EDIT: Y'know, I think "randomization" was poor wording. It's more like "dynamic generation". When I say "randomization", know that what I mean is dynamically creating new objects instead of hard-placement in the ESM file.


Heh, I have a lot to talk about lately. This one's a bit better; I want to talk about memory, scope, and randomization.


Storing saved data from games can be a rather daunting task for a machine, if the scope of the game is large. Morrowind had an incredible amount of safe storage due to the way it handled items. This left anybody's house open to take as your own. Anything you changed inside the home would stick. This made for some massive save files after a while. Not to mention, every item in the world had to be placed there. Imagine if they'd tried to make the whole of Morrowind rather than just Vvardenfell. Placing all the items would take forever, and use up a ton of data

Look at Oblivion as well; save game bloating could completely kill the original unpatched game, and it didn't even have all that many safe storage spots. All the information respawned over and over, except in the 8 purchasable houses and very few other places. Every tree, rock, patch of grass, or anything else would also contribute to reaching the limit of available data, and also took time to make. It was highly limited by the system they used.

But what if things were more automated?
Instead of manually modeling each segment of land (which takes time and resources), game developers started to use Topographic heightmaps.
What if they did the same thing with Climate maps? Instead of putting each object in one-by-one, just paint it onto a climate map. Then whenever a player is in the general area, all the designated areas would automatically generate scenery. No, not everything would be randomly generated; simply leave some spots blank, and the developers can manually place whatever they'd like. This leaves a ton of data free, and allows more time to be allocated elsewhere.

Not to mention, it makes gathering ingredients a little more interesting.



This same concept could be used elsewhere, to expand the scope of the game as needed.
For example, Morrowind Comes Alive (MCA) uses tons of random NPCs to make Morrowind seem more lively. And it works! This could be accomplished with a Political Map. It could be used to randomly generate bystanders and unimportant folk who make the area appear more populated. Some areas will be sparse, while others are dense. Some will be rich, while others are poor.
The map could be multiply-layered, too, to designate ownership and boundaries of areas. You probably wouldn't see some random skooma-addict hanging around an Imperial compound on his own volition. But you probably would find mercenaries you could hire hanging around a Fighter's Guild.
And places with shops are likely to have random customers coming in. The player may be rich from adventuring, but they couldn't seriously be the only customer in the game.



The idea could even be used inside houses for random decorative junk. If the house has an owner, all the cups and spoons and cabbage and such could be generated randomly whenever the player enters the area. If the house doesn't have an owner, then the junk wouldn't regenerate. This way, the memory actually has room to save everything the player places by hand.

Given, this aspect would take a lot of creative algorithms for decoration. "Put spoons and forks on the table next to the plates, cloth can go on top of just about anything. Fill food-storage with cabbage and such, any shelves might have books on them... If the owner has a good income, everything should be kinda pretty. Otherwise, clay mugs." And of course, anything manually-placed by the developers functions just like it would in previous games.


I'm willing to bet that such randomization techniques could make even the entirety of Tamriel feasible in some way.



So, what do you think about randomization? What parts do you like, and which parts don't you like? If the whole of Tamriel could be created in a single game, would you take the whole shebang?

(Of course, there's the whole issue of audio files taking up a ton of data too, but that's another issue. For the sake of this discussion, let's assume all the audio in the world can fit onto a tiny disc.)

I'm not all worried about randomisation when it comes to random items in interiors, random NPC's, such as "commoners", random wildlife, and random quests, that should be marked as random, but I just don't want to see a randomised landscape. a computer-generated map, and a hand placed map, is like the difference of looking at a photograph of a person, and looking at a painting of a person. It's just more... alive... I'm not too sure how to explain, other than, it's nicer to see a hand placed scenery.

Tamriel has been in one game, and the whole thing was randomly-generated TES I: Arena, had all of Tamriel(except for what is now Cyrodiil) available for exploration. However, such randomization produced a bland world. The same is true for Daggerfall. So, with today's technology, random generation could produce very interesting results(and a large game world), however, I like the hand-crafted Elder Scrolls games(Morrowind and Oblivion) more than Arena and Daggerfall due to them being hand-crafted and not bland. I don't want random generation to go beyond what is seen in Morrowind and Oblivion.

Some repetitive "filler" things like grass could be randomly placed, but then there are all those "exceptions", like where a blade of grass sticks out of a rock, a plant hangs over the edge of something, or some other situation occurs that requires either a hand tweak afterwards or an awkward bit of code to avoid it. By the time you're done, it's not that much of an improvement over using an initial random placement and then a lot of hand tweaking by the developers, as was done for many things in both MW and OB.

Making a set of "alternate" modules, and choosing one at random, then placing a random selection of trim, etc., could be used to generate large quantities of "basic" housing, trees, etc. Again, it would be done once during development and then be extensively hand-adjusted and customized to further hide the fact that there's only a small set of original pieces.

Purely random anything gets to be noticable and annoying after a while, but it can be effective if mixed in carefully with hand-placed content. Taking the human oversight out of the equation is usually a recipe for disaster, though. I'd much rather have my game thoroughly tested and manually adjusted with a bit of TLC by the developers and artists, than get whatever the random number generator feels like spitting out today.

In addition to saving data, I think randomization of wilderness would allow the developers to spend more time on the smaller details of non-random places. I bet in the time it would take to decorate an entire house by hand with random junk, I could create a new, unique relic in Blender, and import it into the game. Maybe even write a little backstory about it, which could later be added into NPC conversations.

The landscape deep in the forest often goes largely unnoticed. Automating it will instead let them spend more time on things that should be more hand-crafted.

Additional NPCs, Additional Quests, Wild Beasties.

The problem with random scenery is some of us tend to use landmarks as a way of getting around. Or am I not understanding what the OP saying?

I did vote for "Additional NPCs". Would be cool if a bunch of no-name, generic peasants milled about Would fill alot of space that's usually empty!

I also voted for "wild beasties".

Of course, hand-placed things are the most enjoyable part of the games. If a good deal of said "filler" things are randomly generated on-the-spot, the developers have more time to work on all the things that actually need hand-craftiness. And if all the filler objects no longer need to take up data, there's much more room on the disc for more hand-crafted areas of the world.

I just randomly chose a house in Oblivion. There were about 180 items in all, 40 of which were furnishings, building parts, doors, the innkeeper, and other important things.
So the other 140 other objects were just random clutter. Assuming all the other buildings in Oblivion are remotely similar, the game could have had more than three times the buildings it had if junk were randomly generated. Probably more.

A random spot in the world; tidewater cave, had 65 items around it. There were about 10 or fewer parts to the scenery that actually made a difference. That would mean the world in Oblivion could have been more than 6 times larger than it actually was.

With these general, rough estimates, I kinda think that the entirety of Tamriel would actually be feasible, and still have the quality that Oblivion had.




@Renee Gade 2: Landmarks would definitely be able to stay; the developers would simply not generate random foliage in that section, and they would hand-place said landmarks. The randomness is just to cut out a lot of the "meat" of the game's data, which goes ignored anyway.

:rofl: What do you have against clay mugs?

On to the subject matter at hand. Some random people would be a nice touch. People going into store and buying, also a nice touch. Flora could be a big thing for me. I liked in OB to walk in the woods and picking "flowers" for alchemy, with a random system on it the flora could look out of place. I would prefer patches of flora, mushrooms, bushes, ect. But not at the cost of having them spread out over different terrain where they don't grow...referring to "Special Flora of Tamriel"

But some type of randomization would help fill those empty places and increase other smaller nuances.

http://tuahshinguru.deviantart.com/art/Climate-Map-161421219

Here's kinda what I mean. The green area is where basic trees and bulk foliage are. There's two little paths that meet in a clearing at one part, and a larger path toward the bottom. Nearby, there are also some patches of Monkshood (pink), and some mushrooms (blue). And I'm not sure what that yellow part is. My alchemy must be kinda low.

Tuah: I see, thanks.

Junk and etc. items should be the only thing randomized if anything just like in Morrowind.

These are wonderful ideas

I vote only junk and wild beast. Anything else is a bad idea. IMO.
Randomized quest just don't appeal to me.

The quests would be akin to minor jobs for the Fighter's or Assassin's guilds. Or maybe even the Thieves' Guild. The first thing that happened when I got to the end of any of these quest series in Oblivion, it felt disappointing. Here I am with all this fame and skill that I've built up, but no special quests I can go on anymore? That was one of the original plans for the Dark Brotherhood Chronicles mods, if I remember correctly. It actually gave a purpose to the sanctuary whelps.

That's just my opinion. :shrug: I don't like the idea.
Others more than likely will, however.
I just don't like the idea of random quest. And honestly, no quest is "random", that's impossible. It has to be programmed in some way or another.

Yeah, the idea does seem like a bit of a cop-out. "Heeey, we couldn't think of anything to follow up else after this. Have some random quests!"

It could be really random though, if said Random Junk system were fully functional. It'd select a cave, fort, or ruin or something, put in the objective (enemies of a certain type, item to retrieve) using the Junk Decoration and Wild Beasties randomization, and point you to it.

I had originally gotten the idea when I tried to make a make-your-own-guild system for Oblivion. The idea would be that you'd get contracts, and either send your members out on it, or take some with you and do it yourself. Of course, the scope of such a project was way out of my league back then. I guess it could best be described as a novelty.

That seems a lot like Fable II's random quest thing. I could see like..the Assassins guild or theives guild/DB or w/e giving you randomly generated contracts to kill people, based off a list of certain non essential NPCS. Or fighters guild giving you random contracts on items acquired by killing animals. That would be fun.

And with some extra randomly-generated NPCs you wouldn't end up making Tamriel full of ghost-towns.

That gives me another idea with housing. Houses should be integrated into an internal system (like the Office of Imperial Commerse did for the old shack in the Waterfront). This way, if an owner is dead and gone, the player can buy the person's house, and it would function like houses did in Morrowind. The system could also be integrated into types of buildings; if you buy a house and set up chairs and tables, you could open a tavern of your own, and people would come to it. After that point, it would function sort of like buildings did in Fable 2, with gradual income.

Alternatively, somebody else is bound to move in, given enough time.

Hey, this could even lead to said Economic/Political Maps playing a part in how much money a player makes. Dynamic economic landscape! Of course, to give the player a bit more fairness if they leave it alone for a while, it should eventually go back to normal.

No more randomization than already found in Oblivion, thanks. As random goes; leveled lists for loot in chests and enemy spawns is great. Anything outside of that is something I don't want to get involved with.

The kinds of randomization people in this thread are suggesting are solutions to problems that don't exist.

Placing paintbrushes on bookcases is probably the least effort-intensive part of making a game like TES4, time consuming, to be sure, but not difficult.

Compared to getting the scripting, AI, and world engines to work together and do everything they have to do without crashing, or creating the raw art assets (models and textures, skeletons and animations, particle effects and shaders), puttering around in the Construction Set to place trees and rocks with care is straight-forward and much less likely to cause a dev to pull their hair out.

Using the construction set has a bit of a learning curve, but compared to coding the game itself?

Sidenote: The SI Reference bug the OP referred to was a screw-up; under normal circumstances, the game takes care of itself, flushing temp object data, and preventing problematic save game bloat. Pointing out a patch-corrected issue as a justifcation for randomization is like saying you need surgery because years ago you had an illness that was cured with normal antibiotics - it doesn't follow.

While randomization works for Diablo-clones, it is anathema to what I think is the essence of the MW/Oblivion experience.

You don't consider the lack of a large number of quests to be a problem? I think that the OB style of "every quest is of immediate and dire importance" is kind of ridiculous. Take the Mages Guild line, there should have been a lot more ingredient collection quests to draw out the questline. There really should only be 1 "story" quest per rank per guild. The rest of the quests should be menial tasks performed solely to advance in rank. This would make the guilds feel more real as well as prevent you from being able to complete the entire line in 3 hours.



You seem to be making the case for randomization of junk placement here. If using the CS object placement is menial, time consuming and less important than scripting, AI, and engine performance, why shouldn't they find a way to simplify it?



Duly noted, and heartily agreed.



The essence of the TES experience is the ability to feel as though you are in another world, which does not necessarily mean statically boring.

I appreciate your reply to my post, and wish to address some of your points.



I don't think Oblivion lacked for quests, no. Even if you are only considering MQ, TG, DB, FG, and the Arena - that is still a great deal of directed and defined gameplay. In addition to that, each major city hosts a number of additions quests ranging from quick-hits to multipart mini-arcs. Then there are all the scattered quests like Aleswell's invisibility problem, the necromancer problem for the Roxy Inn, the Ayleid treasure hunting for Umbaccano. And don't forget the Daedric Shrine quests, master-training quests, or the significant DLC-added questlines in SI and KotN. I think Oblivion has a very large number of quests - quite enough, IMO, to occupy the time of players who only play laid out quests, and don't explore or do their own thing outside of the quest journal.




I see what you're getting at here, and I don't entirely disagree. This is something that may come down to a 'different strokes for different strokes' division, but I think that gamesas made the right choice. Herb foraging and sword polishing might be realistic, and personally I would be down for that, as I really enjoy the immersion - but I think you and I represent a minority of the Oblivion-loving audience, much less the general game consumer market. Most players would probably bemoan such between-major-mission activities as grindy time-wasting. (on a sidenote, the TG fencing goals come close to this, but w/o mods the goals are laughably small - knock over one upper class house and you're made)

The beautiful thing is, while the game doesn't force that kind of things on players, it does nothing to prevent players from doing it themselves. If you want to assign yourself busy work for the Arcane University, collecting herbs and reading from the library, you can do that. I've done things of that sort. I've also had characters who never fast traveled and never rode a horse, but walked literally everywhere, finding shelter to sleep in at night - games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 are what you make of them, self-imposed rules and limits may be RP-nerding it, but its a single player game, and you're having fun, so whatever, right?




Other posters have argued that randomization of world objects is necessary because its "too hard" to place every tree and rock in the world, and set a unique layout of clutter in every interior, and they feel that this investment of effort is what makes creating the game and releasing it slow and risky - the same mindset that thinks that voice acting uses up too much disc space. I see this as the main trunk of support for randomization, some other arguments in support seem too off-base to address in this space (briefly: the idea of randomized quests for example is at odds with my concept of what makes TES4 and Fallout 3 such singular experiences. "assasinate person X" and "kill a specific random spawn in the location marked on your map" style random quests would be garbage - and they were garbage in the highly overrated Fable II).

Why not randomize the 'less important' work? Well, it is and isn't less important at the same time - making the game work is complex beyond discussion, and doubtless the leading cause of premature baldness for the devs. But the manual placement of world detail is important in a different way. Its like 'making a camera is an extremely difficult feat of engineering, resulting in a device that is simple to operate; but taking great photos is still an artform all to itself'.

The CS work that could conceivibly be handed over to a procederal script first of all gives the game its 'down-to-the-details' feeling of craftsmanship and care on the author's part, and secondly is the kind of thing that could be trusted to interns, new-hires, and contract workers given a day or two's training. Not to take anything away from the employees that do it, but they know as anybody that following the "My First Dungeon" CS tutorial gets you about 70% of the way there to being able to populate the world with clutter and trees. The other 30% (which is the harder part to train, to be sure) is having a good 'eye' for it, creativity, and heart - caring about what clutter each house 'should' have based on its residents.





Agreed; but I fear that a gameworld created randomly by algorithms and scripts would be cold and boring in a way that even Oblivion's sharpest critics would see as worse.

Thanks again for the polite and detailed reply mt_pelion.

I'm okay with a little randomization, e.g., plants, rocks, wilderness animals.

It seems I was a little misguided in thinking about what took up the most data. Thinking straight is a hard thing for me to do lately. xP

Randomization would optimize the amount of time and space available to use the content such as models and textures, but to create the whole of Tamriel, it would require more models and textures, which would take up much more data. However, I still think that the idea is feasible, considering how poorly optimized Oblivion's use of meshes and textures was.

However, with only the content as-is, said randomization would have allowed for Cyrodiil itself to be made much, much larger.

The primary problem with randomization and TES is that TES is designed to be played in a first person view. In order to successfully pull off a first person view the environment must be very detailed and smooth which adds an additional layer of difficulty since every object (not including furniture and storage objects) is moveable and therefore subject to hand-placement as well as physics. This means that even with a randomly generated landscape or interior you would still need to then go in and spend almost as much time reviewing it as you would have placing it. In third person games (such as Fable) you can easily simulate complexity without actually being complex; that is simply not possible in TES.

I think a better method for building interiors would be to build a few "sets" (i.e. a pre-build table with everything already set up on it so that the entire table with furnishings could be placed meaning that the forks, bowls, and cups only need to be placed a single time when creating the set). Having around 4 sets for each income class would save placement time and still be varied enough to appear very crafted. The same could be done for bookshelves, end tables and the like and would still allow Bethesda to hand place some (or even make small changes to each set after it is placed) without becoming a vast expenditure of time.

As far as exteriors go, the landscape was essentially randomized for the initial generation. They put together an algorithim which simulated natural land formation, input a few parameters, and got the basic map along with rocks, trees, and flowers. Then they went over it and did edits for buildings and other items.