edited by Nihilan; 2016-06-23 at 02:00 PM.

  2. #7382
    Quote Originally Posted by Nihilan View Post
    I believe this is how Bethesda's creation kit does it (Skyrim, Fallout 3/4 etc). And this is why you never have line of sight into the cave from outside, or vice versa. That first corner you turn is where the invisible portal is. When executed well, the player seamlessly passes through it and appears in the "cave" which isnt actually connected to the exteriror terrain. The player is none the wiser.
    Yep, it's easy. You may pre-load all caves, or load caves within x radius and since the there isn't a client-server communication, the transition will be instanteneous. You can also do it traditional way, i.e., just generate entire terrain and caves in a procedural way without tricks, the problem would be anchoring the generated cave and exterior terrain. I mean, in terms of programming and physics, this is not an issue and is straightforward. The problem would be on graphics department.
    Last edited by Kuntantee; 2016-06-23 at 02:12 PM.

  3. #7383
    Quote Originally Posted by Kuntantee View Post
    These guys are still going?
    They've been making incremental progress ever since they reorganized after the last failed KS to work purely on the power of volunteers in developing their self-hosting multiplayer totes-gonna-be-a-really-reals-MMO-someday game. We've just been watching their weekly bibble-babble of talking big about very little of substance. Lots of elaborations on their ideas and concepts alongside talking up managing to do tasks that should've gone without saying in the course of a normal workday. But again, relying purely on volunteers, which means they work as much as they want when they want. And I expect by now most of them are not putting forth more than a hobby's worth of effort.

  4. #7384
    Quote Originally Posted by axell View Post
    Well let me just preface that i don;t believe they can do it , what they described is actually doable and has been done in a few games. You initially generate the terrain then based on the heightmap and slopemap and texture map you can generate the vegetation and rocks and other misc natural decor.THen you generate a navmesh and you can generate the monsters using similar techniques. Caves are a bit more tricky as well but they can be done if you use meshes for the cave entrance and make it act as a portal to the cave interior. THe caves cannot be part of the terrain and will need to have a mesh for the entrance and one for the interior but it can be done.
    It's not easy by any stretch of the imagination but a team of experienced developers can do this.
    I am not sure what games you are talking about, could you give an example? It definitely is not doable in Unity, because there aren´t even tools that allow you to do it in the editor, let alone generate and save a gameworld that huge at runtime. Throw in the fact that you would also have to be able to auto-chunk it for performance reasons. Generating a huge map, fully decorated would crush your RAM and GPU and would be impossible to optimize (runtime lightmap generation?). And let us just add that the team that is going to do this is 18 months into this project and still hasn´t gotten a server login system working, nor has begun working on this amazing new terrain system.

    If you show me a game that has done what they are trying to do in a 3D game with a large gameworld, I will quickly admit I am wrong. I have no doubt someone can do it with terrains and minor decorations on a small map.. which is really just an extension of what games like Diablo do with map generation. But to create a large world with caves and stuff. I do not think it is possible.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Kuntantee View Post
    These guys are still going?

    - - - Updated - - -



    This is the easier way to do it. Generate cave entrances randomly, and then upon entering the cave, generate the cave as well or at some prior point. You can probably tie generated maps on the actual terrain, but that would be technically difficulty and probably pointless since teleporting works just fine.
    I bolded this part because you seem to have just talked right past it. How? How using Unity terrains do you just ´generate´ a cave entrance. There is no mechanism to do that, you cannot even cut holes in unity terrains.

    If you could make such a tool, you would be a millionaire on the Unity asset store. The guy from Gaia is getting paid big time for his editor extension that doesn´t even do half of the stuff ToA is talking about, and it only works in the editor.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Nihilan View Post
    I believe this is how Bethesda's creation kit does it (Skyrim, Fallout 3/4 etc). And this is why you never have line of sight into the cave from outside, or vice versa. That first corner you turn is where the invisible portal is. When executed well, the player seamlessly passes through it and appears in the "cave" which isnt actually connected to the exteriror terrain. The player is none the wiser.
    That is probably more about RAM. The same thing in WOW when you enter any major city there is an S-Curve to break line of sight. When you enter the walls of Ogrimmar or the statues in Stormwind, you go in, then right, then left, then you enter the city. That middle section inside the wall is added so they can drop Durator from your memory and load Ogrimmar. Games are usually always set up so you only have one major and one minor map in your memory. Having a full dungeon and a full outside area in your memory would give you performance issues.

    We also use it because of lighting issues in Unity when doing caves ( even in a pre-created world). it is easy to have lighting artifacts and shadow issues if you can stand at a point and look into partially into the cave, and still see outside world. Halfway through the S-curve we unload the outside world along with it´s lighting.

    Edit. Here is the link to Gaia ( I do not have any part in it, and do not even own it). It has been out for about 6 months and is probably the best selling asset on the asset store during that time by a large margin because it is by far the most advanced world creation system going for Unity. What you should notice... no caves, only works in editor, and you still have to go in and break the terrain into chunks and set up your loading/unloading system to get it to be performant. But just the fact that it creates terrains, textures the terrain and adds plants and objects randomly to that terrain was a huge breakthrough. The best, most advanced terrain creation system that has sold thousands of copies in the last 6 months does not even come close to doing what ToA says they are going to do.
    Last edited by Azrile; 2016-06-23 at 10:28 PM.

  5. #7385
    Quote Originally Posted by Azrile View Post
    How?
    By coding. I wasn't talking specific to Unity but programming in general. It's doable. I could probably implement something similar, only if I had time.

  6. #7386
    Quote Originally Posted by Kuntantee View Post
    By coding. I wasn't talking specific to Unity but programming in general. It's doable. I could probably implement something similar, only if I had time.
    Yes, but remember, this is the ToA team we're talking about. None of them are even close to professional or working on this anywhere close to full-time. So in the abstract sense, sure, stuff like this is possible. For volunteer, amateur Frankenkitters like ToA? It is to laugh.

  7. #7387
    Quote Originally Posted by Kuntantee View Post
    By coding. I wasn't talking specific to Unity but programming in general. It's doable. I could probably implement something similar, only if I had time.
    Yeah, anything can be coded, they could abandon Unity and just program their own engine.

    I am not insulting you at all. But I am saying this honestly. If you think you can program what they described... You will be a millionaire by selling it on the Unity Asset store. There are guesses that the guy who made Gaia has probably made close to quarter of a million from sales in the past 6 months.

    Skip all the cave stuff.. I am just very doubtful you could procedurally create even a terrain and textures with rocks (skip plants) at runtime that would be able to be played as an openworld RPG. You are just missing most opportunities to optimize. You would have to create the world, then automatically break it down into 1km by 1km sections that have their heighmaps match up, and then you would have to have an automated system to where only 2 or 3 pieces could ever be loaded at the same time...and which zones loaded at which times would have to take into account line of sight... you have a hill, well then you have to load 4 zones in front of the player.

    Also, you might have missed the fact that these guys lost their only programmer 18 months ago, than they couldn´t even figure out how to turn on their server, then they were not able to extract the content on that server... so they started over. And in 18 months, their amatuer programmer has not been able to create a login server.

  8. #7388
    I don't see where they're claiming they'll procedurally generate terrain at runtime. From that Island Settings mockup it looks like their plan is to provide pre-made (whether hand-made or procedurally generated at design time) island maps with a couple of variations of each of their biomes.

    The variable resource spawns could be handled by prepositioning all possible spawns at design time and using those server settings to control how many are active at runtime.

    As for caves, Unity's built in terrain system doesn't support holes in the terrain mesh. There are a couple of potential workarounds. One straightforward method would be to create a handful of cave entrance meshes (an arch of rocks with a dark shadow in the middle) that act as teleporters to the actual prebuilt caves and that can be handled like the resource spawns to allow runtime adjustment of the number of entrances available. The actual cave meshes could be kept somewhere underground in the same scene. They wouldn't have to be located near their entrances.

    Still alot of work (mainly in art creation and world building) and potential performance pitfalls, but technically straightforward.

  9. #7389
    Quote Originally Posted by DCMonkey View Post
    I don't see where they're claiming they'll procedurally generate terrain at runtime. From that Island Settings mockup it looks like their plan is to provide pre-made (whether hand-made or procedurally generated at design time) island maps with a couple of variations of each of their biomes.

    The variable resource spawns could be handled by prepositioning all possible spawns at design time and using those server settings to control how many are active at runtime.

    As for caves, Unity's built in terrain system doesn't support holes in the terrain mesh. There are a couple of potential workarounds. One straightforward method would be to create a handful of cave entrance meshes (an arch of rocks with a dark shadow in the middle) that act as teleporters to the actual prebuilt caves and that can be handled like the resource spawns to allow runtime adjustment of the number of entrances available. The actual cave meshes could be kept somewhere underground in the same scene. They wouldn't have to be located near their entrances.

    Still alot of work (mainly in art creation and world building) and potential performance pitfalls, but technically straightforward.
    Yeah but what you are describing is light years beyond what these guys are capable of doing.

  10. #7390
    Quote Originally Posted by Azrile View Post
    Yeah, anything can be coded, they could abandon Unity and just program their own engine.

    I am not insulting you at all. But I am saying this honestly. If you think you can program what they described... You will be a millionaire by selling it on the Unity Asset store. There are guesses that the guy who made Gaia has probably made close to quarter of a million from sales in the past 6 months.

    Skip all the cave stuff.. I am just very doubtful you could procedurally create even a terrain and textures with rocks (skip plants) at runtime that would be able to be played as an openworld RPG. You are just missing most opportunities to optimize. You would have to create the world, then automatically break it down into 1km by 1km sections that have their heighmaps match up, and then you would have to have an automated system to where only 2 or 3 pieces could ever be loaded at the same time...and which zones loaded at which times would have to take into account line of sight... you have a hill, well then you have to load 4 zones in front of the player.

    Also, you might have missed the fact that these guys lost their only programmer 18 months ago, than they couldn´t even figure out how to turn on their server, then they were not able to extract the content on that server... so they started over. And in 18 months, their amatuer programmer has not been able to create a login server.
    No, you are not insulting me. Chill out.

  11. #7391
    Quote Originally Posted by DCMonkey View Post
    I don't see where they're claiming they'll procedurally generate terrain at runtime. From that Island Settings mockup it looks like their plan is to provide pre-made (whether hand-made or procedurally generated at design time) island maps with a couple of variations of each of their biomes.

    The variable resource spawns could be handled by prepositioning all possible spawns at design time and using those server settings to control how many are active at runtime.

    As for caves, Unity's built in terrain system doesn't support holes in the terrain mesh. There are a couple of potential workarounds. One straightforward method would be to create a handful of cave entrance meshes (an arch of rocks with a dark shadow in the middle) that act as teleporters to the actual prebuilt caves and that can be handled like the resource spawns to allow runtime adjustment of the number of entrances available. The actual cave meshes could be kept somewhere underground in the same scene. They wouldn't have to be located near their entrances.

    Still alot of work (mainly in art creation and world building) and potential performance pitfalls, but technically straightforward.
    Again, we can talk about theoretical things all you want, but it is a huge technical hurdle that nobody has accomplished using Unity. Not even close. The closest, most advanced thing took some team 2 years to create and doesn´t even come close to what ToA is describing. Saying on some forum´it is doable´ flies in the face of evidence. And as we pointed out, this is a development team that went an entire month where the highlight of their development was creating the model for a block of rock.

  12. #7392
    Quote Originally Posted by Azrile View Post
    I am not sure what games you are talking about, could you give an example? It definitely is not doable in Unity, because there aren´t even tools that allow you to do it in the editor, let alone generate and save a gameworld that huge at runtime. Throw in the fact that you would also have to be able to auto-chunk it for performance reasons. Generating a huge map, fully decorated would crush your RAM and GPU and would be impossible to optimize (runtime lightmap generation?). And let us just add that the team that is going to do this is 18 months into this project and still hasn´t gotten a server login system working, nor has begun working on this amazing new terrain system.

    If you show me a game that has done what they are trying to do in a 3D game with a large gameworld, I will quickly admit I am wrong. I have no doubt someone can do it with terrains and minor decorations on a small map.. which is really just an extension of what games like Diablo do with map generation. But to create a large world with caves and stuff. I do not think it is possible.

    - - - Updated - - -



    I bolded this part because you seem to have just talked right past it. How? How using Unity terrains do you just ´generate´ a cave entrance. There is no mechanism to do that, you cannot even cut holes in unity terrains.

    If you could make such a tool, you would be a millionaire on the Unity asset store. The guy from Gaia is getting paid big time for his editor extension that doesn´t even do half of the stuff ToA is talking about, and it only works in the editor.

    - - - Updated - - -



    That is probably more about RAM. The same thing in WOW when you enter any major city there is an S-Curve to break line of sight. When you enter the walls of Ogrimmar or the statues in Stormwind, you go in, then right, then left, then you enter the city. That middle section inside the wall is added so they can drop Durator from your memory and load Ogrimmar. Games are usually always set up so you only have one major and one minor map in your memory. Having a full dungeon and a full outside area in your memory would give you performance issues.

    We also use it because of lighting issues in Unity when doing caves ( even in a pre-created world). it is easy to have lighting artifacts and shadow issues if you can stand at a point and look into partially into the cave, and still see outside world. Halfway through the S-curve we unload the outside world along with it´s lighting.

    Edit. Here is the link to Gaia ( I do not have any part in it, and do not even own it). It has been out for about 6 months and is probably the best selling asset on the asset store during that time by a large margin because it is by far the most advanced world creation system going for Unity. What you should notice... no caves, only works in editor, and you still have to go in and break the terrain into chunks and set up your loading/unloading system to get it to be performant. But just the fact that it creates terrains, textures the terrain and adds plants and objects randomly to that terrain was a huge breakthrough. The best, most advanced terrain creation system that has sold thousands of copies in the last 6 months does not even come close to doing what ToA says they are going to do.
    Forgot about this so might be a bit late but there are examples of games that generate their gameworlds at runtime and then save it. Last time I've used Unity was a while ago and never did hardcore terrain stuff in it so it might not be doable in unity without getting access to their source code but here are 2 examples that i have personally played that generate the world randomly : Rising World , Salt, Stranded Deep ( not 100% sure but 99% ) , 7 Days to Die. No AAA products here but there are plenty of techniques you can use to achieve the things you mentioned if you have skill, time and money. 2 of them use voxel terrain but 2 of them don't so you have both variations there.
    Unity is pretty shitty to extend functionality though because you cannot access the source code ( unlike my personal favourite much superior Unreal 4 ) but maybe it can be done it it as well, maybe not... I cannot say for sure but it's not impossible. Just very difficult do do right.

    And about the caves, you don't even need holes in terrain because you can't for one but you just use a mesh for the cave entrance that you slap on top of the terrain if the slope suitable for a cave and use that as a portal that will render something else ( the cave interior for example ) similar to the techique the prey guys used. Anyway it's a lot to talk about but it's doable and not that hard if you know the tricks needed to fake it.

  13. #7393
    Quote Originally Posted by axell View Post
    Anyway it's a lot to talk about but it's doable and not that hard if you know the tricks needed to fake it.
    Yeah, but the question is: Is it doable by the people ToA have? Maybe so, but given we're talking about a group of amateurs working in their spare time and making incremental progress, that starts to seem like a pretty distant maybe. Regardless, all we can do is wait and watch as they continue to hype little drib-drabs of work towards that nebulous alpha release or whatever.

    EDIT: Also, lulz @fanboys blowing up on their forums over dragons not being how they REALLY are!

  14. #7394
    Quote Originally Posted by lawow74 View Post
    Yeah, but the question is: Is it doable by the people ToA have? Maybe so, but given we're talking about a group of amateurs working in their spare time and making incremental progress, that starts to seem like a pretty distant maybe. Regardless, all we can do is wait and watch as they continue to hype little drib-drabs of work towards that nebulous alpha release or whatever.
    Nah I don't think it's doable by those guys as I mentioned in my first post. And I do think it's important to keep an eye on these types of scammers that promise the world and are not capable of offerying anything , but it's very easy to get a bit too carried away with it and state things that are false ( not knowingly ) like the impossibility of what they want to achieve and unwillingly offering the scammers fuel to disprove everything because of a simple mistake ( which is all too common on the internet ). So that's why I was replying. All of the things mentioned are probably possible for an experienced team ,very difficult , but probably not impossible.

    There is a difference between can't be done and can't be done by a pair of feral troglodytes .

  15. #7395
    Yeah, I'm reminded of past posters on their forums who went all psycho-RP over the idea of being a dragon and whatnot, even worse than Spazkid the Magnificent or WTF his name is. It's been a somewhat sad aspect of ToA from the start, how they dupe in dreamers with all these lofty notions that fly in the face of any reasonable game system, never realizing that the reason no one's done it that way yet isn't because they don't care enough to give fans what they want, it's because it's a logistical nightmare to try and make happen even when you DO have a large team of experienced designers and programmers to put on such a task.

  16. #7396
    Quote Originally Posted by axell View Post
    Nah I don't think it's doable by those guys as I mentioned in my first post. And I do think it's important to keep an eye on these types of scammers that promise the world and are not capable of offerying anything , but it's very easy to get a bit too carried away with it and state things that are false ( not knowingly ) like the impossibility of what they want to achieve and unwillingly offering the scammers fuel to disprove everything because of a simple mistake ( which is all too common on the internet ). So that's why I was replying. All of the things mentioned are probably possible for an experienced team ,very difficult , but probably not impossible.

    There is a difference between can't be done and can't be done by a pair of feral troglodytes .
    I can admit that I sometimes get caught up in talking in absolutes (never etc). Let us just clarify that Unity source codes costs in excess of 100k. TOA currently has no programmers on staff, just a guy who can mess around with code. The fact that 18 months after ´having´ a login server, he hasn´t been able to reproduce what they already had, let alone just make one from scratch shows the limits of his programming skills.

    But this is exactly what they did the last time. They did all of the easy stuff and make it look like they had made progress, but they were nowhere near having a playable game ready for the last KS. Now they are making a UI for this procedurally generated landmass, but they haven´t even started working on it... it is like saying ´see, we have all these sliders, buttons and checkboxes... so that means we can do the self-generated islands´.

    I wonder if Brax is going to do a Kickstarter to raise the $100 fee for greenlight... more than likely he will just make his ´developers´ all pay a percentage.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Myobi View Post
    Oh it already started? This kind of reaction was to be expected, they don’t love “Trials of Ascension”, they love whatever is the idea they created on their own minds of it without any sort of fucking limitations, no one is capable of matching that, especially not Brax who knows jackshit of what his doing
    Every game is great when it is nothing but toilet paper notes.

  17. #7397
    Another lovely Dev Blog, wherein we learn felled trees will leave behind stumps you have to clear. Cos y'know, realism. *snicker* *chortle*

  18. #7398
    Quote Originally Posted by lawow74 View Post
    Another lovely Dev Blog, wherein we learn felled trees will leave behind stumps you have to clear. Cos y'know, realism. *snicker* *chortle*
    Do you like chopping wood? Well, now you can do it twice for each tree!

  19. #7399
    Quote Originally Posted by Myobi View Post
    Yeah, you also used to know about game development from the school of hard knocks and shit =P
    I like how he 'accomplished' free-form flight with pixies, i.e. mock it up in a screenshot. These guys sit and blow all this hot air around while the guy behind AM2R actually worked at it, learned something and IMO made the best Metroid game since Fusion and Zero Mission. I'm so looking forward to watching ToA:E flop like a dead pelican dropped from a skyscraper.

  20. #7400
    Quote Originally Posted by Myobi View Post
    Yeah, you also used to know about game development from the school of hard knocks and shit =P
    Shhh they don't speak about those days anymore! You are totally killing their good will towards their...fan....fans...10 people?

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •