The Mana World Forums

Ultima 7+ like maps would not be feasible, unless you wanted everything on 1 height (houses, castles etc. would all take up a fair bit of space since they only have one level, and coule be possibly annoying to navigate). Ultima 7+ was pseudo-3d, allowing mutiple housed levels and different objects with different heights on the same map. So i would not think "UO" style map changing would work. Also, UO's map format was quite complex.

Blah typoed earlier.. What I really meant was that why are we constantly compared to UO these days..

Talking about generic dungeon generator.

This should be done in server mantainance. Every time that server is reloaded, a new map is generated. But we have a problem:

All players should have to download the new map.. This is NOT good

About comparision with another MMORPG this should be learn with experiences and older games.

That's the beauty of the Random Dungeon generator. The point isn't to create random dungeons (misleading name, eh?) but to create the same dungeon every time based on a single number. The client uses that random number to map out a dungeon without help from the server. In effect, the dungeon generator is designed to fix the problem that imorgado pointed out. All we have to do to switch up the dungeons is to change one number on the server.

The client is not allowed to create anything. To have a secure server and consistency of data server should be always aware of every map.

Elven Programmer wrote:The client is not allowed to create anything. To have a secure server and consistency of data server should be always aware of every map.

The point about random maps was mainly that both the client and the server create the same map based on a single number. This number is called the seed.

That sounds like a new, innovative approach into MMORPG dungeon creation.. Instead of a map, you'd just have a number on both ends and the map itself wouldn't stress the server if there is nobody on it. Now we just need people to randomly choose seed numbers to use..

Rotonen wrote:Now we just need people to randomly choose seed numbers to use..

If only it required as little involvement as that... One problem I see is making sure that server and client keep the same dungeon maps. If someone mods the client, they may not be able to see the dungeon correctly.

Hmm I don't see how that's very innovative, map seeds are being used basically since random maps exist. I mean Age of Empires isn't sending the whole map over to all players either, I'm sure. Because it can just send the seed.

Random maps may not exist in many MMORPG, I'm not sure. In our case, they're pretty much a necessity I think.

Random maps for each player isn't a good idea. Should be nice if the map should be generate in each server restart. And all players connected share the same map, allowing interation and a new dungeon to explore. And NO! to dungeons mini maps.

imorgado wrote:Random maps for each player isn't a good idea. Should be nice if the map should be generate in each server restart. And all players connected share the same map, allowing interation and a new dungeon to explore. And NO! to dungeons mini maps.

Random maps for each player is also not what is being suggested. That last thing is the whole idea, but a new map would certainly not need a server restart. You can reset the map when nobody is there, for example.

If you don't want dungeon minimaps then I guess we will have to send the actual map incrementally instead of a number. If you send the client the seed, he'll know the whole map instantly so exploration is not that interesting.