This article collects information regarding the conceptualisation of the gameplay of The Mana World
This article is currently only a proposal
The features or design guidelines described in this article are only a proposal made by one or some persons. It has not been evaluated or accepted by the core development team yet. Feel free to add your personal opinion about them or make counter proposals.
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There is already a need for a LOT more space. The best way to produce a lot of content would be to add a random map generator component to 'Tiled.'
The generator will generate a map based on size and specific parameters (Location type, special features, desired elements,etc) Right now it takes a lot of care to make even a single map. Such random map generators are already in abundance in RTS games, and there is a market for tile based generators to make maps for Dungeons and Dragons games.
Roadmap
Step one
Create rippling updates in tiled. One thing that adds a huge amount of time to the map creation process is adding the corner and border pieces. If you have a plain of dirt, and you want to ad a rocky outcropping, you have to first add the border around what you want to make (making sure to use all the right tiles) then you add the top edge, and whatever you wanted on the outcropping to begin with. This translates to a lot of time wasted. I propose making a standard tagging system for the tile set that shows when a piece is placed that several other tiles should be placed around it.
The milestone for this step would be a click and drag tool to create mountains, rivers, streams, and bodies of water.
Step two
Create rule sets for all major features, such houses, pathways, and castles. These would be similar to the features of step one.
Step three
Add random deviation based on the rule sets made in step two. A river is not going to be completely strait, it is going to deviate. A rock wall will not be completely strait, and not all houses will look alike. Add a logical randomness to the rules.
Step four
Create rules for the generation of features in a map. Based on settings, create rivers, trees, and ponds based on the location of the map (desert, forest, etc) These can then be touched up and changed to suit the user
Step five(long term goal)
Create rules for the organization of cities, towns, outposts, etc. Ideally, you should be able to click and drag, and a hamlet will appear, with pathways, houses, shrubs. Implement this along with step four and you should be able to create an entire map dynamically. This then simply needs to be touched up, and you are set.
Suggestions
Put any suggestions/comments here:
- This would be awesome! We could vastly expand the mana world through automated maps. This idea could even be taken further -- one could randomly generate wilderness and store the entire file as a single random seed value (in the extreme case), allowing for a galactically gigantic world (or at least allowing us to not have to limit the world size). This, in turn, would make it much more possible for every player to have their own house, and guilds also!--Blash 18:19, 19 February 2008 (CET)
- I've inspected some of the maps that are used in-game. Almost all of them use some multi-layer tricks. What makes mapping also time consuming is that collision has to be filled in manually. Hence I tried to implement Blash' idea. See http://home.deds.nl/~bcmpinc/map.html for the result. One note: it's based on perlin-noise, which makes it fully-deterministic, runtime generated and (as far as a human can recognize) infinite and non-repeating. --Bcmpinc 15:15, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
