How hard procedural map?

[hatfieldcw 184]

In the spirit of the hardcore social experiment aspect of DayZ, I have a vision for the future where every life is played on a different server, different map, different players. No friends from past plays or real life, no handy DayZDB loot map, no idea what the heck is going on or where the good stuff is, just a foreign shore with dudes you do not know.

Is it conceivable that the ArmA3 engine could be supplemented to include the ability to spawn an infinite number of procedurally generated maps? Terrain, roads, buildings, loot spawns, all that stuff, made on the fly? You die, you respawn, the game makes you go to a new server and download a new map and you wind up in a totally alien environment, fighting and searching for the duration of your life. When you die, you can never log back in to that map.

If all buildings are going to be enterable, it becomes possible for loot to be much more dense, so that we can eke out a living in a fraction of the map. Instead of trekking from Kamenka to Cherno for a map or ALICE pack and morphine, then trudging up to Stary to get a decent weapon, then venturing to NWAF to farm military loot, make all the necessities available in any given 4km^2 area, with military look tucked around where it makes sense. You raid a police station, you get enough shotguns for all your friends. You raid a supermarket, there's as much canned food there as you can carry. Take away the randomness of the slot machine loot spawns, and replace it with the randomness of the environment. If I find a military supply depot, I don't want to have a .11% chance of finding a DMR. I want to have a 98% chance of finding a DMR and a 1% chance of finding a military depot before I die.

No well-known sniper hills, no predictable vehicle spawn locations, no reliable farming routes. Only mystery, danger and zombies.

[Bobcomss 189]

I think the idea of random generated maps is an amazing idea...but I dont think the stand alone would go down that route...either way an excellent idea(s) :)

If I knew how to do it I would >.<

AJ

[GiggityGump 41]

Well, if I understand you right, you're saying each life for each player would have a different server, or at least each player would have one server for multiple lives. For one thing, that means over a million unique servers to accommodate over a million unique players. That would be really cost prohibitive. Doing the whole thing client-side would be an idea, but the resources required would probably be huge. I did have a question though. Did you mean that each player would have one map that would continually/procedurally generate new areas as they play, but they would keep the same map over multiple lives? Or, did you mean that each player gets a continually generated map that is new and different each time they die and respawn?

Added to that, you said something about no players from past lives and no real life friends. I think that kind of goes against the concept of this particular game. It could work for something different, and even reminds me of some older console survival horror games. Survivors are people. People, in general, know that there is safety in numbers, so I think that it makes sense that we have that option in a game that pits you first and foremost as a survivor. If you can't group with people you know in-game or people you know in life, then you'd have a hard time grouping with people at all because groups need to trust one another to an extent, and you'd have no way to build that trust.

The loot is an idea that has some promise, but I'm not so sure about it because of the part about any 4 sq. km area. That would make every town and village equally important. It sounds great at first, but then you might be missing something. If each town is essentially the same because you can find everything you need in a small-ish area, then why have more than one? Have one big city with all the loot you need and let it respawn often enough that people won't need to fight for it. What I mean by this is, you have no drama in those towns now. Nobody is going to fight for supplies that they can get anywhere (sure some will, but you know what I mean). The lack of supply in DayZ creates the demand. You have randomized loot that turns up in nonrandom places. Each place has a certain set of types of loot. People have to go to those places to get certain things. The small towns and villages don't have a supermarket, so if you need something that is likely to show up at one, you have certain towns you can check. It creates tension, because you don't know if someone is already there, if someone is watching it, if it will have what you want/need because the loot is so random. In your version, each area is basically guaranteed everything a survivor needs. It will take away that drama. You'd have all out war at a military depot because of the 1% rarity, but why fight over other resources when you can get them anywhere?

Its 4am. :| So, I'm probably not making any sense. Sorry. I'm not saying that your ideas are bad, really. What I'm saying is that, in my opinion, they have potential. They would need work, like all ideas do. Refinement could make them really good. But, the game that would come out of them wouldn't be DayZ. I'm not sure they fit DayZ's concept at all. It seems to me like you've created something similar yet entirely different. (yeah, I know that was a contradiction :P ) I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in it, too. Maybe you should find some people who could help ya out and go make this. lol

[malau (DayZ) 36]

Maps generated on the fly wouldn't be very good.

Rocket said that Chernarus took over 2 years to create and test. If chernarus is the minimum expected level for size and quality then random maps would be pants.

Great idea though.

[Strategos (DayZ) 190]

There's no reason a procedural map couldn't be good. But doing a good procedural map is very difficult.

The terrain is easy, but making towns that appear believable and function correctly .. ie accessible areas etc is very difficult.

[Bribase 251]

I think that a procedurally generated map is not only out of the question, it's also a bad idea for the game. The familiarity of the locations is an essential part of the game; it serves to produce stories and adventures that other players can instantly understand. A video of someone on sniper hill in Electro shooting another player marks him as a bandit scumbag that preys on newly spawned players, a video of someone shooting a player on an unknown hill near an unnamed city tells you nothing about the scenario at all.

That said, the idea of per server generated maps is an intriguing one. A wrote a little here about the prospect of them:

http://dayzmod.com/f...in/#entry356930

The awesome thing about per server generated maps is that instead of maps losing all familiarity like minecraft esque map generation, it multiplies the explorable space exponentially while allowing players the ability to become familiar with a certain map with careful exploration of a certain server. The servers themselves taking on a life of their own. A player can hop over to a different server and find themselves bathed in the unfamiliarity of the first few hours of playing Day-Z all over again without the help of Daydb.com. They locate themselves according to a simple grid referrence on the map. They could be in a town like Guglovo one minute, somewhere like NWAF the next. Surrounded by players that know the server and know the terrain.

Enterprising players could even spend their time on a server "prospecting". Exploring and Annotating maps that can be duplicated by him and him only showing the locations of major sites of interest in game. These could work as a welcoming gift for new arrivals, a bartering tool for vast sums of loot or a peace offering between clans that stake their claim on the same map.

[Bribase 251]

There's no reason a procedural map couldn't be good. But doing a good procedural map is very difficult.

The terrain is easy, but making towns that appear believable and function correctly .. ie accessible areas etc is very difficult.

I wouldn't say that. Most cities work according to a grid system. If a programmer produced, say 200 individual building blocks ranging from cafes, hospitals and offices to farmhouses, detached residential buildings and supermarkets. Then he produced some generative rules that work similarly to to the way cities work; Major industrial buildings are likely to clump together with smaller ones, close to the coast producing an industrial district of a harbour town. Hospitals, firestations and supermarkets are likely to spawn where major roads cross with residential areas leading off from them, allowing the amenities to be used by the residents. Instanced firestations are likely to spawn military posts near them. Hospitals and flat industrial areas have a higher chance of spawning military aid camps.

With simple procedural rules like this a huge amount of variety can be generated on map while keeping urban centres coherent and believable. The landscape follows the laws of physics, biology and geology. Urban areas follow zoning laws. Each of these can be implemented with some clever coding.

[hatfieldcw 184]

My idea for the model, if we can ignore the technical challenges for a moment, would be a bank of maybe a few hundred servers. Each server generates a map, and when you create a new character, you're locked into a random low-latency server for that character. You've never seen the map before, it's populated by a bunch of people who have never seen the map before. You go on a fun-filled adventure spanning minutes, hours or days. You meet people, you exchange skype info, you bro up and fix a bus, but whenever a member of your team dies, you lose them forever. They'll never ride that bus again. They have to make a new character, start on a new server with a new, unfamiliar map.

I would say have each server run either until it reaches a certain population density or for a set amount of time or until a helicopter gets built or whatever, then stop accepting new players and introduce the end-game ultimatum: One week until the nuclear sterilization or something, and you have that much time to "win" one way or another. You might fly out on a chopper, sail out on a boat, walk out through the woods or repair a radio tower and generate enough power to make an emergency transmission for military evacuation or something. Whatever you do, it's a non-death end to your character's story on that server, and then when everyone's gone, the server closes, whips up a new random map and starts accepting new spawns. If you died last time, you spawn on the coast like a newb. If you escaped, then you spawn in a reasonable place. Hikers emerge from the edge of the map, chopper pilots appear at a chopper crash (with their buddies if they all got out together), sailors run aground at the shore. You lose the vehicle, but you keep your personal gear, giving you an accelerated start on the next play.

It would encourage ragtag bands to form and stick together, but it would also require them to suspend their shoot-on-sight policy in many cases in order to recruit allies to replace fallen team members. I think it would make for some pretty interesting zombie surviving. The high-density loot would allow players to play their entire story without having to see every corner of the map.