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Did modern graphics kill the seamless world?
fonoi
Member UncommonPosts: 56
Simple question really!
I have been thinking about this and trying to figure out why the best games such as "Betrayal at Krondor" and "Asherons Call" which featured huge open worlds with almost no zoning or restrictions are so rare today. Vanguard is another example but slightly more restrictive.
Asherons Call was HUGE, it tooks hours to run from the top of the map to the bottom. There were open dungeons and they were awesome.
Asherons Call was the first truly "3D" mmo I ever played and perhaps it is this wow factor that has left me jaded years after quiting the game. I can still recall the first time I logged in, it was into a town called Nanto if I am not mistaken. I set out on my own, joined later by a close friend and with little to no quests or anything like that made Asherons Call my own game.
We enjoyed playing the game, the "grind" was heavy yet nonexistent. At that time the max level was 126, which took me years to achieve but I never once felt pressured to get to that level as the game I played was ours. We set the objectives, we set the pace. We built lasting friendships and monarchy's (guilds) which lasted years.
Even now when I get the urge and pop in again I still see members of the monarchy who I know, and they remember me. This bond, this social bond is something that is not easy to describe.
Lets go back a bit though, Asherons Call was the original TSW. The quests when they came made you think, you had to discover the correct way to complete them. There was a "spell economy" which was fueled by the fact you had to research your owns spells by trial and error. The more players using those spells meant the spells would get weaker, the less the spells stronger.
Asherons Call in its infancy was a thinking mans game and it was amazing! I personally believe this is one of the reasons TSW dd not do so well, the spoiled players of this era do no want to think anymore.
Anyway before I get too long winded here is my question :
Did modern graphics kill the seamless world? My dialogue set the theme but the essence remains the same. Are we limited by what we can render?
** For kicks here is an old article I wrote that was published on IGN.
Comments
The problem is hard drives. Or more to the point, loading times off of hard drives. If you want to load too much stuff off of a hard drive too often, then a seamless world is impossible and you have to make the game heavily zoned. Reduce the amount of stuff you have to load off of a hard drive and a seamless world is easy to implement.
One way to do this is by requiring everyone to have an SSD in order to play the game. While SSDs are seeing wider adoption, that would still greatly restrict your potential playerbase.
The other way is to reduce what players have to load, period. What are games loading off of hard drives so much? Mostly it's textures as used in 3D graphics. Don't give a game so many textures or such high resolution textures in a given area, and making the world seamless would be easy. Alternatively, if the textures are procedurally generated rather than loaded off of a hard drive, then you can skip the loading times.
It's not modern graphics in general that killed the seamless world. A wide variety of high-resolution textures stored on the hard drive is the specific culprit. Everything else in modern graphics is perfectly compatible with a seamless world.
Nope. Technology is there. See WOW.
What kill the seamless world is player desire to play in co-op small groups in an instances, and e-sport pvp.
Some graphical niceties don't really get in the way of having big world
Post processing effects
Shaders
Shadows and lighting
High polygon models (sort of because the more polys kinda leads to more textures)
This like this work against seamless, due to both ram and gpu RAM load
Better quality textures
More variety of textures (due to more variety of player looks, mob types scenery etc..)
Also you need more meshes with more player and mob variety
That has absolutely nothing to do with whether a world can be seamless or needs zones.
Yes but wow hardly has cutting edge graphics.
Asheron's Call is the most seamless world I've played in but it still has graphic loading based lag with hard disk drives. If you move directly North, South, East or West you only load about 4 sectors of graphic textures. There is still to this day small lag spikes from those textures loading. If you move diagonally you load about 8 new sectors of textures and have a slightly larger lag spike.
It was a embarassment to Turbine when they tried to call Asheron's Call 2 a seamless world. I've played first person shooters with larger and more open, although not quite seamless, worlds than AC 2 had.
Vanguards sector based loading lag is significantly worse.
That depends very strongly on how it's implemented. If you have a separate texture for each triangle, you're doing it wrong. It's pretty easy to wrap a single texture continuously across thousands of triangles in cases where it's appropriate.
Stop making excuses for lazy developers or blaming computer hardware. Few developers want to invest the time needed to pull it off ITS THATS SIMPLE.
Every other reason in this thread is just an EXCUSE period.
The time difference in making a heavily instanced game like GW2 AOC TSW etc, and something like DF, RIFT, WOW is enormous. Instancing should be reserved for dungeons only, but games like Vangaurd and AC have proved its technically possible in any development lifecycle.
Lobby games even with big zones are easy mode to develop.
A lot depends on how it's implemented. Asheron's Call is old enough that it's likely single-threaded. If the game engine is designed to stop rendering while it loads something from the hard drive, then that's going to give you hitching whenever you load anything. With modern multi-core processors and threading techniques, it's pretty trivial to have one thread handle loading things from the hard drive while other threads carry on and ignore it. But you can still only load one thing at a time from the hard drive.
Of course, even after you get something from the hard drive, you often still have to upload it to the video card. And it takes some amount of time to send it over a PCI Express bus (or in Asheron's Call's day, AGP).
Nobody has mentioned Skyrim. A large, mostly-seamless world with modern graphics is definitely possible with today's client technology. I think the issue is more related to the server-side. Splitting up players with "loading" boarders allows you to place players on several different physical server machines. This means you can spend less on processing power. Alternative methods have been difficult to implement and few have succeeded.
World of Warcraft is not seamless. It appears to be from the client side, but the servers definitely have borders. In the beginning of WoW, the borders were easy to spot because no critter would cross them, but they quickly removed spawns from areas near the borders. Players also found some exploits related to being on borders of zones.
Nonsense. In terms of how long it takes to code something, the difference between making a game heavily instanced versus seamless is inconsequential. It's not even clear which takes longer, but at worst, maybe one takes a single employee a couple of extra days to code it.
The problem with trying to make a game seamless comes when you need to render something on the screen that hasn't yet been loaded off of a hard drive. At that point, you can either sit there and wait for it (severe hitching) or else ignore it until it's ready and have players complain that they're getting killed by invisible mobs.
And how do you make it so that you don't have a problem with needing to render things that haven't yet been loaded? Either you increase the system requirements (i.e., SSD is required) or else you decrease the amount of stuff that needs to be loaded. Programmer cleverness doesn't actually have that much to do with it.
Transferring a character from one physical server to another is very, very fast. Assuming that the physical servers are at the same site, you're looking at maybe a few milliseconds, if that. And if it's in the range of milliseconds rather than microseconds, then it's probably because the LAN isn't entirely optimized for latency, precisely because it doesn't matter. If that were the reason for loading screens, the loading screen would commonly disappear before the game draws it for even a single frame.
''/\/\'' Posted using Iphone bunni
( o.o)
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**This bunny was cloned from bunnies belonging to Gobla and is part of the Quizzical Fanclub and the The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club**
THIS.
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Ok. Very big amount of high resoltution textures, problems with adressing enough memory as mmorpg's are designed to comply with 32-bit limit. This have some part in it BUT all those are not things that make seamless world impossible.
Zoned / instanced worlds are design choice partially for technical reasons but mostly because of gameplay reasons.
Lack of seamless world is one of long list of things that kill modern mmorpg's for me.
My first mmorpg was Ultima Online with totally seamless world.
Second mmorpg was World of Warcraft vanilla and then it was not so focused on instances, phasing, etc and had almost seamless world.
Seriously playing most zoned, instanced, phased mmorpg's does not feel like playing in game world. Maybe because it is not.
Darkfall did it, with just 20 devs.
Vanguard did it.
its a design choice.
Stop ignoring the freaking facts, there is NO MMO in the past 10 years that has a seamless world, every single time its either cleverly masked by code or design choices, world of warcraft is heavily instanced, its just that the loading screens are replaced and hidden and you dont see them, ...
Look at Fuel, that is a game that is procedurally generated, and has a world size many dozen times bigger than any other game in existance, on par with Elder Scrolls II.
And its almost completely seamless, however doing procedularally generated content means that almost everything will look the same, and you can fire 90% of your artist team, ...
I agree with Quizzical, every company should ban sales and stop producing hard-drives, and make everyone get SSDs or similar technology, the stupid 1950s relic is way overdue for extinction.
Just make rebates and do a deal that you can bring your hard-drive and if you give it for recycling you get money off your ssd, same like they do it with cars, make it affordable and necessary and easy for people to switch out their hard-drives with ssds.
Also companies should stop being pricks, skip a year or two, go straight for <10nm process and boost TLC-NAND lifetime and get those SSD prices in par with HDD prices, 20% more expensive SSDs is a good enough point to annihilate HDDs.
No Darkfall didnt do it, Vanguard didnt do it either, they are just tricking you, it is a not a seamless world it is not a one piece world that isnt cut anywhere, ... its just very well hidden and optimized.
Seamlessness or not (loading screens or not), comes from what Quizzical wrote, but all games will probably use zones because of the limited amount of players a single server can handle at any given time.
It is partly technical, partly a design decision.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I dont get people's lack of obsession with seamless worlds.
Seamless world games also use multple physical servers per one game servers. It is of course creating more certain problems that in zoned games but ultimatelly is not what mainly it is about.
I think you might misunderstood Quizzical.
Punching salad will do that to you.
It is if one zone gets too crowded.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
A lack of obsession being the default state, I dont understand that sentence.
You just design game in a way that it almost never happen.