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Why no seamless building interiors?
jusomdude
Member RarePosts: 2,706
After playing the superhero games or any game with large cities I've noticed that you can't seamlessly go into every building.
I think it would be a ton of work to make every building with an interior but why has no game done this?
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It would take a whole heck of alot of work, even if they designed 2 building interiors and used them on every single building. Not to mention if it was done wrong people would bitch about it. Maybe one day somebody will take it to the next level and have something like seemless buildings in their game, I just hope its done right because I think it would be awesome as well.
The Matrix Online came closest to this that I'm aware of. You could enter nearly any building, most of the rooms inside were accessible only through missions though. Still, many had non-instanced rooms as well.
As you said, it would take a lot of work. When technology gets better for developing games and rendering them, we will see some.
It could be done with procedural generation, but that is something of a lost art these days.
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Object loading.
SWG had it to where you can enter basically any structure in towns, and every time you went into one there was a major hiccup where the game tried to load all the deco objects in the place. If you go to player towns you could enter any house that allowed you to, then exit, and enter others. Eventually you'd lag yourself out with the thousands of objects taken into consideration, even while outside of them.
To do something like this in modern games there would have to be a distinct lack of clutter, almost sterile environments. People would bitch about that in and of itself. "Sure you can enter any room in the game, but there is nothing there!". There would be hell to pay if there was that many objects + physics as well.
Even single-player games like Oblivion went the load in/out route for this very reason. It optimizes performance.
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Istaria does this. Every single city, building, lair, structure... you can go in without any load zone at all.
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edit: Vanguard lets you go into buildings without any load screen either.
If you could seamlessly walk into every building it would take you "ages" to walk down the street. Simple as that really.
Zoning in is possible but then we have to ask "what for"?
I think this could be worked around if objects were streamed in instead of loaded in one big chunk.
Same with different interiors, just keep the ones that are in a players vacinity loaded at any one time and stream them in when there are more than a handful to load.
Different floors could also be seperated to just load the floors the player is close to.
There's bubble loading tech that some companies perfect, like how GTA handles incoming objects and wandering NPCs only within a certain distance. As far as the game is concerned, the world is empty beyond a 50 meter bubble around your character. Dunno how that could work in an MMO though...
Fallout 3 and Oblivion use the same methods, but still rely on a lot of interiors you gotta load in as well. My only guess is to regulate spawning objects and triggers, n' such. Your guess is as good as mine, but I would have to say performance optimization is still probably the top reason.
I played Gothic 3, and that had a fully explorable world w/ interiors and underground caves, and whatnot, but the stutter from area to area reminded me of SWG most of the time. That game was pretty poorly coded to begin with though (G3 that is, but I guess it can apply to SWG as well).
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Everquest2 does this somewhat. Most of the buildings you can enter, and it's seamless. It definitely helps with game world immersion.
I program a little and think I know already how it could be done... Basically there would be a bounding box area around the player and then there would be buildings which have their interiors which would each also have a bounding box bigger than the actual interior area.
When the player and interior bounding boxes intersect then that interior is loaded if it's not already.
There would be a list of all loaded interiors and players would have pointer lists of interiors that are loaded for them.
For every player that had an interior loaded a reference count would be incremented for that interior. When players are out of range for the interior it is removed from their list and the reference count is decreased. When the reference count is 0 the interior is unloaded server side.
Objects could be attached to interiors and streamed in and out over a period of time.
There are probably other ways to do it too. I think it just comes down to whether or not developers want to take the time to do the extra work.
Everquest had a door for every building as far as I can recall.
It's definently been done in older games, newer mmo's definently cut back on this sort of thing though.
Strikes me more as an efficiency issue. I'm sure a game programmer would say, "It's possible, but it'll take x hours of my team's time. And that's x less hours we can spend on other features."
General development technology increases won't really change that, unless it was technology which specifically applies to seamless interiors. (which might happen if some game company gets it in their head to stubbornly implement it no matter what, and then shares their learnings. It happens.)
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Infinity Universe might have this or at least they seem to have the procedural generation required to implement it.
I think that in couple of years we will witness something like "next generation MMOs". They will probably be with highly detailed characters, indoors and outdoors. This flood with "same" MMO games will stop as soon as someone come up with that type of game, and since tecnology is moving forward with light speed, I dont see reason why MMO won't go along.
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Plenty of games have this, out of the top of my head: DAoC, EQ2, Vanguard and probably more that I didn't play.
No idea why it isn't done anymore, I suspect it's just considered fluff in modern games. It helps role-playing, immersion and exploration - but role-playing, immersion and exploration are about at the bottom of the current developers' priority list.
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With Champions Online specifically, building interiors were used for player missions, so the zoning was used to separate the player instance from the rest of the world. Something I notice about games that have instanced interiors or seamless interiors is that most of the seamless interiors do not have doors. You just walk through a hole in the wall kind of thing. That's probably just a design choice though.
Another poster had it right I believe. It's the cost versus the benefit. If you have one building with a seamless interior, you have to have more. Each building you program takes time and time is money when you're developing a game.
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UO, Asheron's Call and Puzzle Pirates have always done this. Most games don't add interiors to the extra buildings as they are for show and the reources to do so would far outweigh the benefits of having something for the occasional person that wants to look inside empty buildings.
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Many buildings in WOW have interiors. Many didn't need them since there nothing that important inside. A few hidden quest givers were scattered around off the beaten path, at least in vanilla.
Because older MMOs were more advanced than new MMOs. In UO and Asheron's Call and Istaria (Horizons), I could enter any building I wanted without a loading screen. Think oldschool SWG did too.
New MMOs are greatly devolved from the oldschool MMOs. Technology for MMOs went backwards.
Servers are much lower quality too, cause in UO/SWG/AC/Istaria I can/could meet anyone from all over the world, but new MMOs can't do that because technology is too bad today to support that. EVE is only exception to that.
We aren't actually in 2011, we are going back in time. At least as far as MMOs are concerned.
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WoW handles it just fine, so does GTA and RDR which game worlds are probably bigger than most seamless zones in todays MMOs.
I agree that MMO's seem to go backwards, or at least standing still in terms of technology.
I am not sure what you mean with "technology is too bad today to support that".
It is not hard to make a complete seamless world, if it is a single player or MMO does not really matter in this case because loading resources, which is a matter of available memory and disk reading is an issue on the client.
The thing is, when you design your game/client and want seamless buildings, you must plan this into your architecture, it could be hard to add in the middle of the game.
Does not EVE load when you switch solar systems and enter/leave space stations? If that is true, it not seamless at all.
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