Graphics/Ideas

[ORC]

I was wondering, how difficult would it be to include active terrain. By this I mean swaying trees or real grass that bends when a player takes a step. This could even extend to natural disasters such as earthquakes that make large random cracks in the surface of the world. This would be esspecialy stunning if certain players could take advantage of this technology such as being able to make a gorge surrounding a base. I personly like the idea of teams joining up and working together, especialy if they could have a home base that could be built or taken over. So teams could war against eachother and try to make larger kingdoms, and server controled monsters would just add another great aspect to the game. Being a small party and sitting around and \"buffing\" for 5 minutes like in EQ does not seem like a lot of fun for me. So if there could be more of a rival team aspect to the game I belive it would be great.

Of course all of these things are just ideas. I don\'t really know exactly what direction they are trying to take with this game but I think the concept is their and by the looks of the screenshots it looks like the dev team is highly skilled at what they do.

[kinshadow]

Originally posted by ORC
I was wondering, how difficult would it be to include active terrain. By this I mean swaying trees or real grass that bends when a player takes a step. This could even extend to natural disasters such as earthquakes that make large random cracks in the surface of the world. This would be esspecialy stunning if certain players could take advantage of this technology such as being able to make a gorge surrounding a base.

Deforming the terrain permanently is *probably* something you are not going to see in this game.   There are several possible ways to do this, but they require building a special terrain engine for that purpose and I don\'t see that being done.  Housing and static addons may be possible and have been discussed.

\"Active\" terrain as you put it (dynamic grass, swaying trees, dynamic water, etc.) is currently being worked on.  These are more \"visual effects\" and hopefully will be available to those who can spare the hardware cost.

[ORC]

Great! I was hoping that things like that were on the drawing table. Although hardware requirements will surely go up I think that the eye candy is worth the time and effort and will distinguish this game from others.

[ealolis1]

Swaying grass, and swaying trees is definitely possible, it would create some lag, but most computers these days can handle that fine, or at least for the grass, should be able to turn it off.

Digging holes, or random cracks in the earth, that would take a LOT of work, and a LOT of server stress. We may need to wait for the next, next, gen of MMORPGs for stuff like that.

But hey, ya never know.

Don\'t know if Planeshift will have grass or swaying trees, but I don\'t see why not, the team seems very capable in what they have already done.

[ORC]

I agree that the team does seem capable. The other ideas were just some interesting thoughts that I have been kicking around. Although I don\'t know if technology today is up to it, it would really add an interesting aspect to a MMORPG. I have a feeling that cpu\'s and gpu\'s are on the dawn if not here already with chips that could provide acceptable framerates for graphic intensive effects such as those. But my guess is that for now the programing to take advantage of these effects is so time consuming and in turn costly that many producers take the cheap way out and make a quick buck with a sub par product. ATI and NVidia are really on the cutting edge especialy from what I read about NVidia\'s Cg launguage. But I still think that it will be sometime before developers can take these effects and make them mainstream in the high graphics gameing enviroment.

But then again who knows... Maybe the Planeshift dev team is up for a challenge. Obviously their heart is into this game becuse they are making it for free.