I had a dream

[Piano Monkey]

Hello Everybody.

New to this forum, really like this game, really good looking RTS.

So a month or so ago I had a dream, I was in a game, it was a first person role playing game much like the gothic and elder scrolls series, but it was a randomly generated world (diablo/minecraft), it had an older art style as well, I guess like as if the squares in minecraft had been shrunk a lot, the terain or at least some parts of it were destroyable too I remember destroy a pillar in a dungeon/cave will fighting some sort of enemy. There was also a viking village and something about some lost book that was needed to summon a really powerfull weapon.

But I was wondering how easy would it be to make such a game? would it be better to use a engine like unity? or just make one specifically for the game. I was thinking, not that I have any experiance with game engines or anything, that using voxels like minecraft but having smaller squares could make destruction of the enviroment a lot easier than trying to make destruction similar to battlefield, plus it would be alot more precise and not prescripted destrction that all ways breaks down the same time.

So any thoughts on this idea?

[sanderd17]

Possible? Yes. Will it take very long to achieve? Yes.

Our renderer isn't really made for FPS. We have lots of moving objects (units and animals), while a FPS mainly has a very detailed static mesh.

[Piano Monkey]

even one that was going for an old school vibe? and using tiny squares to make up everything? what about unity?

[Piano Monkey]

http://forum.movingblocks.net/
would there be a way to modify that game into a lot more RPG centric game with much smaller blocks?

Edited April 21, 2014 by Piano Monkey

[sanderd17]

Rpg's would probably work fine. Speed isn't really a problem there, so you could use any engine.

[Piano Monkey]

how do you think computers would go handling so many squares?. would it be possible to have squares ten times smaller than the ones in minecraft? 5 times? 100 times?

[sanderd17]

You'd have to do it cleverly. Not store a list of cubes with their information (position, texture ...), but have a formula of some kind, with a list of exceptions.

Memory is a limiting factor if you do it naively. Say you need very little information per square. F.e. a reference to a texture (4 bytes), a position (3x4 bytes)and some other info s.a. a weight and other characteristics (estimate 10 bytes). You'd arrive at 26 bytes per cube (and that's a serious underistimation, as you'd normally need more info per cube).

If you then have a 100x100x100 world, that would mean 26 000 000 B = 26MB of memory. While 100³ would either mean your cubes are very big, or your world is very small (100m distance for a man is very small, while a cubic meter cube is a bit big to move around). A bigger world like 1000x1000x1000 would mean you need 26 GB of memory. While most computers that are sold now only have 8 GB of memory. So you'd have to start working with the hard disk (which is painfully slow), or find some other way to store them (f.e. only keep the visible tiles in memory, keep the rest "calculatable" but not stored anywhere).