Even hand-crafted doesn't always manage seamless links between areas (although failure to do so is probably due to human error). I don't have confidence in the ability of computer programs to produce seamless transition areas. Its one thing to use computer programs to generate terrain then touch them up by hand. That could produce decent results but to rely on a computer program alone (which random terrain generation each time a game is started would require) seems a recipe for obvious anomalies in game.

I've stated it before, and I guess I should probably say it again. Randomly generated land makes the game next-to impossible for modding and placing things where you want them to be, if they'll be different in everyone's game.

It also nullifies the use of Bethesda putting a map in their game case if everything's different all the time.

In small games like Animal Crossing, it worked just fine. In really big games like TES, it wouldn't work out so well.

I'm not trying to offend or fight with anybody, but I'm just speaking my mentality on this.

Randomly generated monster spawners would put wolves on the inside of somebody's external house mesh, or a huge monster right where you happened to place a city. It would kill off plenty of NPCs, opportunities, and chances for creativity if you never knew what was going to happen when you made a mod.

It's neither. In case of Morrowind and Oblivion, it's because the data structure tries to save a few bytes (... so you can fit roughly ten minutes worth of dialogue more onto the DVD) and has thus very specific limits in respect to what height differences are possible in which direction. If you break those constraints, your landscape will have gaps. Read the documentation for TESAnnwyn if you want to know all the gory details.



I don't need to have confidence in stuff I've seen done correctly already.

Suggested reading:

Frank Losasso, Hugues Hoppe, "Geometry Clipmaps: Terrain Rendering Using Nested Regular Grids"
S. Stachniak, Wolfgang St?rzlinger, "An Algorithm for Automated Fractal Terrain Deformation"

Actually it DOES work with mods and there can still be a map, not absolutely everything has to be randomly generated you know.
First off towns, roads and certain landmarks can be put into the landscape permanently without chaining position and layout and borders of randomly generated areas can be redefined. So a previously fully random area can be defined as set.
Also within a randomly generated are you can have a set one like i mentioned before having a large ruin inside a randomly generated forest.

Lastly the map would simply show all landmarks that have a solid position like large towns and simply mark random areas with their general name.

Ah, I get it... the only thing I can think of is... what if I place a house in a randomly generated area? Like, I want a house in the forest but in somebody else's game there'd be a huge tree jutting out of it. And they can't move it because it's randomly generated so it doesn't show up in the CS?

Good point,randomly generated areas would absolutely cripple the ability to mod.

That's wrong. Modded parts of the landscape won't be touched by the random generation parts. Thus, when you put a house into the landscape, you basically add the following constraints to the generator:

1. The hourse is always there, always surrounded by as much manually generated landscape as you wish, the border regions seamlessly blending into the randomly generated part.
2. The spawns around the house are only those you manually put in there. Those can use the randomiser, but don't have to.

You can also potentially add following constraints to the game if you like to, and have the random terrain generator modify its landscape to always have them be true:

1. Specific line-of-sight lines are either always free of obstructions (say, if you always want your house to have a clear view of a specific city) or are always blocked (if you want your house not visible from a specific point or area.
2. The boundary of your manually modelled terrain patch has a "road link" with specified parameters in regard to maximum slope, width, possibility of bridges and texturing to either the nearest other road, a specified crossroad point on another road, or to any other road, randomly chosen (but weighted so that the nearest point is most often picked).
3. A boundary point is either a ridge or a valley. In case of a valley, it can be filled with water to a specified level and with a specified flow direction.



Small-scale maps in Bethesda games are already generated from the landscape data, not the other way around. Large-scale maps can be still used, by constraining the random generator (a ridge here, a river there, some city here, a bunch of villages over there, road network linking them going through specific points and so on).

But my point is that if somebody's got 5 caves surrounding the house from where the person never chose to have it "unchangable" that are constantly spitting out high-level monsters, it'd be very difficult to make it to your house. I mean, picture plowing a field and a minotaur runs up and breaks through the fence killing your livestock and eventually you because you're level 2. When all you wanted was a "Simple Life" mod.

I'm not saying that I hate the idea, or that I'm even against it. I would love randomly generated things so each time you make a new character you get to see new and brilliant things. I just think there could be a few problems with it.

Namely that unpredictability of terrain, monsters, or buildings makes the "what can go wrong" ratio really high.

How do you know that? Have you modded randomly generated games before?

Simple, you can place a non-random area within a random area, that non-random area would then always overwrite randomly generated landscapes. With the example of the large tree that tree would simply be removed if it fell on the same spot as your set area.

No, I wrote random generation software before (a few test cases, and not for games but for a friend's landscape rendering stuff), and - just checked - have 44 reference papers on that subject on my hard drive, most of them from SIGGRAPH. It's basically how the state-of-the-art for random landscape generation "on demand" looks like.

I think randomly generated quests are much more feasible than randomly generated landscapes.

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood how it worked. I still disagree with the idea, though. I want the place to look the same with the same ruins and same cities everytime I start the game. It doesn't make sense that the ruins and dungeons change place every time I start a new game. That would make it more like a game, and less like a immersive place that I could roleplay in.

I agree with you. I want it all to be the same every time. If it was different, how would we recommend exploring cool places to each other? Randomly generated games also lack depth and are quite generic. I want to go into a dungeon and find some surprises, a story, and hand-placed items, not just a plain, randomly-generated place.

The main problem with random quests is ... there is several orders of magnitude less research done on it than for landscapes. Yes, it can be done. Programmatically, a quest is a series of linked events with a defined start point (or start points) and a defined ending condition (or several of them), just as a dungeon is a series of linked rooms with a defined entrance (or entranced) and a defined goal (or several of them). But to do it well is a whole another matter. I'd be glad for references to research papers on this subject, frankly.

Oblivions Cyrodill svcked and it wasnt even random generated. Morrowind was amazing. The player wanted to find every ruin, stronghold even the small villages had a certain atmosphere. Then whe get oblivion, 200 dungeons with 6 copy/paste designs.

If they make handplaced landscape and ruins, then atleast make it atmospheric like Morrowinds.

Actually ... it was, to a big part. Ever tried the heightmap editor for Oblivion? Most of the landscape is made with its randomising features, and then touched up a bit.

There are three distinct time periods when a landscape can be generated randomly (though a game can use more than one of those at the same time):

1. At design time (what Oblivion had). Every game ships with a pre-generated landscape, but most of it is the result of a fine-tuned random generator.

2. At game start time. Every new character can have their own version of the world (though you can share the worlds if you like), the game ships with only the basic constraints to the generation process (where are specific cities/ruins/roads/landmarks and so on located; also, what races and creatures are there). Dwarf Fortress uses this version.

3. At area load time. That's basically what Diablo II uses. Everytime you visit an area, it's generated anew.

A well-designed random generator is also deterministic. This means that every time you start the generator with the same input (same constraints, same "seed" starting value), it generates exactly the same landscape. For such a generator and a game which uses Type 1 or Type 2 random generation, all you need to ship with the game (... or send to your friends, "look at this cool place!" type of deal) is a few kilobytes worth of data for the generator, not a few hundredths of megabytes worth of generated landscape.

Many of the ruins in OB were generated randomly, then "cleaned up" by hand. That took a lot less time to develop than hand-building every dungeon from scratch. Most of them still made no sense in terms of layout functionality, though, because of their random origin. Things like trees in a forest, or basic housing in a slum area, could probably be placed by a properly set-up randomizer to save development time, and then hand-tweaked to get rid of the most blatantly absurd combinations or arrangements. Generating a fresh set of data randomly for each game would allow any glaring "anomalies" to occur in your game, with no checks on it.

The three ways of placing random content would be:
(1) Pre-generate specific content during game development, then hand-tweak it. The shipped version would be "permanent", with all of the corrections. If done properly, it would be difficult to distinguish between the randomly generated content and any entirely hand-placed equivalents. Oblivion used this for dungeon development, and presumably for some other content as well.

(2) Generate the random content at game startup, and tweak the generator until there are no unacceptable anomalies created. Shipping this with the game, you would see a different version of the world every game. So far, it's not practical, if even possible, to do this and have it produce an "acceptable" level of quality. A number of games have used this for more "basic" content, but don't have anywhere near the level of detail that the TES series uses.

(3) Generate specific items or other data each time the cell is loaded. This is done now in the TES games with varying amounts of random loot and some creatures or NPCs. Morrowind did this with most loot and stray wildlife, but only for a limited number of specific types of nameless NPCs (mainly guards); other loot and most NPCs (including bandits) were hand-placed. Oblivion used almost entirely randomized loot, creatures, hostile NPCs, and guards; only the "passive" named NPCs were hand-placed.

not mentioning that it makes no sense at all to have a dangerous Vilverin ruin right by the side of the supposedly hugely populated Imperial City.

That would remove one of the most important things about this game, or an RPG in general. A consistent world. I'd much rather see a world that was influenced by the players actual actions and choices than some random generator.

How so? If anything, a random generator can improve consistently. It can consistently ensure water flows downhill (unless overridden in a specific instance by a human), it can consistently put a lavatory into every castle (unless overridden ...), it can consistently put an acre of farmland around a village for each of the its inhabitant (unless overridden ...), it can consistently make sure border forts have enough convoys with provisions reaching them (unless overridden ...) and so on.

Humans svck at these kind of consistent details. We need checklists, and we still screw up after the tenth or twentieth repetitive task.



You can have both.

I guess these radicals against random content would like the next game to be 1 sq km with 10 NPCs in total, if EVERYTHING in the game, including individual leaves on the trees and wrinkles in each NPC were all carefully handcrafted.

Big does not equal better (and sometimes not even good).

I rather a small but hand-placed world.

like i said before, you will get what you want when TES 13 comes out, which will be played out just a single room with a table in the middle and one NPC (of course it will all be totally virtual reality with photorealistic textures and animations on everything and you can also smell stuff with the new Smellomatic system software ™.)

also it will play itself like so you dont have to do anything but imagine how you LARP your char and look at that ?ber GPS compass that points out all the details in the game and also comments on them with Schwarzenegger's voice.

mein gott, i can almost feel the gigantic cash flow entering Bethesda's Bahama/Switzerland bank accounts.

more nonsense
the debate isn't over will future games contain randomly generated elements but how much and what will be randomly generated
whether the game contains a compass or not has nothing to do with random generation