Reactive landscape

[Darkvoid_bluff]

Just a thought on the paths throughout PS, would it be possible for the traffic between two points to be recorded & the paths shift accordingly?
Going from green/grassed on little travelled areas graduating to the white paths that we all know & love for the heavily trafficked lines, allowing them to follow the paths that people are actually taking.
In extreme areas of inactivity trees may begin to sprout eventually forming that will require woodcutting to move along ever again

Also possibly a stamina penalty for not staying on the path?

[Suvok]

That would be great. But I bet it'd be damn difficult to code, I doubt it is possible with the tools at hand.

[ThomPhoenix]

I'm sure things like different walking speeds on different kinds of terrain and "leaving footprints" on the ground that will form tracks eventually are things that are thought about in both the PS and CS league. However, it is not high on the list. Perhaps in a few years we will see it.

[Kerol]

Different walking speeds etc. are thought of and afaik there also were some improvements regarding this. However, having *paths* altering the terrain... that's a completely new idea - and a great one, I must add. I'm pretty sure that it's possible to add with (relatively) little effort.
I imagine it could work as following:
A terrain-map (like grassland) is split into sufficiently small fields (thinking of hex-fields of 1m edge length), all numbered.
Each field has a counter "times_used".
When a land-moving entity moves onto a field, the times_used gets incremented.
This should not be a big impact on CPU since the server knows the pos of the entity and can check the field used each 1 m the entity has moved.
It's also not a problem if it's not exact.
There's a standard-grass texture for fields that have 0 <= times_used <10, a stomped on grass texture for 10 <= times_used <50, a mud texture for between 50 and 100 etc.
I think we even have these textures already.
After an ingame-day (5 hours or 6 RL) the times_used counters of all terrain fields get decremented.

The biggest problem I see is the interface between map, textures and server, which is basically a CS thing.

[LigH]

The heightfield grid is not hexagonal, rather squared (not to mention triangles, but that's one step too far), so it could rather easily be managed as an array.

Imagine the positional distribution display you may see as analysis of the two players after a tennis match. After each midnight of game time, this "map" could be overlayed onto the alpha map reliable for the "dusty road" texture, as the grassland texture is the basic one, if I remember right. And the "dark rock" areas won't be changed ever.

There is just one little issue... The updated alpha map has to be offered by the server as update day by day.

[Darkvoid_bluff]

Thanks for taking the idea seriously, I suppose the update down side could be reduced with weekly rather than daily updates.

[LigH]

Indeed -- vegetation grows slowly. And differences will be little: a hardly noticable patch of grass less on the hill, another more on the road.

[emeraldfool]

Does that mean very determined individuals could stomp their names into the ground?

[neko kyouran]

I'd think vandalizing the Octarch's land would be a punishable offense.

[Tuxide]

Crystal Space supports both parallax mapping and decals.  I wonder if one can put the two together to produce dents in the ground wherever the server needs to without changing the world geometry.

[aersixb9]

From what I know about CS, the terrain is a static mesh so you can't go around deforming it without rewriting CS. I also think that if you tried to cover the ground with "entities" (3d objects) like grass and plants, you'd get a huge number of entities really fast. With draw distance clipping it might be possible to cover the ground with entities, but that won't be efficient or good for the frame rate...

[saladasalad]

I love this idea! It's features like this that I think will separate PS from the rest in years to come. It's good to see another Tasmanian here too

[LigH]

@ aersixb9:

Altering the alhpa maps for the texture overlays is a lightweight operation.

And implementing adaptive foliage (differently probable temporary meshes in relation to a map) could be possible, but due to some issues people are already remarkably hurt by uniform foliage (the same grass patch everywhere).

Furthermore, comparing with the best foliage I've ever seen ("Serious Sam: Second Encounter", ~v1.5), the foliage in PlaneShift is much too opaque, or the full-opacity radius too large.

[Zhaxor]

There is a thing I see that could cause problems, and that is the shortest route between two place is a straight line. Without some impementation of the earlier mentioned ideas, ie: slower walking for different terrain, lose extra stamina for climbing hills etc there is a danger of all the roads in PS becomg straight slines. I know for a fact that now I have progressed sufficiently in PS I no longer bother to follow roads, it's straight as an arrow to get where I want to be as fast as possible. If this is implemented there needs to be incentives to follow roads as they are in real life. ie: roads go around hills because heavily laden carts can't be pulled over them, roads go to river fords or ferries rather that straight through in the direction we wish to go.

I love the idea, and implemented right it would be great. Imagine going to someplace you havn't been for a long time and you get lost in the woods because the paths have changed, like where the hell did this forest come from anyway?

[LigH]

There is already a hard limit of steepness you can climb. A kind of "soft limit" would be nice, but will increase the server load due to more complex movement calculations.

I like shortcuts too. But I hardly use really the straightest possible direction.