Terrain & me

A forum about everything related to the Cafu World Editor CaWE: mapping, editing, scripting, making GUIs and fonts, using the BSP, PVS and Light compilers.
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An0maly
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Terrain & me

Post by An0maly » 2012-03-30, 12:56

Hello, i am new to the Cafu community, but i come with moderate/brief experience.
(listed)
-Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy Mapping (GTK Radiant; quite similar to Cafu's CaWE)
-RunUO's Ultima Online Emulator: (C# Modding/Light scripting/mapping 2 yrs experience)

i can see some similarities in the creation of a map, in both jedi academy, as well as Ultima, though i have a few questions. In ultima, for example. when creating a 'map', you would draw it out including the color-settings for the Height map, in paint, or whatever your artwork program may be, and then run it through a compiler, and it would present to you, elevations and all, a rough copy of what you had, based on a specific color palette. In jedi academy, elevation was determined by you, you would shape each object to fit your needs, as well as apply the appropriate texture, and thus, was your product. (3d and all that good stuff in JA)

My end goal, is a bit of a hybrid. I want to apply the personal skill, and functionality of any shooter game, with the play style & open world of an MMO.
I come in with full knowledge that i will be 100% re-scripting everything, that is not an issue. My issue & questions come with the world itself;

Is it possible to build an entire world within a map (rivers, land, bodies of water, mountains, the whole 9), while still being able to function within the bounding box of terrain. I need to be able to apply multiple different textures to the 'ground', for various regions, but on one large field. ( i am sure a lot of this relies on scripting, i will worry about that when the time comes.) I would like to handle as much of this in world building as i can, and still maintain good FPS without any leaks, and what not. Perhaps those of you who have more experience may have a few tips to guide me where i need to go, as far as building what will be 'the world' of my game, through this engine.

Another question that popped into my mind, is this engine powerful enough to run what i am trying to run. (imagine jedi academy, halo, *pick your shooter game* on an MMO scale.)?

Does my best end-result lie in instance-based maps, (a good example is guild wars), or one single persistent world (similar to that of LOTRO/WoW, with small instances for dungeons, etc.)?

my plan, in the end, if everything is as i hope it will be, is to present an MMO, that relies more on the skill of a player, than how well he/she can grind to a 'top level'.

I will continue to monitor, reply, and add to my post, here, as questions develop.
HWGuy
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Re: Terrain & me

Post by HWGuy » 2012-03-30, 19:45

Well you could quickly integrate instance-based since it's just a matter of having a bunch of servers running per instance and a master server which tracks player data, you could optimize Cafu so changing instances takes only a couple seconds.

For a rolling unified world, if the player count wasn't too high and the world not too massive you could simply have a single large world server-side and improve the LoD system so terrain chunks very far away were simply not drawn at all and the player is not kept up to date with very far away events.

If you want a big busy single world, that's where it gets complicated... you'll have to have the world chopped into a matrix server side and have the client able to be synchronized to more than one at a time, or have a hub fake a single world to the client with instances running in the background.
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Carsten
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Re: Terrain & me

Post by Carsten » 2012-03-30, 22:04

About very large terrains for MMO or MMORPG, I guess this is becoming a FAQ:
Please see http://www.cafu.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4795#p4795, plus the post it is linking to, http://www.cafu.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3706#p3706

As a technical detail, quite in the spirit of the TechDemo map, you can also have multiple terrain instances, each with different surface material, in a single Cafu map. So if you want to put a lot of geography with different attributes into a single map, it is technically possible. (I'd recommend though to try to split the large map into several smaller ones.)
Best regards,
Carsten
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An0maly
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Re: Terrain & me

Post by An0maly » 2012-03-31, 14:15

As a technical detail, quite in the spirit of the TechDemo map, you can also have multiple terrain instances, each with different surface material, in a single Cafu map. So if you want to put a lot of geography with different attributes into a single map, it is technically possible. (I'd recommend though to try to split the large map into several smaller ones.)
Are you saying that for example, looking at the 2d top grid, i could place multiple terrains, separate from one another, within the max parameters of a cafu map?

rough example

Code: Select all

|-------|                |------------------|
|piece A|                | piece B          |
|-------|                |------------------|
                               
|-------------------------------|
|                               |
|    Piece C                    |
|-------------------------------|
Using the code block as the example of the "max size" of a map, and pieces A B and C, i have illustrated what i think you mean. I could place x amount of terrain blocks on the same map, as long as i do not exceed the cap?
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Carsten
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Re: Terrain & me

Post by Carsten » 2012-03-31, 21:00

An0maly wrote:Are you saying that for example, looking at the 2d top grid, i could place multiple terrains, separate from one another, within the max parameters of a cafu map?
[...]
Using the code block as the example of the "max size" of a map, and pieces A B and C, i have illustrated what i think you mean. I could place x amount of terrain blocks on the same map, as long as i do not exceed the cap?
Yes, that's exactly right.
:up:
Best regards,
Carsten
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An0maly
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Re: Terrain & me

Post by An0maly » 2012-04-02, 00:03

Well i have begun to work with the map editor, i decided to roll with the previously discussed option. i figure i'll spend about a month practicing with the editor, and build a few trial/error pieces, before i start in on anything serious. That time will also give me time to begin drafting up ideas for other aspects of the 'game' such as a name, (lol), & other things... thanks for the support. 2 thumbs up.
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