Quote:Original post by infrmtn
Hey, I don't see you adding much to the topic now. Maybe you'd like me to fill a form and draw a picture?
Don't get all narky at Kylotan for asking you to keep your posts constructive. Making a general, untargeted, unqualified criticism like you did is completely unconstructive and is a good way to turn your own thread into a shitty flame war, and consequently get it deleted.
Quote:Look, if you can't extract my point from my THREE previous posts (read the second one) then here it is, as clear as an unmuddied lake: Think of something new NOT ALREADY DONE in the last big names of genre x.
So rather than being a general long-winded appeal to 'not make things repetitive', it's a general long-winded appeal to 'be original'?
Either way, it's been heard before, and it's not particularly constructive. Just stamping your feet and shouting "BE ORIGINAL" isn't going to achieve anything. Furthermore, if people fail to get your point, try explaining it better rather than shouting at them for being stupid - communication is an important part of game design, so take the opportunity to practice it.
Anyway, to try and get back to the topic, which is potentially quite an interesting area for discussion...
Quote:It hasn't been mentioned yet that you don't have to freeze your world after you're done with it. When you say it's just as bad seeing the same tree 40 times as it is seeing 40 trees that look the same, yes it's true but a single tree shouldn't look the same all the time. Flowers don't look the same all the time. Of course with plants any major changes don't happen that fast, but for example there are also the smaller changes that happen through the day/night cycle.
It looks like you're falling into the realism trap here. It seems you're suggesting that rather than having big, simple worlds, we have small complex ones.
The problem is the sort of complexity you're talking about here isn't really going to do anything for the gameplay. At least with a big, simple world, people can still get some enjoyment out of exploration. With a small, uber realistic one, you have less space to explore, and nothing more than gimmicky effects like flowers that close at night and trees that look a pixel taller if you come back to the game 3 years later.
If you're going to replace size with complexity, it should be meaningful complexity rather than trivial effects which 99% of people won't even notice.
It may be interesting to consider the content density distribution as well as the overall size. I would favour a model where content is concentrated around relatively small areas (e.g cities) with a marked drop in content for the outlying areas. (rural areas) This is much more intuitive and realistic than a uniform distribution, and it gives some incentive to explore - you wander around the low-content wilderness in the hope of finding a previously undiscovered nugget of high content goodness. However, when the player isn't exploring, the high concentration of content around certain areas means that the amount of legwork while actually doing important stuff is minimized.