I was browsing a bit through your posts, so no Idea if this was mentioned
before, but since you are a one-man-"team", I would suggest to go the
"generate as much as possible" approach (from world, to quests to dialogs
between npc's).

Take your heightmap, create some polygonal representation of it - either
simple (which would suffice for your goal) or complex (with alpha maps
and blending between "tiles" and all the other gimmicks)

Take another 'overlay picture" to show where you want vegetation on your
map, maybe one for enemies or weather, quests and so on.

You could have another "overlay" map to show where your algorithm should
place towns (maybe depending on a pixelcolor or sth, how big a town
should be).

Then in a final process, put all of these 'layers' into a world-generator.


Concerning quests - I you give it some thought, you wil come to the
conclusion there is only a pretty basic set of possible questtypes (with
lots of tweakable parameters, obviously)...
It should be possible to largely generate pretty good quests just by
providing a few basic input parameters (and if you go really fancy,
interactions between quests).

Thats a pretty detailed elevation map, was curious what did you use to generate that or did you use an image editor to make it. Looks good :) I can't wait to see a 3d rendering of it in the future :).

I've been working on it a long time....about 4 Billion years now. =)

Sorry, couldn't resist. It's a pieced together, modified elevation map for the area of the United States called "Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico.

This is just an elevation map, and cannot be used for a hieght map, due to the extraneous data and sharp edges. There are, however, topographic maps of the same area which can be run through various tools which will create a Heightmap with an appropriate scale for the engine. This is the route I'll take.

Cheers!

Awsome, can't wait to see more from you.

OOH! ooh, call the game "4 Corners", hahaha.

But honestly, being from CO, I'm not surprised I recognized the map right away. Someone unfamiliar with the local geography wouldn't necessarily place it (and you couldn't really tell once in-game anyway) so I commend the resourcefulness there :)

BCullis:

You'll be happy to know the main city of MiniMORPG is located roughly where Denver is.

Cheers!

Sorry if you've answered this question already, but what is the approximate dimensions of this map?

I just googled the size of Utah and it's about 85,000 square miles (270 miles east-west and 350 miles north-south, with a small chunk removed from the north-east corner). If you assume about 85,000 sq. miles for each of the 5 states you mentioned, we're looking at a pretty big world.

Doesn't this seem rather large? I know it's possible to generate enough graphical content to display (although it might be repetitive) in such a large world, but will there be enough gameplay spread out to justify such a large world?

Just asking questions...

Sanity:

Very good question. We'll be using a much scaled down version of the region. In general, we want it to take no more than 4 minutes to run from the bottom of the map to the top of the map...with no interruptions or detours. With hills and such we can extend it to 5 minutes.

With a walk-rate of 1m /sec and a run rate of say 3m / sec. We can surmise that in 5 minutes our character can run about 900m. The widest point of the map is roughly 1.47x bigger than the height of the map. We'll round up and call it 1.5. This means that it's an addition 450m wide.

So, based on our quick calculations our map is roughly 1350m x 900m.

Is this number exact? No. It's a good estimate though based on the user experience we'd like to create. Based on these numbers, the user can run from the top of the map to the bottom in about 5 minutes, and can cover the widest possible route in about 7.5 minutes. Keeping in mind there's little reason to do this, and more often than not people will be traveling between cities and important locations, which will cut travel time down to around 1-3 minutes depending on where they're going.

This means that the map is "pretty big", but the idea is to allow room to grow. Although I'll not attempt to fill the entire map with interesting content, it should be large enough to do so, while being small enough that we can manage it.

Cheers!

Cool... sounds good.

You should probably smooth down the corners of your map; in general, islands don't have mountains that suddenly drop off perfectly vertically in the middle. [grin]

Jeromy,

Are you okay? I've been checking in from time to time to see how this MMORPG project is going. It seems you've been MIA for a while.

Anyway, I hope you are doing well. Keep up the good work!

-Sanity Assassin

Already out of motivation? Yes, I have been working in vapor ware too, but at least I lasted a bit more...

Quote:Already out of motivation? Yes, I have been working in vapor ware too, but at least I lasted a bit more...

Wow...no faith. Please do not post on my journal again. You're not welcome. I will, however, be following your posts here on GDNet to ensure you maintain a positive, friendly attitude. And when you attempt to slam others, or when you say something even the slightest off-color, I'll be sure and report your posts for harassment. The GDNet community doesn't need your kind. They need positive, friendly, and constructive individuals. Go away.

To those who care: I was out of town because my wife's grandfather had open heart surgery. Then I returned and was overwhelmed trying to catch up on work that didnt get done while I was out of town. Work on the MiniMORPG will continue today.

For future reference, any time someone volunteers their time to help others, thanks, and encouragement work a lot better than criticism and sarcasm at motivating them to continue.

Peace!

Hope the surgery went okay and he's well (regarding the circumstances of course). I'm not really into MMORPGs but I'm having fun tracking your development progress. Good luck!