Re: Feld size (Re: [Once development] Terrain Generator)

[Manuel A. F. M. <ma...@us...>]

Dom, 2005-02-27 =E0s 21:03 +1300, Thomas Clive Richards escreveu:
> On Sunday February 27 2005 6:02 pm, Jon Davis wrote:
> > In FFXI each zone was about 1K.  A run between 2 of
> > the major cities was anywhere from 3zones to 6zones.  Feld is 4 times
> > that size, and we only have one "major" city.
>=20
> You're all missing the point about the scale of things in Once. The wor=
ld is=20
> that big to allow us to expand, should we need to. It is not suggested =
that=20
> we build the entire world at once, only if our player base grows to tha=
t=20
> size.

*** note: and I'll use 1 area =3D 1024 ~=3D 1km of side, could be changed
but anyway it's not that important the internal division of Feld into
sectors in the topics of this mail, the important part it's the side and
area of all Feld and the range of sight to see other players).

first of all, this is a long mail, but I hope to be my last long mail
about this topic, and I think that it's necessary as we need to decide
this as soon as possible.

I think I didn't miss the point, because I didn't talk about relative
sizes of Feld and the rest of the world, so it could be scaled as
needed, of course :)

instead I was just saying that those sizes of 8km would be the top
acceptable size for the current "scale" of our team and player base: it
would take us at least about 1 year or 2 to fill it with interesting
content, I think that's about the time to let the devels to make
interesting interaction with the world, combat, etc.

also there's a thing to have into account that it's the size scaled to
our player base, as you say, the "population density" of the game.
since the last release I heard that PS has about 120 players on-line
(was 10-30 before that, and maybe that's only in some peaks, can
anybody provide more accurate data?). let's assume that they could have
about 1000 in the next release, more or less 5 years after the creation
of the game. probably it will take us quite time to reach that level,
if we ever reach it, but let's take that we could have an average of
100 players on-line (!!!) by the end of the year and one year after
that in some stable release. with 8km of side that's 64 areas of 1km^2,
with 20km 400 areas.

in the current map, from the top of the lighthouse, you can only see
points running around in the middle of the map, the center of the
village, 200m away approximately. so probably even with 15 players per
area you wouldn't notice the presence of most of them (again, dividing
1km^2 in squares of 200x200 would be 25 squares, almost 1 player for 2
of that areas, and they have to be outside buildings or not behind
hills, etc etc etc). the player-to-player interaction has a lot of
influence in the game, so I think that we have to pay attention to this
too.

that means that if the players are distributed randomly, with 100
players connected we would have 1 or 2 players in each area with 64
areas, but only 1 out 4 areas with some player there if there are 400.
even with 1000 players it would be 15 per area with 64, but only 2.5
with 400 areas.

so from this point of view could be more interesting to let Feld be
even smaller: with 100 players on-line would be 4 players per area with
5km of side (5^2=3D25 sectors), 6 with 4km, 11 with 3 and 25 with 2
(2^2=3D4 sectors). (btw, with the island being 300kmx500km would be 1
player for 1500 areas with the same 100 users).

so we would have to take into account the following points (some of
them only if we're going to use that system that I talked about in
other messages to generate the terrain):

- performance (CPU and memory) constraints to load, unload, render
terrains, etc. (as I explained before most of this is not noticeable
once it's "rendered" for the first time, but anyway it would be time
consuming for the people who hast to make it).

- performance of the server: the server doesn't have to make the
graphical stuff, but needs to have all the sectors loaded and the
content in it, so it's probably a waste of memory to have empty
sectors, if we use a lot such as 64 (8km of side) probably doesn't even
fit in the current computer of the server.. do we gonna go for the
multiserver architecture at this point? :)

- difficulty to design the heightmap. the better would be to generate
the heightmap and then cut it in pieces, but that's almost impossible
even with a image of 8192^2, not to say with that of 20^2 km; and the
more big the more difficult to avoid gaps in the edges of the areas if
the maps are generated separately, etc etc etc.

- estimated time to fill it with interesting content.

 - [subsection] time to explore it: with 20km of side you'll have to
spend 4 hours running (provided that there's no penalization to keep
running for hours) to go to from one corner to the other 3 and back to
the same corner, and that without obstacles. it would take a lot of
months playing hours every day to explore all Feld, not even thinking
in enter the buildings and interacting with other players and NPCs and
so on. unless there are huge amount of players most of the island would
be unexplored and so the designed content not seen or fully used.

- "population density", as discussed before.


well, so after this I even think that 8km of side it's too big for the
current state of the game, probably 4km (16 sectors) is the minimum
acceptable size to have some player interaction in the next years,
unless you have other numbers in mind for the on-line players that we
could have. anyway if we grow fast we can scale the other islands as
needed.

so what do we do? PJ is already trying to make a heightmap for Feld, we
need to decide something soon to keep going, we've been stuck with this
for too long :)


regards.

--=20
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <ma...@us...>