In 1999, the graphics in those seamless games were the bleeding edge high tech. EverQuest was one of the games that made dedicated graphics cards actually a thing. You do not, under ANY circumstances, have to have bad graphics if you want a seamless world.
Have you not noticed that today's bleeding edge graphics are rather more demanding on hardware then 1999's bleeding edge graphics?
Considering EQ alone was responsible for the shift towards dedicated graphics cards, no. Today's bleeding edge graphics are just as demanding as in the 90s, because it all scales up.
MMO companies have done seamless worlds then, and they're doing seamless worlds now. It is a design choice.
Or are you telling me that, Arenanet doesn't have programmers as good as Darkfall's 30 developers in Greece?
Except that it doesn't all scale up. Hard drive IOPS hasn't increased much. A 3.5" hard drive platter spinning at 7200 RPM spins at exactly the same speed as a 3.5" hard drive platter spinning at 7200 RPM that was produced way back in 1999. There have been some slight improvements in IOPS due to a variety of tweaks that make it more likely that you can move a hard drive to the right radial position to grab data on a given rotation rather than waiting for the next one. But the expected rotational latency of 4.17 ms is an intrinsic property of 7200 RPM hard drives, and even being able to magically teleport a hard drive head to the right radius instantly would not be able to reduce read latency below that.
It's simple physics, really. A hard drive rotating at 7200 RPM rotates at 120 revolutions per second. Each full revolution takes about 8.33 ms. If you discover that you want to read a particular cluster and know where the cluster is, you have to wait for the platter to spin it around to where your drive head is. The amount of time this takes is uniformly distributed between 0 ms and 8.33 ms, for an average value of about 4.17 ms. And that's assuming that you can move the drive head to the right radius by the time it the platter moves to the right spot the first time. If not, then add another 8.33 ms per revolution it takes. Various optimizations can and have tended to decrease the number of extra revolutions, but that 4.17 ms figure is simple physics and cannot ever be beaten with 7200 RPM hard drives.
Incidentally, the other thing that hasn't really scaled is memory latency, whether for system memory or video memory. There, you're limited by a variety of factors, one of which is the speed at which an electrical current travels through a copper wire. That, in turn, is limited by the speed of light in a vacuum, which is a meaningful restriction and has been for a long time. The speed of light in a vacuum has long been believed to be a universal speed limit that you can't exceed by any means, ever.
There are still ways to make a seamless world, but it requires major sacrifices that didn't used to be relevant. Since you cite Darkfall, I'd like to point out that Darkfall's graphics are rather far inferior to Guild Wars 2's graphics. That's practically a poster child for "we made some major sacrifices in the game" to make the world seamless, among other things.
You keep saying that, but you're ignoring that hard drives HAVE been getting faster load times. Not only that, but hard drive speeds have not stopped other games from making seamless worlds without sacrifices. Darkfall's graphics weren't the result of sacrifices, they were the result of the game company having 20 devs, no publisher, and less than a million dollars of budget. Now that they actually have money they've been beefing up the graphics.
If hard drives are the limitations of a seamless world then Planetside 2 wouldn't be seamless. Skyrim wouldn't be seamless. Vanguard wouldn't be seamless.
Hard drives and memory are not bottle necks. Seamless MMOs are a design choice.
Ask any MMO dev on the planet if they'd rather have their players:
A) wait at load screens
stutter/skip at region boundries
C) have extra long first-time load times
D) do everything seemlessly
I would bet you 99.99% would choose D.
The reason MMOs have A-C or some combination or other random "problem" of non-seemless worlds IS the limitations of technology - be it speeds, load times, bottlenecks in rendering, textures, whatever.
Valve is one of the quote "best" game developers on the planet - most would agree they always/normally do a very, very good job with their games. They still have loading screens.
Why? Not because they WANT players to have to wait in load screens to play the game. Because they HAVE to in order to give players everything else the game gives them.
Ask any MMO dev on the planet if they'd rather have their players:
A) wait at load screens
stutter/skip at region boundries
C) have extra long first-time load times
D) do everything seemlessly
I would bet you 99.99% would choose D.
The reason MMOs have A-C or some combination or other random "problem" of non-seemless worlds IS the limitations of technology - be it speeds, load times, bottlenecks in rendering, textures, whatever.
Valve is one of the quote "best" game developers on the planet - most would agree they always/normally do a very, very good job with their games. They still have loading screens.
Why? Not because they WANT players to have to wait in load screens to play the game. Because they HAVE to in order to give players everything else the game gives them.
It is give/take without a doubt.
D is quite hard to achive, and has nothing to do with graphics, yes you need to sacrifice somwhat, but it is also a design choice.
You do not need to sacrifice as much as you think, check the average post WOTLK texture resolution in WoW, check the polygon count, particle density, and many other things and you will find out its not that different than what GW2 uses. Both WoW and GW2 load very simmilar amounts of assests into your RAM per zone. Rift has a "seamless world" too, and yet it on the pure technical scale its as advanced if not more advanced than GW2.
Having instanced zones is easier since you it sets more restriction on players, it's easier to ballance the world since players cannot just pop from one zone to another, and from a pure techinical point it takes much less resources to track the actions of players and the state of the world when you're dealing with smaller instances than per world.
Belive it or not WoW has one of if not the most advanced mmo engine out there these days, and im not talking about the graphical engine altough its not as bad, look at what they can actually do from all points, restore items, restore chars, move chars across servers, faction changes, phasing, cross realm zones, account wide and char spefcific attributes and tons of more stuff, you really think it's easy to program that? Most companies have to sacrifice because they can not develop a good enough engine in the time farme they have, game engines are much more complicated than you think, take a look at TERA and how much issues they have just because they are using UE3 heck Doom 2 was revolutionary at the time because the engine supported multiple links between objects so finally we could get more than 1 key or button to open a single door, even the most trivial aspects of a game are much more complicated than people think.
Most instanced games do not treat boundaries as loading screens thats the perk you get which allows you to boost the graphical fidelity somewhat, most MMO's use those boundaries as checkpoints in order to ensure the consistancy of their world and your character.
Most instanced games do not treat boundaries as loading screens thats the perk you get which allows you to boost the graphical fidelity somewhat, most MMO's use those boundaries as checkpoints in order to ensure the consistancy of their world and your character.
Ask any MMO dev on the planet if they'd rather have their players:
A) wait at load screens
stutter/skip at region boundries
C) have extra long first-time load times
D) do everything seemlessly
I would bet you 99.99% would choose D.
The reason MMOs have A-C or some combination or other random "problem" of non-seemless worlds IS the limitations of technology - be it speeds, load times, bottlenecks in rendering, textures, whatever.
Valve is one of the quote "best" game developers on the planet - most would agree they always/normally do a very, very good job with their games. They still have loading screens.
Why? Not because they WANT players to have to wait in load screens to play the game. Because they HAVE to in order to give players everything else the game gives them.
It is give/take without a doubt.
You're correct somewhat. There are very few streaming engines which break apart the world into what would be streaming chunks. Amazing stuff can be done with Esenthel engine and Biworlds engine. SOE has farlight which is suppose to be a streaming engine so EQ3 will most likely be a large open seamless world.
Ask any MMO dev on the planet if they'd rather have their players:
A) wait at load screens
stutter/skip at region boundries
C) have extra long first-time load times
D) do everything seemlessly
I would bet you 99.99% would choose D.
And yet many MMORPGs have managed to be entirely seamless. The question is whether or not graphics have stopped seamless worlds. And the answer is, no.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Originally posted by skydiver12 A working Test model of final graphic fidelity Honestly, i know not one developer who had a full DX11, tesselation, HDR, SSAO box of their new "MMO" including one map, VARIOUS armor renders and player clients during his brainstorm phase. If they would, we probably wouldn't have to deal with things what plaqued SWTOR and even GW2 till today during WvWvW. They basically would have a working game which only needs content and art. (Not gonna happen) ...For an open world, you may need to cascade MORE your systems. A npc server working in a cluster matrix who deals more in sectors including load balancing, offloadingm the npc spawns and AI rather than having just a "simple" spawn table for each area one locigal server instance....It's a core design decision you just can't exchange later. You need to go with what you start.1) Coding various graphical effects is actually pretty quick. Pixel/fragment shaders need to run hundreds of millions of times per second, and that's not happening if they're hundreds of lines of source code. Earlier programmable portions of the pipeline don't run quite that much, but still, a game that tries to have tens of thousands of lines of HLSL or GLSL source code may not run well on anything.
The bigger problem is that just because your game engine runs at 1000 frames per second when there isn't much artwork in the world doesn't mean that it's still going to run great once everything is built and added. Once you've got a ton of artwork made assuming that the graphics engine wants it set up in a particular way, if you go back and change the graphics engine, you might have to redo a ton of other stuff. Yes, that's why no one has such a deep worked out asset libary at this stage. That was the point. Thanks for making it clearer.
Originally posted by Quizzical
2) NPC spawning takes so little computational time as to be effectively a rounding error. Informing nearby players that an NPC has spawned, loading art assets relevant to the NPC client-side, and drawing the NPC on the screen are much harder than merely deciding whether and where it spawns. It isn't intrinsically that way, I suppose, as you could design a game with very complex algorithms that take considerable running time to determine when and where mobs spawn. I'm not aware of any game that has gone that route.
I wasn't entirely clear, my bad. It's more than just merely spawning of course, i should have called it npc "server" or in most cases sadly "thread". Games like Lotro and GW2 currently show pretty well what can happen if you did not consider this during the early phase of the project. And i wouldn't call "just" spawning simple - as in not load generating. Quite the contrary. If a zone holds 10000 spawns they may vary in timer and even player generated circumstances which needs to be feed, streamed and calculated into the spawn routine. Not every game has the old fixed 2 minute respawn.
Considering you didn't think this through as a developer you may end up with a virtual continent or world (whole game) in a seamless world to be calculated by that tiny thread on one logical server. That's the point, you need to invest a lot more resources when dealing with a seamless world rather than beeing lucky because your licensed engine and server core may just happen to not exeed their limits with 300 spawns on one zone (which may or may not happen to be centralized calculated)
Originally posted by Quizzical 3) I think you've hit on the real issue with your last sentence. It's not that the coding for a seamless world is harder to do. It's that it might not run very well once you add all of the artwork and such, and you won't find out whether it's going to run well until it's too late to change it.
Thanks. That was my point.
For a seamless world to run you likely need either to be a lot more expirienced as a developer or (and) a team and (publisher) who has the ressources (know-how and finacial) to rewrite whole parts of your server / engine if needed at late development stages.
Because running into road stoppers is (more) likely.
sorry to necro a month and half old thread here, but i was going to make a thread similar to this one. i wanted to try and get a few answers to a few questions i had, and this thread helped a bit.
i've read this entire thread and from what i gathered..
in general, the main reason we don't have AAA graphics with seamless worlds is due to catering to low budget /older systems and system requirements?
Yes. Eye candy or gameplay? IMO: You can make a game that's graphics heavy, but it'll will lack any kind of depth. You can make a game that's a balance of both and get a decent game. However, if a developer could get away with releasing an MMO that has weaker graphics they could create a virtual world the size of the planet.
Unfortunately, the X-Box generation will never allow this.
Yes.... but I think its more due to it making us far more picky then anything. We have been accustom to flashy graphics that we become overly critical of graphical elements that are just a bit to far off. Heck, this extends to just how much options we have. A game that would come out today in the state WoW was in at its launch would completely flop, and yet you see the game so high up in population. Better graphics and the large number of options we have has made us much harsher and less forgiving critics.
To everyone saying yes, go back earlier in the thread. The question was answered, and that answer is no.
Instancing is a developer choice, not a technical limitation. There are quite a few modern games without borders, zones, or instances, that have high end graphics. Graphics have no impact on latency, which is usually the reason to instance something.
And older MMOs had cutting edge graphics (for their time) and still managed seamless worlds (Dark Age of Camelot, SWG)
in general, the main reason we don't have AAA graphics with seamless worlds is due to catering to low budget /older systems and system requirements?
Not older systems in general, but just hard drives. A video card has very little to do with whether a game world is seamless; it does take a little bit of time to upload and mipmap textures, but only a little. A seamless world doesn't put much extra load on a processor or system memory, either. The big bottleneck is the hard drive, and a 7200 RPM hard drive today spins at the same speed as a 7200 RPM hard drive from the turn of the millennium. More textures to load means more work for the hard drive without having a faster hard drive that can handle the extra load, and that means more need for loading screens.
However, if a developer could get away with releasing an MMO that has weaker graphics they could create a virtual world the size of the planet.
You would have to do a lot of stuff procedurally generated to do that. Assuming you mean planets like Pluto (I can call Pluto a planet if I want, as I'm not part of the IAU), not planets like in SWTOR. And if you try that, you'll immediately run into the problem that most game developers don't have the background in probability to do it well. So it will be very hit and miss, and you don't want to pour tens of millions of dollars into a project that might have a game world that is a complete train wreck.
Graphics have no impact on latency, which is usually the reason to instance something.
I have no idea what you mean by that. And I don't think you have any idea what you mean, either.
Instancing is an entirely separate matter from seamless worlds. The main reason to instance things is so that you can have a bunch of people in the "same" area of the world without tripping over each other. The reason for loading screens is mainly because it takes a while to load things off of a hard drive, and to a lesser degree, because it takes time to process things that have been loaded off of a hard drive and to upload graphics assets to the video card.
in general, the main reason we don't have AAA graphics with seamless worlds is due to catering to low budget /older systems and system requirements?
Not older systems in general, but just hard drives. A video card has very little to do with whether a game world is seamless; it does take a little bit of time to upload and mipmap textures, but only a little. A seamless world doesn't put much extra load on a processor or system memory, either. The big bottleneck is the hard drive, and a 7200 RPM hard drive today spins at the same speed as a 7200 RPM hard drive from the turn of the millennium. More textures to load means more work for the hard drive without having a faster hard drive that can handle the extra load, and that means more need for loading screens.
i'm about to call General Mills and see if they can put you on a Wheaties box.
thanks for the response, and posts in this thread.
sorry to necro a month and half old thread here, but i was going to make a thread similar to this one. i wanted to try and get a few answers to a few questions i had, and this thread helped a bit.
i've read this entire thread and from what i gathered..
in general, the main reason we don't have AAA graphics with seamless worlds is due to catering to low budget /older systems and system requirements?
No, the main reason that we don't have seamless worlds is that many of the players don't care about seamless worlds - they want instances that they can run with their friends/guild.
And studios react to that demand - why should they develop seamless worlds when the majority of the players just stands around in a city spamming "LFG dungeon XYZ"? You don't need a seamless world for that gameplay - instead you need a hub and a score of dungeons with fat loot.
I maintain this List of Sandbox MMORPGs. Please post or send PM for corrections and suggestions.
Wireframe Graphics began the death of seamless worlds, but were not solely responsible.
Same effect they had on the expiration of roleplay.
OTOH, you can't have "massive" without the purty eye-candy.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Frankly, I have no problem with instancing. If it makes sense in how it is used and is seamless (no load times) then no problem. What I hated in those truly uninstanced games was that quests would sometimes take forever to finish due to camped spawns and such. It also reduced "imersion" when doing a quest that supposedly was for just MY character only to see dozens of others doing the exact same thing. Instancing made those "other people" disappear and my quest felt far more unique to me.
But as to the whole modern graphics killing the so-called seamless world....no.
Graphics have no impact on latency, which is usually the reason to instance something.
The main reason to instance things is so that you can have a bunch of people in the "same" area of the world without tripping over each other.
No, the main reason for instancing is when developers don't know how to properly design an MMO, so they slap instancing over the problem hoping it'll go away.
A well designed MMO has NO need of instancing.
But yeah, modern graphics have nothing to do with the death of seamless worlds.
sorry to necro a month and half old thread here, but i was going to make a thread similar to this one. i wanted to try and get a few answers to a few questions i had, and this thread helped a bit.
i've read this entire thread and from what i gathered..
in general, the main reason we don't have AAA graphics with seamless worlds is due to catering to low budget /older systems and system requirements?
No, the main reason that we don't have seamless worlds is that many of the players don't care about seamless worlds - they want instances that they can run with their friends/guild.
And studios react to that demand - why should they develop seamless worlds when the majority of the players just stands around in a city spamming "LFG dungeon XYZ"? You don't need a seamless world for that gameplay - instead you need a hub and a score of dungeons with fat loot.
The opposite of a seamless world is not a world with lots of instances. The opposite of a seamless world is a world with lots of zones separated by loading screens.
You can have heavy instancing in a seamless world. For example, you could have standard instanced dungeons where, instead of a loading screen when you go in, players just walk in and continue as though nothing had changed, but disappear to players not in their group outside of the dungeon. While standing outside of the dungeon, you could look in and see a generic "empty" dungeon without any players--but perhaps with the standard mob spawns. I'm not aware of any game that has done this, but there's no reason why you couldn't.
You can also have no instancing at all in a heavily zoned games with lots of loading screens. A game made by developers that hate instancing might do this to allow players to warp between geographically distant areas without having to walk back and forth every single time.
Speaking of which, warping is problematic for a seamless world. If you can warp between arbitrary points at will (say, Guild Wars map travel), then the moment you warp, you don't have the area you just warped to already loaded. There are a variety of things you can do to handle this, but a loading screen is often the best. One simple alternative is to simply show obviously broken graphics for a few seconds as the next zone loads. You can try to cover up the delay by starting to load the next zone as soon as the player gives the command, but having a confirmation dialog box so that you've got some loading done by the time the player confirms it, and then having the screen freeze until it's loaded. But that could easily get annoying.
You can also greatly restrict warping. No warping at all, ever, is one way to do it, but that will, itself, annoy a lot of people. If warping is such that you can only warp from specific areas to other specific areas, then you could start loading the area on the other side of a warp point as a player approaches the warp point--without knowing whether the player will use it. That adds a lot to your memory requirements unless the warp points are in pretty barren areas.
Another alternative is to make all areas that you can warp to or from identical. That way, if you've got one loaded, you've got the textures for all of the rest loaded, too. You could try to cover this up in lore as it being the standard teleportation machine--and the door has to close for it to operate, so you can't see out. And then the game loads the rest of the area outside the machine while you're warping and heading over to the door. That the graphics outside would be horribly broken doesn't matter if you can't see them.
Speaking of which, doing 3D graphics is all about tricks like that. I don't mean that exact trick. Rather, there's a ton of "this would be horribly broken if players could see it, so we'll cover it up so that players can't see it". Camera restrictions are often in place not because the game designers think no one would ever want a versatile camera, but rather, to cover up things that would look obviously broken if players could choose a different camera angle, distance, or whatever.
Graphics have no impact on latency, which is usually the reason to instance something.
The main reason to instance things is so that you can have a bunch of people in the "same" area of the world without tripping over each other.
No, the main reason for instancing is when developers don't know how to properly design an MMO, so they slap instancing over the problem hoping it'll go away.
A well designed MMO has NO need of instancing.
But yeah, modern graphics have nothing to do with the death of seamless worlds.
Why are you talking about instancing again? That has nothing to do with whether a game world is seamless. There is probably a correlation between people who want seamless worlds and people who are against instancing. But from a game design perspective, they're independent issues, just like the decision of whether to have a deep crafting system is independent of whether to have a seamless world.
Graphics have no impact on latency, which is usually the reason to instance something.
The main reason to instance things is so that you can have a bunch of people in the "same" area of the world without tripping over each other.
No, the main reason for instancing is when developers don't know how to properly design an MMO, so they slap instancing over the problem hoping it'll go away.
A well designed MMO has NO need of instancing.
But yeah, modern graphics have nothing to do with the death of seamless worlds.
Why are you talking about instancing again? That has nothing to do with whether a game world is seamless. There is probably a correlation between people who want seamless worlds and people who are against instancing. But from a game design perspective, they're independent issues, just like the decision of whether to have a deep crafting system is independent of whether to have a seamless world.
I'm aware of this, but most other people in the thread are not.
I'm talking about instancing because its been brought up dozens of times in this thread, and also because if a game has instancing, it's not seamless.
Comments
You keep saying that, but you're ignoring that hard drives HAVE been getting faster load times. Not only that, but hard drive speeds have not stopped other games from making seamless worlds without sacrifices. Darkfall's graphics weren't the result of sacrifices, they were the result of the game company having 20 devs, no publisher, and less than a million dollars of budget. Now that they actually have money they've been beefing up the graphics.
If hard drives are the limitations of a seamless world then Planetside 2 wouldn't be seamless. Skyrim wouldn't be seamless. Vanguard wouldn't be seamless.
Hard drives and memory are not bottle necks. Seamless MMOs are a design choice.
I'll stop you right there...
Ask any MMO dev on the planet if they'd rather have their players:
A) wait at load screens
C) have extra long first-time load times
D) do everything seemlessly
I would bet you 99.99% would choose D.
The reason MMOs have A-C or some combination or other random "problem" of non-seemless worlds IS the limitations of technology - be it speeds, load times, bottlenecks in rendering, textures, whatever.
Valve is one of the quote "best" game developers on the planet - most would agree they always/normally do a very, very good job with their games. They still have loading screens.
Why? Not because they WANT players to have to wait in load screens to play the game. Because they HAVE to in order to give players everything else the game gives them.
It is give/take without a doubt.
D is quite hard to achive, and has nothing to do with graphics, yes you need to sacrifice somwhat, but it is also a design choice.
You do not need to sacrifice as much as you think, check the average post WOTLK texture resolution in WoW, check the polygon count, particle density, and many other things and you will find out its not that different than what GW2 uses. Both WoW and GW2 load very simmilar amounts of assests into your RAM per zone. Rift has a "seamless world" too, and yet it on the pure technical scale its as advanced if not more advanced than GW2.
Having instanced zones is easier since you it sets more restriction on players, it's easier to ballance the world since players cannot just pop from one zone to another, and from a pure techinical point it takes much less resources to track the actions of players and the state of the world when you're dealing with smaller instances than per world.
Belive it or not WoW has one of if not the most advanced mmo engine out there these days, and im not talking about the graphical engine altough its not as bad, look at what they can actually do from all points, restore items, restore chars, move chars across servers, faction changes, phasing, cross realm zones, account wide and char spefcific attributes and tons of more stuff, you really think it's easy to program that? Most companies have to sacrifice because they can not develop a good enough engine in the time farme they have, game engines are much more complicated than you think, take a look at TERA and how much issues they have just because they are using UE3 heck Doom 2 was revolutionary at the time because the engine supported multiple links between objects so finally we could get more than 1 key or button to open a single door, even the most trivial aspects of a game are much more complicated than people think.
Most instanced games do not treat boundaries as loading screens thats the perk you get which allows you to boost the graphical fidelity somewhat, most MMO's use those boundaries as checkpoints in order to ensure the consistancy of their world and your character.
Now that, dear DOGMA1138, is an answer.
Kudos sir, and thank you.
You're correct somewhat. There are very few streaming engines which break apart the world into what would be streaming chunks. Amazing stuff can be done with Esenthel engine and Biworlds engine. SOE has farlight which is suppose to be a streaming engine so EQ3 will most likely be a large open seamless world.
If you are interested in making a MMO maybe visit my page to get a free open source engine.
And yet many MMORPGs have managed to be entirely seamless. The question is whether or not graphics have stopped seamless worlds. And the answer is, no.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
For a seamless world to run you likely need either to be a lot more expirienced as a developer or (and) a team and (publisher) who has the ressources (know-how and finacial) to rewrite whole parts of your server / engine if needed at late development stages.
Because running into road stoppers is (more) likely.
sorry to necro a month and half old thread here, but i was going to make a thread similar to this one. i wanted to try and get a few answers to a few questions i had, and this thread helped a bit.
i've read this entire thread and from what i gathered..
in general, the main reason we don't have AAA graphics with seamless worlds is due to catering to low budget /older systems and system requirements?
Yes. Eye candy or gameplay? IMO: You can make a game that's graphics heavy, but it'll will lack any kind of depth. You can make a game that's a balance of both and get a decent game. However, if a developer could get away with releasing an MMO that has weaker graphics they could create a virtual world the size of the planet.
Unfortunately, the X-Box generation will never allow this.
http://thewordiz.wordpress.com/
To everyone saying yes, go back earlier in the thread. The question was answered, and that answer is no.
Instancing is a developer choice, not a technical limitation. There are quite a few modern games without borders, zones, or instances, that have high end graphics. Graphics have no impact on latency, which is usually the reason to instance something.
And older MMOs had cutting edge graphics (for their time) and still managed seamless worlds (Dark Age of Camelot, SWG)
Not older systems in general, but just hard drives. A video card has very little to do with whether a game world is seamless; it does take a little bit of time to upload and mipmap textures, but only a little. A seamless world doesn't put much extra load on a processor or system memory, either. The big bottleneck is the hard drive, and a 7200 RPM hard drive today spins at the same speed as a 7200 RPM hard drive from the turn of the millennium. More textures to load means more work for the hard drive without having a faster hard drive that can handle the extra load, and that means more need for loading screens.
You would have to do a lot of stuff procedurally generated to do that. Assuming you mean planets like Pluto (I can call Pluto a planet if I want, as I'm not part of the IAU), not planets like in SWTOR. And if you try that, you'll immediately run into the problem that most game developers don't have the background in probability to do it well. So it will be very hit and miss, and you don't want to pour tens of millions of dollars into a project that might have a game world that is a complete train wreck.
I have no idea what you mean by that. And I don't think you have any idea what you mean, either.
Instancing is an entirely separate matter from seamless worlds. The main reason to instance things is so that you can have a bunch of people in the "same" area of the world without tripping over each other. The reason for loading screens is mainly because it takes a while to load things off of a hard drive, and to a lesser degree, because it takes time to process things that have been loaded off of a hard drive and to upload graphics assets to the video card.
i'm about to call General Mills and see if they can put you on a Wheaties box.
thanks for the response, and posts in this thread.
No, the main reason that we don't have seamless worlds is that many of the players don't care about seamless worlds - they want instances that they can run with their friends/guild.
And studios react to that demand - why should they develop seamless worlds when the majority of the players just stands around in a city spamming "LFG dungeon XYZ"? You don't need a seamless world for that gameplay - instead you need a hub and a score of dungeons with fat loot.
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Kind of a two-pronged question, really.
Wireframe Graphics began the death of seamless worlds, but were not solely responsible.
Same effect they had on the expiration of roleplay.
OTOH, you can't have "massive" without the purty eye-candy.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Frankly, I have no problem with instancing. If it makes sense in how it is used and is seamless (no load times) then no problem. What I hated in those truly uninstanced games was that quests would sometimes take forever to finish due to camped spawns and such. It also reduced "imersion" when doing a quest that supposedly was for just MY character only to see dozens of others doing the exact same thing. Instancing made those "other people" disappear and my quest felt far more unique to me.
But as to the whole modern graphics killing the so-called seamless world....no.
Let's party like it is 1863!
No, the main reason for instancing is when developers don't know how to properly design an MMO, so they slap instancing over the problem hoping it'll go away.
A well designed MMO has NO need of instancing.
But yeah, modern graphics have nothing to do with the death of seamless worlds.
The opposite of a seamless world is not a world with lots of instances. The opposite of a seamless world is a world with lots of zones separated by loading screens.
You can have heavy instancing in a seamless world. For example, you could have standard instanced dungeons where, instead of a loading screen when you go in, players just walk in and continue as though nothing had changed, but disappear to players not in their group outside of the dungeon. While standing outside of the dungeon, you could look in and see a generic "empty" dungeon without any players--but perhaps with the standard mob spawns. I'm not aware of any game that has done this, but there's no reason why you couldn't.
You can also have no instancing at all in a heavily zoned games with lots of loading screens. A game made by developers that hate instancing might do this to allow players to warp between geographically distant areas without having to walk back and forth every single time.
Speaking of which, warping is problematic for a seamless world. If you can warp between arbitrary points at will (say, Guild Wars map travel), then the moment you warp, you don't have the area you just warped to already loaded. There are a variety of things you can do to handle this, but a loading screen is often the best. One simple alternative is to simply show obviously broken graphics for a few seconds as the next zone loads. You can try to cover up the delay by starting to load the next zone as soon as the player gives the command, but having a confirmation dialog box so that you've got some loading done by the time the player confirms it, and then having the screen freeze until it's loaded. But that could easily get annoying.
You can also greatly restrict warping. No warping at all, ever, is one way to do it, but that will, itself, annoy a lot of people. If warping is such that you can only warp from specific areas to other specific areas, then you could start loading the area on the other side of a warp point as a player approaches the warp point--without knowing whether the player will use it. That adds a lot to your memory requirements unless the warp points are in pretty barren areas.
Another alternative is to make all areas that you can warp to or from identical. That way, if you've got one loaded, you've got the textures for all of the rest loaded, too. You could try to cover this up in lore as it being the standard teleportation machine--and the door has to close for it to operate, so you can't see out. And then the game loads the rest of the area outside the machine while you're warping and heading over to the door. That the graphics outside would be horribly broken doesn't matter if you can't see them.
Speaking of which, doing 3D graphics is all about tricks like that. I don't mean that exact trick. Rather, there's a ton of "this would be horribly broken if players could see it, so we'll cover it up so that players can't see it". Camera restrictions are often in place not because the game designers think no one would ever want a versatile camera, but rather, to cover up things that would look obviously broken if players could choose a different camera angle, distance, or whatever.
Why are you talking about instancing again? That has nothing to do with whether a game world is seamless. There is probably a correlation between people who want seamless worlds and people who are against instancing. But from a game design perspective, they're independent issues, just like the decision of whether to have a deep crafting system is independent of whether to have a seamless world.
I'm aware of this, but most other people in the thread are not.
I'm talking about instancing because its been brought up dozens of times in this thread, and also because if a game has instancing, it's not seamless.