/v/ - Video Games

>>15417395

Lazy devs who didn't write a story or thought their transparent scaffold of a plot and procedural generation were enough to carry the day, which they never are. The idea of procedural generation makes stupid devs cum hard because it means they have barely any do any work and can brag that their game is near infinite, while conveniently forgetting that means an shitty infinity which is empty. You'd need a team of writers making multiple (good) TES-level whole (not just regions) worlds for it to work and this is why Star Citizen is also going to die ignominiously *even* if they managed the 200 million dollar miracle of getting 10 people on the screen at once without everyone falling through their cockpit, the 'universe' they're in will be an empty dead space.

I'm sure some devs think their shit will fall into the Dorf Fort niche where the world/players make their own bespoke story but they fail to realise the work needed, they don't have the autism to make the assets for that to happen they just want unthinking dolts to see 'big spess geam' and empty their pockets.

>>15417648

With this kind of logic you can conclude that HOMM and M&B are shit because they are about choose your own adventure as well.

Because the grind and journey is where the attention goes. Having an end game and point to your travels isn't fun.

>>15417395

Because they forget that the fundamental purpose of Procedural Generation is merely to give you different and unknown start conditions, it serves to gameplay purpose after that.

Gameplay must come from the interactions of every element that ProcGen puts in your world, meaning the world and actors in the game cannot be static in nature.

This is the tiny detail that gives ProcGen a really bad reputation, despite being quite a nice starting point on paper. Devs create a literally unique world for everyone so you can do different things in it than anyeone else.

However, the rest of the gameplay and NPCs will behave as if they were in a linear game with handcrafted levels instead. There'll be little interactions and reactivity from them or the world itself and the player will end up doing the same thing every single time despite having a different starting condition.

>No Man's Sky

There are rival factions in that game and friendly ones as well. A good sandbox game would give you the option to join one, inheriting it's enemies as well or let you start your own and use diplomacy.

Afterwards, the point of the game would be the competition between factions, each wanting to progress to the center of the galaxy and needing resources harvested from planets that they must control.

If the factions themselves were active and took planets from one another, had an economy and diplomacy that created trade routes and truces or alliances and the player could also join in on all of this, you'd have a purpose for all the shit you often do in these games.

Build a base because it will mine\farm resources sent to a station and traded across the galaxy or used to strengthen your fleet.

Explore planets to find newer and better resources to use or more space for the civilian population of your faction.

You can't have all the required resources to finish the game without butting heads with other factions so wars and alliances are inevitable.

You'll go back to previous planets to defend them or change their structures as well, maybe even having to retake them.

>Starbound

Here it's even simpler and they could take a queue from how Terraforming works in Endless Space.

You have a bunch of tiered planets, the lower tier being more hospitable while the later ones are much harder to survive in.

Put crops\minerals available on each planet based on it's tiers so the first ones will have the simplest most common plants and ores but in larger amounts, while the later ones will have rare but scarce ones.

Tie in the population of settlements in the planet to it's tier, lower tiers having higher populations.

Now you need all tiers since the first ones makes the bulk of food and tools you need for everyone, the medium tier makes all the upgrades you need for settlements\ships and the later ones make the unique powerfull gear\equipment.

In order to finish the game, a player would need to colonize and build something like 10 tier 1-2 planets, 5 tier 3-4 planets and 2-3 tier 5 planets while setting logistics\trade routes between space station to keep them stocked as well as any planet below them.

At this point you can visit planets to upgrade and optimize them, maybe have events where they are attacked, but most of your supplies are delivered to space stations, you restock from there and move on to the next adventure.

>>15417395

One problem that those 2 suffer from is that there's no sense of scale.

>No Man's Sky

Why bother to explore anything when you can just click a button and be 100's of lightyears away? Planets become meaningless when you can travel from one point to its polar opposite in less than 20 seconds.

>Starbound

The solar systems aren't even really connected to one another. Once you get a backlog of fuel (which is early in the game) you can just jump near-infinite distances between extremely tiny planets.

>>15417707

The thing about HOMM is that it still has a story and a static, well designed world to explore, don't know where the comparison comes from.

Now M&B is a better comparison. It has the exact same world when you start the game but it's far more interactive. Towns can be taken by anyone and they affect the local economy greatly. You also have plenty of reasons to revisit previous locations and there's plenty of actors roaming the world and doing their thing that the world doesn't feel centered around you.

You could take M&B and slap a random map generator, where the terrain is random, towns are placed around based on a few parameters and then given to factions in a sensible fashion, giving every playthrough a different world to play in.

You'd lose some of the familiarity players have with the game, but you'd gain a lot of different scenarios that could play out differently due to different starting conditions.

And the funny thing is, M&B wouldn't suffer from this, (especially if there was an option to play in the traditional world) since all the gameplay that the game is famous for would still be there and work just as fine.

>>15417648

>I'm sure some devs think their shit will fall into the Dorf Fort niche where the world/players make their own bespoke story

i actually enjoyed exploring in starbound for that very reason. granted, i usually played with mods.

a few new races, updated crew mechanics and more types of planets to explore and im entertained for a good while.

>>15417707

thats definitely part of the appeal for homm and age of wonders to me.

>>15417763

a lot of homm games had the option to play on random maps, or to generate random maps in the map maker.

>>15417763

>playing campaigns in homm

>not just playing randomly generated maps over and over again

>M&B is only good because of aggressive AI

>>15417772

>>15417779

Apologies, I was thinking of a different HOMM, the ones where you are just a party of 4 dudes getting their shit pushed in by bats and spider while your companions jew all those 1Gold from you.

>>15417779

>M&B is only good because of aggressive AI

Not at all, although that plays a great role in it. You can fuck up the economy of a town by attacking traders going there, you can screw villages that way since they depend on selling their products on towns for cash, you can fight a guerrilla warfare using these methods against an empire.

There's also the competition between nobles to see who gains the next fort\town, all the political plots, prisoners, etc.

Generals running around conquering towns and participating in banquets is the biggests part, but there's also a lot more details that make the world feel far more alive than most others.

I mean, it's a shitty comparison but look at Skyrim, who also has towns that supposelly make resources like ore, wood, food that's required for their civil war but you never see caravans of that nor can you use this in the gameplay. You also don't see generals marching around and trying to take towns, you never visit Riften to find it has been annexed by the other faction (who hate you) while you were away.

Now check NMS or Starbound. The only time a place is colonized is if YOU do it, if anything changes in the world at all it's because YOU did it, everyone else feels like a bystander.

>>15417817

"the world spins around player" is the oldest troupe in video gaming history.

>>15417900

Doesn't mean it's one that should be maintained, at least for some genres.

If we were exploring the story of some MC, that makes sense. But if we are exploring an entirely new procgen'd universe, it needs to be as important and active as the player since it's taking on the role of providing everything a main story gives you in regular linear games. This means the game can't revolve around the MC only anymore, some of the focus and agency has to be in the world.

>>15417925

Nah, the real reasons is that on certain engine its just impossible to simulate actions outside of player view scope. I worked on javascript for a while, i realized its really hard to maintain some activity outside of user's view, unless you're willing to sacrifice performance of your application and make player notice lags in your game when enemy ships outside his current location currently undergoing colonization of some distant planet or some shit. And then multiply that by 100 or 1000 of distant unseen simulated npc units doing their job.

That's like running 1000 of games at the same time. Its easy in dwarf fortress with no graphics and no requirement for additional processing power, but its really hard to do on a next gen engine.

>>15417963

>I worked on javascript for a while

"Never fear my friend, Javascript will never die" - Indian Engineer

The issue you mention is a matter of resolution. You do not simulate every single NPC, ship and item in the entire world at once. Everything that's otuside the range of the player is simulated at a macro level, only that which is near you is simulated at a micro level.

This means an entire planet can be simplified to basic variables that describe it, like Wealth, Population, Security, Loyalty, etc. Then every in-game hour or some other sensible time-interval, you iterate through every planet in a task running in another thread if possible, make basic processing (handle trade routes affecting it's variables and changing resources, handle it's production, ongoing sieges etc) in a very simple way, run a random event that changes things a bit and add it to an activity log for the player to read later, and move on.

Then, when you visit the planet, rebuild the savefile from when you were last here and edit it according to the change in variables, removing or adding houses if the population increased, adding more or less money and products to the market based on it's economy rating, etc. Or just create the planet using those variables if it's the first time visiting.

Same level of macro simulation can be applied to fleets and other characters to keep them moving around the world and act upon it.

>>15418128

Forgot to add, this is mostly what Sims 3 does, simulating every family in background when you're not interacting with them, doing some basic tasks and moving around without actually having to use specific objects or simulating all aspects about them.

>>15418139

Yeah, and Sims 3 is unoptimized piece of shit, especially with Story Progression mod enabled.

>>15418167

32 bits, my brother. Nothing in it is threaded. You'll get bumps in performance at night specifically for this roughly at 1 A.M. when the game runs a lot of cleaning functions.