Would it be at all possible to... (Random Generation)

[Cipherthe3vil]

Would it be at all possible to have a game like Skyrim, but have it all randomly generated like in Minecraft? Minecraft is awesome in this regard. Its always different. The world doesn't even exist until after you discover it and is made on the spot.

 

A Skyrim that goes through and generates its own new, unique content so no two games are alike.

 

That would be epic. I think thats one of Minecrafts greatest appeals.

[gasti89]

It's called Daggerfall ;)

 

I think that an engine like the skyrim one couldn't handle such a thing. And that's the reason for the Minecraft graphics i think.

[Cipherthe3vil]

It's called Daggerfall ;)

 

I think that an engine like the skyrim one couldn't handle such a thing. And that's the reason for the Minecraft graphics i think.

 

Well, there might be work arounds. It could start loading from much farther away in very rough forms that only truly develop within a reasonable radius? (Notice the question mark, I wonder if something like that could work.)

[Moraelin]

Well, it's at least theoretically possible to generate terrain by program. There are several algorithms for just that. And yes, an engine like Skyrim could render it, since, at the end of the day, it's still just a mesh of triangles.

 

The first problem is that it's not guaranteed it won't suck. Even though most games use SOME degree of just generating terrain by program, rather than manually placing a million triangles, AFAIK most also use SOME degree of then retouching it by hand and placing stuff by hand in it. So you could have a generated Morrowind map, but then at the very least choose the least WTH one out of a few tries, and place the cities and forts manually on it.

 

Making a program so it can just generate a random map that both includes cities on a mountain like Solitude, and also flattens the terrain where it matters and places the paths and whatnot, so it still looks good, and the player can still get everywhere he's sent, is a bit harder. I mean, as a trivial to understand problem, imagine you have an algorithm that can generate impassable mountain zones. Now you can just flatten the ground where you place a city, or check the immediate area when you place a cave, but what if that place is surrounded at a distance by such impassable mountains? You could make everything be just rolling plains and hills, so there are no impassable zones, but you then got something a bit less impressive than Skyrim. Another trivial problem is making use of terrain. There are several bandit forts and such, or even for example Solitude or Markarth that have a wall only on one side, because the designer knows that you can't get in from any other side. If you want to make it automatically generated, it's not trivial to figure out where to put such a fort. It's not impossible either, but basically on the whole, why bother?

 

The second, and actually most important problem is that while the engine may be able to render it, it doesn't mean it actually offers support for some mod to just write a script to do that. And probably you wouldn't want something like that in a script anyway, because it uses more CPU than just compiled x86 code.

[BlahDog]

While this game doesn't have any village or dungeon generation, Starforge can generate not-so-blocky terrain. Of course, this type of engine can most likely only create landscapes, not generate meshes around it so you can have mountains but they will look more like large hills with a rock texture on it.

 

This is all theoretically possible if Beth made a totally new engine but as a mod, it's near impossible.