June 2, 2019

MyWorld Meetup – 6/1/2019

Discussion:

  • Work is progressing on initial world generator design
    • There are many aspects that need to be addressed – generating an interesting world, handling modifications made by users, updating/improving algorithms later, etc.
    • Many procedural world generators work by layering noise & fractal functions – we’re investigating applying/saving user modifications to terrain as functions that are applied as patches over the generator’s output. The alternative is storing the world as soon as it’s generated, but this takes a great deal of space.
  • FordLady – It seems easier to store the world as it’s generated – would this take up too much storage space?
    • The issue with storage space only comes up when people travel across vast areas and don’t come back to them. If the world is stored as soon as it’s generated, this means storing large amounts of data that may never be used again or may only be used very rarely.
    • Another issue with storing the world as soon as it’s generated is changing the generation algorithms or parameters later. You may want to re-generate some wilderness areas, but user-customized areas should probably not be changed. Storing the world results after generation make it harder to re-generate as algorithms are improved. Re-generating and storing only user modifications makes this much more straightforward.
  • FordLady – Would re-generation happen automatically or would it have to be manually applied?
    • This is still an open question – probably the best solution is to allow either to be used at the world operator’s choice.
  • FordLady – Will the world-generator be fairly complete by alpha?
    • Simple world generation is easy – during alpha we’ll have some simple feature generation, but we’ll likely delay further enhancements to beta or later until higher priority tasks are completed. Eventually we may pursue placing animal populations as part of the generated world.
  • Advanced features will wait until higher priority tasks like porting the scripting engine to Graal/Truffle are completed, but basic world generation will be in place by alpha.