Originally posted by AdamTM I don't get peoples obsession with seamless worlds.
I dont get people's lack of obsession with seamless worlds.
A lack of obsession being the default state, I dont understand that sentence.
it is irrelevant if you understand or not, as a matter of fact it is completely irrelevant what you think.
It will however become relevant in the off-chance that all humans start thinking and behaving the same,
or in the chance that you yourself personally as an individual start represeting a sizable statistical demographic that pays money for MMOs.
Untill that happens, you can take your semantics and play with them alone, arguying semantics is the furthest most off-topic event that can happen in this thread.
Btw i was being sarcastic, it is also irrelevant what i personally get or dont get, unfortunately we the people are still different from one another, and do not share the same feelings, opinions, misconceptions, and can have very different state of minds, and train of thoughts that radically alter our perception of reality.
All of that is also greatly influenced by the ammount of Cognitive Dissonance that is at play at each of our individual brains at any point in time.
Seamlessness or not (loading screens or not), comes from what Quizzical wrote, but all games will probably use zones because of the limited amount of players a single server can handle at any given time.
Seamless world games also use multple physical servers per one game servers. That actually is not an main obstacle.
It is if one zone gets too crowded.
You just design game in a way that it almost never happen.
The question isn't whether a game has seams internally. Of course a game world will have a bunch of seams internally. The question is whether those seams are clearly visible to players. A "seamless" world is one in which the seams aren't glaringly obvious, such as a "please wait 10 seconds for the next zone to load" loading screen, or even a "we're going to freeze the game for a while to load the next zone" like Vanguard.
Look here. I'm at a seam between two zones. Can you see it?
If you think it's the darker green on one side and the lighter green on the other, you're wrong. Here, I'll zoom in.
Now can you see the seam? You'll have to click on the picture to see a higher resolution. If you can't see the seam unless you zoom in far enough for individual pixels of the texture to be clearly visible, then that's pretty much seamless.
If you question why the weird angle, it's because I want to get rid of the other kind of seam, too. I say that a wall that implicitly says, "You have reached the end of the world. Now turn around." is a huge seam. Make the world round (or in my case, a truncated icosahedron) and you can get rid of that.
Originally posted by ShakyMo Also you need more meshes with more player and mob variety
Modern graphics actually helps a lot with that. You can have relatively few triangles that are stored on the hard drive and uploaded to the video card, and then tessellate them into a lot more. You can end up getting more triangles and vertices drawn on the screen in spite of having fewer loaded from the hard drive and stored in a buffer on the video card.
If you really want to get aggressive about tessellation, it's even possible to upload all of your vertex data (but not textures) for the entire game when you load the game and then tessellate in a huge variety of different ways to get a lot of different looks. All of the objects in the game probably don't add up to very many homeomorphism classes, and you only need one vertex model for each. Of course, whether it's actually a good idea to do that is a different question. But you can if you really want to.
Originally posted by AdamTM I don't get peoples obsession with seamless worlds.
I dont get people's lack of obsession with seamless worlds.
A lack of obsession being the default state, I dont understand that sentence.
it is irrelevant if you understand or not, as a matter of fact it is completely irrelevant what you think.
It will however become relevant in the off-chance that all humans start thinking and behaving the same,
or in the chance that you yourself personally as an individual start represeting a sizable statistical demographic that pays money for MMOs.
Untill that happens, you can take your semantics and play with them alone, arguying semantics is the furthest most off-topic event that can happen in this thread.
Btw i was being sarcastic, it is also irrelevant what i personally get or dont get, unfortunately we the people are still different from one another, and do not share the same feelings, opinions, misconceptions, and can have very different state of minds, and train of thoughts that radically alter our perception of reality.
All of that is also greatly influenced by the ammount of Cognitive Dissonance that is at play at each of our individual brains at any point in time.
Yeah, see, i was being sarcastic too.
Sarcasm is great, just not on the internet.
So do two sarcastic posts that miss the mark make a dumb exchange or what? I say yes.
First issue. People need to stop saying instance when they mean zone.
Second issue, it's purely design.
MMORPGs in the 90s, and MMOs from yesterday have both been made with seamless worlds. It just takes different design. If it was a lot more expensive to make seamless worlds, then indie MMORPGs wouldn't choose seamless over zoned, ever.
There have been dozens of MMOs in the past and present that are not only seamless, but have no instances either. It's all about how you design the game. A game like WoW would break in half if there weren't instances. Meanwhile, a game made with much worse tech, dark age of Camelot, NEVER had issues with crowding, camping, or anything like that, and there wasn't a single instance in that game.
It all comes down to whether or not your designers are good enough to balance a game world, or if they want to take the lazy way out and instance everything.
We could say that FF XIV had big seamless zones. And yet Square said that if they want to make the zones more diverse with bigger amount of dextures etc., they will have to add loading screens. And that is what they did in 2.0.
EQNext is evidently going to sport a seamless world with ultra-modern graphics and even advanced tech we have never seen before.
Honestly (and I am not SOE fan) this game is starting to sound like the next big thing seeing how SOE is talking a lot about bringing back old school style mmorpg and sandbox elements. I really hope to hear more about EQNext and what else they have planned.
EQNext is evidently going to sport a seamless world with ultra-modern graphics and even advanced tech we have never seen before.
Honestly (and I am not SOE fan) this game is starting to sound like the next big thing seeing how SOE is talking a lot about bringing back old school style mmorpg and sandbox elements. I really hope to hear more about EQNext and what else they have planned.
It will be made with the same engine as Planetside 2 , which has a massive seamless world.
SoE seems to have woken up before any of the other devs and realized that WoW clones do not work and making small scale solo instanced games are never what MMOs were about and never where their strength was.
EQNext is evidently going to sport a seamless world with ultra-modern graphics and even advanced tech we have never seen before.
Honestly (and I am not SOE fan) this game is starting to sound like the next big thing seeing how SOE is talking a lot about bringing back old school style mmorpg and sandbox elements. I really hope to hear more about EQNext and what else they have planned.
There's always the chance it'll end up being a buggy mess, but yeah, I really hope it turns out good.
EQNext is evidently going to sport a seamless world with ultra-modern graphics and even advanced tech we have never seen before.
Honestly (and I am not SOE fan) this game is starting to sound like the next big thing seeing how SOE is talking a lot about bringing back old school style mmorpg and sandbox elements. I really hope to hear more about EQNext and what else they have planned.
There's always the chance it'll end up being a buggy mess, but yeah, I really hope it turns out good.
In my general experience, the buggy messes are far more fun to play than the polished WoW clones (LotRO). Vanguard sucked me in, LotRO made me tear my hair out. To think they made such a poor MMO with the biggest IP in the world..
Consoles have killed seamless worlds, along with most advances in PC gaming.
Most developers have to design their games with the xBox and PS3 as the target hardware, with PC's just getting ported over with higher resolutions.
MMO's are just a casualty of this, since they still use the basic tech behind other game genres, with the added client/server middleware added in. Look at Skyrim as an example. It's pretty much the best "seamless world" RPG out right now, but it's kind of on the small side of things, especially compared to older MMO's.
The tech just doesn't exist for huge seamless worlds, and no MMO studios have the budget to create the tech when making an MMO is so expsive anyway.
The problem is hard drives. Or more to the point, loading times off of hard drives. If you want to load too much stuff off of a hard drive too often, then a seamless world is impossible and you have to make the game heavily zoned. Reduce the amount of stuff you have to load off of a hard drive and a seamless world is easy to implement.
One way to do this is by requiring everyone to have an SSD in order to play the game. While SSDs are seeing wider adoption, that would still greatly restrict your potential playerbase.
The other way is to reduce what players have to load, period. What are games loading off of hard drives so much? Mostly it's textures as used in 3D graphics. Don't give a game so many textures or such high resolution textures in a given area, and making the world seamless would be easy. Alternatively, if the textures are procedurally generated rather than loaded off of a hard drive, then you can skip the loading times.
It's not modern graphics in general that killed the seamless world. A wide variety of high-resolution textures stored on the hard drive is the specific culprit. Everything else in modern graphics is perfectly compatible with a seamless world.
I would say it is the combination of slow harddrives and not enough memory that is the problem but otherwise I agree with you.
On the plus side will faster harddrives than the SSD take over in the not too distant future, and hopefully will that eventually solve the problem but it will take years until enough people have the technology and until a MMO that uses it will get released.
Originally posted by rounner No, the problems with large world are things like the pve crowd spread too thin to group, the need for fast travel which negates the adventure aspect, lack of focus points for pvp and too much work. As for seamless theres issues like boss camping and population control for pvp to reduce lag (not particularily due to graphics).
That has absolutely nothing to do with whether a world can be seamless or needs zones.
I answered the original posters question, which was mostly focussed on size. I also dispute your claims about hard drive loading as any and all large terrain engines will use some form of caching. It is ridiculous to assume that a terrain engine would load the entire high lod terrain at once. I recommend you learn a bit more about terrain engines before trying to beat down every other poster in a thread.
Obviously if it could be done back then it can be done now. Graphics are higher but computer power is astronomically higher as well. I want my MMO world to actually feel like one, so bring on the seamless games.
Originally posted by Axxar Obviously if it could be done back then it can be done now. Graphics are higher but computer power is astronomically higher as well. I want my MMO world to actually feel like one, so bring on the seamless games.
Processing power actually hasn't really increased that much in the last 6 to 8 years. In fact, it's decreased a bit. Cores have increased, meaning programs can run more things at the same time more efficiently, but raw power (clock rate) has gone down. Memory is dirt cheap though, but still bottlenecked with the slow rate of adoption for 64-bit OS's.
Seamlessness or not (loading screens or not), comes from what Quizzical wrote, but all games will probably use zones because of the limited amount of players a single server can handle at any given time.
Seamless world games also use multple physical servers per one game servers. That actually is not an main obstacle.
It is if one zone gets too crowded.
You just design game in a way that it almost never happen.
The question isn't whether a game has seams internally. Of course a game world will have a bunch of seams internally. The question is whether those seams are clearly visible to players. A "seamless" world is one in which the seams aren't glaringly obvious, such as a "please wait 10 seconds for the next zone to load" loading screen, or even a "we're going to freeze the game for a while to load the next zone" like Vanguard.
Look here. I'm at a seam between two zones. Can you see it?
If you think it's the darker green on one side and the lighter green on the other, you're wrong. Here, I'll zoom in.
Now can you see the seam? You'll have to click on the picture to see a higher resolution. If you can't see the seam unless you zoom in far enough for individual pixels of the texture to be clearly visible, then that's pretty much seamless.
If you question why the weird angle, it's because I want to get rid of the other kind of seam, too. I say that a wall that implicitly says, "You have reached the end of the world. Now turn around." is a huge seam. Make the world round (or in my case, a truncated icosahedron) and you can get rid of that.
Thanks Quizzical. I know that.
For seamlessness looking at ArcheAge videos can show how they deal with that. ArcheAge is preety seamless, not absolutely totally 100%, since few of dungeons will be instanced(but there will be open dungeons as well) and sieges will be instanced as well.
Rest afaik is preety much seamless, you can cross whole world on foot, sail between continents and enter buildings and don't see any loading screen.
Additionaly I don't know how to call it, but in most zoned games, zones are just like bits of terrain that if you would merge would not create complete continent or world. Of course that's one of the point of zones. Still not sure how to describe it better in english. (and I haven't got my morning coffee yet ;p)
Anyway back to ArcheAge - one of ways how they deal with technicalities. World in ArcheAge is not as cluttered as in many zoned games, and to some people that are used to heavily zoned games it might seem 'empty' at times.
This is I think partially because of less strain on harddrive and generally hardware and because of how large AA world is. Think it is at least WoW Vanilla large or bigger.
Another "solution" is that ground textures and amount of details there is preety small compared to some other newest mmorpg's.Another is that mountain textures and some high building textures especially in high places can be really low-res.
Of couse AA is a 32-bit aplication and is meant to run on PC with HDD's. So that's why there are above things and more things to help achieve seamlessness - I just don't see it.
In future when SSD's (or other non-NAND non-HDD fast storage) are common and 32-bit is preety much scrapped (it is coming soon - in example EA Frostbite 2.0 "big" games like next Balltefiled released in end of 2013 or later will be 64-bit only) there might be easier to make seamless mmo's / mmorpg's.
I don't think that technical difficulities are what keep most designers from creating seamless mmo's. I think it is design choice, because with seamless worlds many design challanges come. What immedietaly come to mind - if in example mmorpg is seamless and use seamless open world for in example housing - then merging servers in necessary can be really problematic for obvious reasons. With seamless worlds often come big design problems.
That does not change a fact - that I totally prefer seamless mmorpg's. Zoned one kinda kill huge part of "world" feeling. Of course most mmorpg's are not designed anymore to be 'worlds' and big part of playerbase don't want 'worlds' - but that's whole another matter ;p
Anyway I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to make a diffrence between instanced dungeon or instanced arena which is used usually by more or less 1-40 players and between a zone that has a limit of let's say 100-300 players before game won't let more players or spawn anothe zone 'copy' (aka next instance of this zone).
Technically both of those things are instances and there is not much diffrence between them - there are similar reasons and simialr philosophy between creating them.
Modern graphics aren't an issue, it is just infinitely easier to program zones than a seamless world, especially if you're using an off the shelf engine.
So it simply comes down to cost and targets. How much time (money) you want to spend on it and what minimum system requirement you're aiming for.
Originally posted by Axxar Obviously if it could be done back then it can be done now. Graphics are higher but computer power is astronomically higher as well. I want my MMO world to actually feel like one, so bring on the seamless games.
Processing power actually hasn't really increased that much in the last 6 to 8 years. In fact, it's decreased a bit. Cores have increased, meaning programs can run more things at the same time more efficiently, but raw power (clock rate) has gone down. Memory is dirt cheap though, but still bottlenecked with the slow rate of adoption for 64-bit OS's.
So? Computers are still vastly more powerful. Really, really bad excuse.
Originally posted by Axxar Obviously if it could be done back then it can be done now. Graphics are higher but computer power is astronomically higher as well. I want my MMO world to actually feel like one, so bring on the seamless games.
Processing power actually hasn't really increased that much in the last 6 to 8 years. In fact, it's decreased a bit. Cores have increased, meaning programs can run more things at the same time more efficiently, but raw power (clock rate) has gone down. Memory is dirt cheap though, but still bottlenecked with the slow rate of adoption for 64-bit OS's.
So? Computers are still vastly more powerful. Really, really bad excuse.
they really aren't that much more powerful. I mean, the graphics cards are, for sure, but that's it. Not saying they are worse, just that the power of the computer is not the limiting factor here. It's the tech and software required to make a seamless world with modern graphics and features like people are asking for. It's not as simple as just building something "bigger" because the hardware is a little better.
There have been dozens of MMOs in the past and present that are not only seamless, but have no instances either. It's all about how you design the game. A game like WoW would break in half if there weren't instances. Meanwhile, a game made with much worse tech, dark age of Camelot, NEVER had issues with crowding, camping, or anything like that, and there wasn't a single instance in that game.
Instances have some major gameplay advantages. For starters, they let players see the world as it is "supposed" to be, rather than heading out to kill a mob only to find that someone else already did. There are drawbacks, too, but even with no technical impediments, there are good reasons why a game might want to use instances in various ways.
You cite DAoC, but that game had instances, too. A "server" (as it appears to players, not necessarily a physical server on the back end) is an instance.
Zones, and more to the point, loading screens, are a very different matter. The only reason why any game would ever have loading screens at all is technical impediments that make it so that they have to stop to load things, or at least have serious gameplay problems if they don't. Surely no game designers think, hey, this loading screen is really cool, so we bet players would like to sit there and stare at it for an extra five seconds every time. You make the loading screen as short as you can.
The tech just doesn't exist for huge seamless worlds, and no MMO studios have the budget to create the tech when making an MMO is so expsive anyway.
Seamless or zoned has nothing to do with the size of the game world unless it's small enough that you can load the whole thing all at once. I'm not aware of any MMORPGs that fit that description.
The problem is hard drives. Or more to the point, loading times off of hard drives. If you want to load too much stuff off of a hard drive too often, then a seamless world is impossible and you have to make the game heavily zoned. Reduce the amount of stuff you have to load off of a hard drive and a seamless world is easy to implement.
One way to do this is by requiring everyone to have an SSD in order to play the game. While SSDs are seeing wider adoption, that would still greatly restrict your potential playerbase.
The other way is to reduce what players have to load, period. What are games loading off of hard drives so much? Mostly it's textures as used in 3D graphics. Don't give a game so many textures or such high resolution textures in a given area, and making the world seamless would be easy. Alternatively, if the textures are procedurally generated rather than loaded off of a hard drive, then you can skip the loading times.
It's not modern graphics in general that killed the seamless world. A wide variety of high-resolution textures stored on the hard drive is the specific culprit. Everything else in modern graphics is perfectly compatible with a seamless world.
I would say it is the combination of slow harddrives and not enough memory that is the problem but otherwise I agree with you.
On the plus side will faster harddrives than the SSD take over in the not too distant future, and hopefully will that eventually solve the problem but it will take years until enough people have the technology and until a MMO that uses it will get released.
If your "hard drive" is fast enough (i.e., is a good SSD), then you don't have to use system memory so much to dodge hard drive accesses. If you could say, oh hey, I need this texture loaded from the hard drive and decompressed, and reliably have it done within a small fraction of a second--even when you need a bunch of other textures at the same time--there would be no need to cache such stuff in system memory.
Both system memory and video memory are meaningful constraints on how much different stuff you can have going on at once. But the only way that making a game zoned helps with that is if there's a bunch of stuff that you need to have loaded if you're barely on one side of the zone boundary and a bunch of totally different stuff if you're barely on the other side, and then the loading screen makes it so that you never have to have both sets of data loaded at once.
Originally posted by Axxar Obviously if it could be done back then it can be done now. Graphics are higher but computer power is astronomically higher as well. I want my MMO world to actually feel like one, so bring on the seamless games.
Processing power actually hasn't really increased that much in the last 6 to 8 years. In fact, it's decreased a bit. Cores have increased, meaning programs can run more things at the same time more efficiently, but raw power (clock rate) has gone down. Memory is dirt cheap though, but still bottlenecked with the slow rate of adoption for 64-bit OS's.
Processing power has increased greatly. Going from a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 to a 3.4 GHz Core i5-3570K didn't mean you got four slower cores instead of one faster core. The latter processor might well triple the performance of the former even in purely single-threaded programs. Per-core performance is clock speed times how much the core can do per clock cycle, and processors have gotten a lot better at the latter in recent years. And then you get four cores on top of that.
What hasn't scaled is hard drive speed, and that's the relevant bottleneck. When I bought a computer in 1998, it had a 7200 RPM hard drive. Today, the relatively fast hard drives are still 7200 RPM. They've gotten dramatically faster at sequential accesses, but that's not the bottleneck. The problem is waiting for a hard drive to physically move to the right spot before you can do anything, and that isn't that much faster than it was many years ago.
Comments
it is irrelevant if you understand or not, as a matter of fact it is completely irrelevant what you think.
It will however become relevant in the off-chance that all humans start thinking and behaving the same,
or in the chance that you yourself personally as an individual start represeting a sizable statistical demographic that pays money for MMOs.
Untill that happens, you can take your semantics and play with them alone, arguying semantics is the furthest most off-topic event that can happen in this thread.
Btw i was being sarcastic, it is also irrelevant what i personally get or dont get, unfortunately we the people are still different from one another, and do not share the same feelings, opinions, misconceptions, and can have very different state of minds, and train of thoughts that radically alter our perception of reality.
All of that is also greatly influenced by the ammount of Cognitive Dissonance that is at play at each of our individual brains at any point in time.
The question isn't whether a game has seams internally. Of course a game world will have a bunch of seams internally. The question is whether those seams are clearly visible to players. A "seamless" world is one in which the seams aren't glaringly obvious, such as a "please wait 10 seconds for the next zone to load" loading screen, or even a "we're going to freeze the game for a while to load the next zone" like Vanguard.
Look here. I'm at a seam between two zones. Can you see it?
If you think it's the darker green on one side and the lighter green on the other, you're wrong. Here, I'll zoom in.
Now can you see the seam? You'll have to click on the picture to see a higher resolution. If you can't see the seam unless you zoom in far enough for individual pixels of the texture to be clearly visible, then that's pretty much seamless.
If you question why the weird angle, it's because I want to get rid of the other kind of seam, too. I say that a wall that implicitly says, "You have reached the end of the world. Now turn around." is a huge seam. Make the world round (or in my case, a truncated icosahedron) and you can get rid of that.
Modern graphics actually helps a lot with that. You can have relatively few triangles that are stored on the hard drive and uploaded to the video card, and then tessellate them into a lot more. You can end up getting more triangles and vertices drawn on the screen in spite of having fewer loaded from the hard drive and stored in a buffer on the video card.
If you really want to get aggressive about tessellation, it's even possible to upload all of your vertex data (but not textures) for the entire game when you load the game and then tessellate in a huge variety of different ways to get a lot of different looks. All of the objects in the game probably don't add up to very many homeomorphism classes, and you only need one vertex model for each. Of course, whether it's actually a good idea to do that is a different question. But you can if you really want to.
Yeah, see, i was being sarcastic too.
Sarcasm is great, just not on the internet.
So do two sarcastic posts that miss the mark make a dumb exchange or what? I say yes.
First issue. People need to stop saying instance when they mean zone.
Second issue, it's purely design.
MMORPGs in the 90s, and MMOs from yesterday have both been made with seamless worlds. It just takes different design. If it was a lot more expensive to make seamless worlds, then indie MMORPGs wouldn't choose seamless over zoned, ever.
There have been dozens of MMOs in the past and present that are not only seamless, but have no instances either. It's all about how you design the game. A game like WoW would break in half if there weren't instances. Meanwhile, a game made with much worse tech, dark age of Camelot, NEVER had issues with crowding, camping, or anything like that, and there wasn't a single instance in that game.
It all comes down to whether or not your designers are good enough to balance a game world, or if they want to take the lazy way out and instance everything.
We are a few days from WoW fans becoming the next Scientology.
EQNext is evidently going to sport a seamless world with ultra-modern graphics and even advanced tech we have never seen before.
Honestly (and I am not SOE fan) this game is starting to sound like the next big thing seeing how SOE is talking a lot about bringing back old school style mmorpg and sandbox elements. I really hope to hear more about EQNext and what else they have planned.
You stay sassy!
It will be made with the same engine as Planetside 2 , which has a massive seamless world.
SoE seems to have woken up before any of the other devs and realized that WoW clones do not work and making small scale solo instanced games are never what MMOs were about and never where their strength was.
There's always the chance it'll end up being a buggy mess, but yeah, I really hope it turns out good.
In my general experience, the buggy messes are far more fun to play than the polished WoW clones (LotRO). Vanguard sucked me in, LotRO made me tear my hair out. To think they made such a poor MMO with the biggest IP in the world..
Consoles have killed seamless worlds, along with most advances in PC gaming.
Most developers have to design their games with the xBox and PS3 as the target hardware, with PC's just getting ported over with higher resolutions.
MMO's are just a casualty of this, since they still use the basic tech behind other game genres, with the added client/server middleware added in. Look at Skyrim as an example. It's pretty much the best "seamless world" RPG out right now, but it's kind of on the small side of things, especially compared to older MMO's.
The tech just doesn't exist for huge seamless worlds, and no MMO studios have the budget to create the tech when making an MMO is so expsive anyway.
You make me like charity
I would say it is the combination of slow harddrives and not enough memory that is the problem but otherwise I agree with you.
On the plus side will faster harddrives than the SSD take over in the not too distant future, and hopefully will that eventually solve the problem but it will take years until enough people have the technology and until a MMO that uses it will get released.
I answered the original posters question, which was mostly focussed on size. I also dispute your claims about hard drive loading as any and all large terrain engines will use some form of caching. It is ridiculous to assume that a terrain engine would load the entire high lod terrain at once. I recommend you learn a bit more about terrain engines before trying to beat down every other poster in a thread.
Processing power actually hasn't really increased that much in the last 6 to 8 years. In fact, it's decreased a bit. Cores have increased, meaning programs can run more things at the same time more efficiently, but raw power (clock rate) has gone down. Memory is dirt cheap though, but still bottlenecked with the slow rate of adoption for 64-bit OS's.
You make me like charity
Thanks Quizzical. I know that.
For seamlessness looking at ArcheAge videos can show how they deal with that. ArcheAge is preety seamless, not absolutely totally 100%, since few of dungeons will be instanced(but there will be open dungeons as well) and sieges will be instanced as well.
Rest afaik is preety much seamless, you can cross whole world on foot, sail between continents and enter buildings and don't see any loading screen.
Additionaly I don't know how to call it, but in most zoned games, zones are just like bits of terrain that if you would merge would not create complete continent or world. Of course that's one of the point of zones. Still not sure how to describe it better in english. (and I haven't got my morning coffee yet ;p)
Anyway back to ArcheAge - one of ways how they deal with technicalities. World in ArcheAge is not as cluttered as in many zoned games, and to some people that are used to heavily zoned games it might seem 'empty' at times.
This is I think partially because of less strain on harddrive and generally hardware and because of how large AA world is. Think it is at least WoW Vanilla large or bigger.
Another "solution" is that ground textures and amount of details there is preety small compared to some other newest mmorpg's.Another is that mountain textures and some high building textures especially in high places can be really low-res.
Of couse AA is a 32-bit aplication and is meant to run on PC with HDD's. So that's why there are above things and more things to help achieve seamlessness - I just don't see it.
In future when SSD's (or other non-NAND non-HDD fast storage) are common and 32-bit is preety much scrapped (it is coming soon - in example EA Frostbite 2.0 "big" games like next Balltefiled released in end of 2013 or later will be 64-bit only) there might be easier to make seamless mmo's / mmorpg's.
I don't think that technical difficulities are what keep most designers from creating seamless mmo's. I think it is design choice, because with seamless worlds many design challanges come. What immedietaly come to mind - if in example mmorpg is seamless and use seamless open world for in example housing - then merging servers in necessary can be really problematic for obvious reasons. With seamless worlds often come big design problems.
That does not change a fact - that I totally prefer seamless mmorpg's. Zoned one kinda kill huge part of "world" feeling. Of course most mmorpg's are not designed anymore to be 'worlds' and big part of playerbase don't want 'worlds' - but that's whole another matter ;p
Actually zone is an instance.
Totally seamless world is just one big instance.
Game composed of 10 zones with loading screens are just 10 instances.
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Anyway I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to make a diffrence between instanced dungeon or instanced arena which is used usually by more or less 1-40 players and between a zone that has a limit of let's say 100-300 players before game won't let more players or spawn anothe zone 'copy' (aka next instance of this zone).
Technically both of those things are instances and there is not much diffrence between them - there are similar reasons and simialr philosophy between creating them.
Modern graphics aren't an issue, it is just infinitely easier to program zones than a seamless world, especially if you're using an off the shelf engine.
So it simply comes down to cost and targets. How much time (money) you want to spend on it and what minimum system requirement you're aiming for.
So? Computers are still vastly more powerful. Really, really bad excuse.
they really aren't that much more powerful. I mean, the graphics cards are, for sure, but that's it. Not saying they are worse, just that the power of the computer is not the limiting factor here. It's the tech and software required to make a seamless world with modern graphics and features like people are asking for. It's not as simple as just building something "bigger" because the hardware is a little better.
You make me like charity
Instances have some major gameplay advantages. For starters, they let players see the world as it is "supposed" to be, rather than heading out to kill a mob only to find that someone else already did. There are drawbacks, too, but even with no technical impediments, there are good reasons why a game might want to use instances in various ways.
You cite DAoC, but that game had instances, too. A "server" (as it appears to players, not necessarily a physical server on the back end) is an instance.
Zones, and more to the point, loading screens, are a very different matter. The only reason why any game would ever have loading screens at all is technical impediments that make it so that they have to stop to load things, or at least have serious gameplay problems if they don't. Surely no game designers think, hey, this loading screen is really cool, so we bet players would like to sit there and stare at it for an extra five seconds every time. You make the loading screen as short as you can.
Seamless or zoned has nothing to do with the size of the game world unless it's small enough that you can load the whole thing all at once. I'm not aware of any MMORPGs that fit that description.
If your "hard drive" is fast enough (i.e., is a good SSD), then you don't have to use system memory so much to dodge hard drive accesses. If you could say, oh hey, I need this texture loaded from the hard drive and decompressed, and reliably have it done within a small fraction of a second--even when you need a bunch of other textures at the same time--there would be no need to cache such stuff in system memory.
Both system memory and video memory are meaningful constraints on how much different stuff you can have going on at once. But the only way that making a game zoned helps with that is if there's a bunch of stuff that you need to have loaded if you're barely on one side of the zone boundary and a bunch of totally different stuff if you're barely on the other side, and then the loading screen makes it so that you never have to have both sets of data loaded at once.
Processing power has increased greatly. Going from a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 to a 3.4 GHz Core i5-3570K didn't mean you got four slower cores instead of one faster core. The latter processor might well triple the performance of the former even in purely single-threaded programs. Per-core performance is clock speed times how much the core can do per clock cycle, and processors have gotten a lot better at the latter in recent years. And then you get four cores on top of that.
What hasn't scaled is hard drive speed, and that's the relevant bottleneck. When I bought a computer in 1998, it had a 7200 RPM hard drive. Today, the relatively fast hard drives are still 7200 RPM. They've gotten dramatically faster at sequential accesses, but that's not the bottleneck. The problem is waiting for a hard drive to physically move to the right spot before you can do anything, and that isn't that much faster than it was many years ago.