Reactive landscape

[Baron Samedi]

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.

   Who needs roads if you have paths? I understand the desire for scenic reasons, but I like the idea of eliminating the roads altogether and just allow paths to develop naturally. This would also lead to paths to mines and other areas of interest...the Gold mine would be a dust bowl, whereas the silver mine might have a light path to it.

  This is a fantastic idea, if it is easily done.

  I suppose you could leave the roads in place for use for carts/wagons, or whatever else may be on the way.

[lurkmost]

I imagine things like changing the vegetation and terrain slightly, as well as putting down paths wouldn't have to be a daily update.
Infact, a monthly update would be just fine.

I think monitoring quite a few activities to change the world accordingly wouldn't be impossible. When certain skills come in, I imagine it would be very interesting for other changes to be observed.
For instance, simply make forests smaller once people start cutting them down for wood, perhaps a change in hillscape when people dig and mine (though that would seem harder to change).
Hopefully fish will already move around in schools. I would also hope that people would be able to plant herbs.

Back to paths though...
I imagine that if one path is heavily traveled then there could be various stages of modification.
Eventually the path would become paved (to a point, I imagine that how far it is paved would depend on how close cities are as well as continued trafic).
I could even see some hills being lowered, and paths being cut through the landscape.
Eventually bridges would be a must.
More interestingly, I think small monuments and ornimental items that reflect the archetecture of the area could start showing up in heavily populated areas.
Perhaps some monuments can name the first player(s) who had traveled along the general path.

This is of course a low priority project, but I would find this small touch an awesome addition to scenery.

[LigH]

* LigH watches Lemming-like hordes of Kran walking over a hill over months to flatten it...

[Candy]

On that note, why not have paved roads that get potholes and such, and eventually get worn down and turn to gravel roads if nobody's taking care of them? Or get torn up by vicious monsters at some points?

Maybe some NPC guards could patrol it closer to the cities, too...I can see some opportunities for new quests coming from that.

[NirAntae]

I really like this idea.  I must admit, it's not something I've ever seen in a game before, and I think it would be a very neat feature.  It might also make traveling a bit easier; right now it's nearly impossible for newcomers.  I was lost for hours, mostly going in circles, trying to get from Oja to Hydlaa, what with no maps or signs and all the paths looking the same (and mostly rather vague).

[190nifes]

I bet that this is a good idea but my used to work on online games and he said that it would be extreamaly difficult but make the game more realistic.

[Ichaas]

That would require a team of professional programmers and woud more than likely result in over population of trees which result in alot of lag. I don't mind the idea of a forest being added to one of the roads, like off th the side maybe, but generally that would be extrememly difficult and time consuming to code.

[Kerol]

That would require a team of professional programmers and woud more than likely result in over population of trees which result in alot of lag. I don't mind the idea of a forest being added to one of the roads, like off th the side maybe, but generally that would be extrememly difficult and time consuming to code.

It would require
1. Level of Detail for items. (which we need anyway)
2. Adaptive labeling for unpickupable items. (which we need anyway)
3. Random spawning with spawn rules over areas. (which we need anyway)
4. A feature to remove/substitute certain items with others over time. (which is needed for fields of fruits etc. as well)
5. Reactive Landscape. (which is discussed here)

I can't think of anything else that is required to do this.

[silvermindyarr]

I like this Idea. Just some thoughts:
there is the problem of straight line paths, but maybe this can be offset by requiring carts and vehicles to use static roads (im a noob, so i have no clue if they exist, and if there is a banking system, disable access from multiple location so that people have to travel with carts to other places to do large scale buy/sell). I think that the abilities could be developed, but shouldn't be implemented untill the game is more stable, and the experience is more aesthetically developed. There already seems to be problems with (baked in shadows?) in the first town, [insert name], especially involving the trees, so I can foresee how good intentions can complicate the game's development, hampering bug fixes before it can handle the challenges. That doesn't mean don't develop it, just don't add it to the public releases for a while.

other thought:
people will keep using populated paths, so I doubt the straight line paths would disappear, as for the world, Itd be a pity if it turned all dirt or paved and and jugs and artifacts were everywhere. This is an Idea that would have to be implemented very carefully.

[Kerol]

This is an Idea that would have to be implemented very carefully.

Like any other 

[Draiocht]

About the paths becoming straight lines in PS..

If there were other features ingame such as bogs or streams and fallen trees or stony terrain people will avoid these because they slow down your journey(or so i hope),
 so if these were in real life paths would not be straight but would be going around these types of things like in real life where paths go around marshes.. see where im coming from?

[Kerol]

If there were other features ingame such as bogs or streams and fallen trees or stony terrain people will avoid these because they slow down your journey(or so i hope),
 so if these were in real life paths would not be straight but would be going around these types of things like in real life where paths go around marshes.. see where im coming from?

Yes, this also fits very well with another idea I had not long ago:

For developers it is possible already to place items in maps and selectively turn on collision detection. You probably noticed the table and chairs near Harnquist's - that's an example for this feature. In guildhouses all items have automatically collision detection enabled.
This is not only possible for furniture or items but any mesh.
The second thing are the stalactites that apparently have fallen down from the skydome long time ago and now are spread over the landscape.

Now it would be possible to remove the stalactites from the static maps and make them item-meshes with collision detection.
It would be already relatively simple to place them manually in the maps and so forth, but I was thinking a bit ahead:
The starting point would be a blank landscape map, except "special" fallen stalactites. There would be dangerous areas, specified by devs.
In these areas the engine would randomly figure out a point in the map in a more or less random time frame. At a given time, a grey spot appears on the ground, which grows fast and gets more and more black. After a few seconds, the spot disappears and an impact effect comes into play. All entities in a given range are killed and a "fresh fallen stalactite" item is placed, still covered by a dust effect.
After a while the dust disappears and only the stalactite would remain.
Since there's rain etc. the "fresh fallen stalactite" item would be replaced by an "older fallen stalactite", then by a "pile of rocks" and finally vanish completely again.

Making the event of falling stalactites rare enough to not fill the landscape with stones  but often enough to freak people out and make them avoid these areas would have similar effects like the one you described.

Edit: Of course this would also imply that specific items don't have labels. It is already strange enough to have table and chairs with labels.
Edit2: And it would require action locations to be stickable to dynamic meshes, too.

[Kempeth]

With the recent talk about adding grass to Planeshift I've been drawn back to these kind of ideas. The older thread "dynamic paths" is locked so I thought I'd necro this one...

I've been doing some thinking and calculating about growing and stomping down grass to make and remove paths. First some base points:

• I've mapped one of the road to Ojaveda maps and calculated that it's total area is around 725k square coordinate units.
• I know of 4 outdoor areas that I could see this whole idea of dynamic paths making sense (2 roads to Ojaveda and 2 roads to bronze doors)
• From the Tech Talk we know that the bottleneck currently lies with the bandwidth. So the focus of these deliberations will lie with that.
• Since the server knows where every character is at all times and has CPU and Memory to spare the analysis of Player movements can be done server side
• 1 coordinate unit is about 2-3 times as wide as a character
• Making paths is a rather slow process

So I've been putting together a few numbers:

• On the basis of the grass shown in the dev blog about 8 degrees for the strength of a path would suffice. 16 would be hardly noticeable and 4 could be a little rough but might still work.
• 1 square coordinate unit looks like na adequately fine grained tile size to grow paths so lets run with that for now.
• Using that tile size we would have a total or around 3 million tiles for all the four road areas. At 3 bits per tile that would make about 1.25 MB (~300kb per road map) for a complete download of the grassmap.
• These grassmaps could arguably be cached for at least a day due to the expected slow build up of paths. That would leave us with an an absolute maximum of 1.25 MB per active player per day
• Aside for standard compression algorithms the size of the grass map could be further reduced by defining areas where grass cannot grow like rocky terrain, very steep slopes or stalactites. All the tiles in those areas could simply be omitted from the grassmap. All that would be required would be a static file client side to indicate which tiles are missing.
• Even finer paths could be extrapolated client side by projecting the grass map onto a 4 times finer grid and using something like a anti aliasing algorithm to smooth the paths

As for the serverside analysis of the player movements there are a few more points that came to mind:

• The weight of any player's steps would have to be put into relation to the amount of inhabitants that can be expected to live in these few and relatively small cities.
• Also instead of weighting the steps of all players the server could simply just monitor only a few random players to reduce the cpu load
• The server could monitor the paths and notify the dev/gm team about paths that remain over a prolonged time so that they can be moved from the dynamic model and into to static map.
• The server would only have to generate the grass map file once for every cycle. And with a simple hash comparison the clients could determine whether they need the new file or not.

[LigH]

@ Kerol:

You are crazy. In the best kind of meaning.

[Kerol]

Me.. *twitch* - crazy?! *twitch*