I know this has been brought up a few times but i just wanted to mention it again, IMPO the maps are too small for open world style maps it would be really cool to have the option to expand these to a bigger size. Ok i know the first replies are going to be how do you fill them : answer you don't . I've been playing SWGEMU the last few days as i was a SWG fan in its day and if you check it out the maps are pretty big but the actual content between cities is pretty sparce , hence giving the impression of a really big world, in saying that they do have an end = not endless, Just very big maps with bits inbetween. I think that from reading the posts I've read that this is actually what people were asking for e.g not filling the maps with content just creating bigger areas to give the impression of a planet size map. Anyways if you feel the force you can check it out if you have the original disks I recon that Idea coupled with GG could make some pretty exiting projects. Just a thought

The problem is they not ask the right question.
We have full camera control now, so dont make the world bigger, make the player and everything smaller. The problem is that nobody did it. And it seems the scripters in this forum are pretty busy at the moment, so the chances for a release of something like this are low.

I think Lee has said before that if he starts playing with that side of things it will mess everyone's current maps and games up.
I don't think making the players and everything smaller will help ... As it is if you couch the grass becomes pretty blurred.
scaling things down would make it look awful ?

You should not scale the textures, you should scale the .x models. Either with scale in the fpe or with a model editor like fragmotion for files who have no fpe eg gras.
Not perfect but it is a solution.

@Corno_1: It's an interesting idea! I dare say there may be some issues with any remaining hardcoded stuff, such as minimum physics sizes and default detection zones for the AI pathfinding, but I dare say you could double or quadruple the world size by shrinking the protagonist and all elements down to 25%. Once we have DX11 out the way, and a few more voting board items, I could add something to the board which would provide near infinite worlds called zone swapping. Essentially as you get close to the edge of the world, it streams in another section of the world so you never meet the edge. From the editor, you could edit these zones much like you do now but able to scroll between them to create seamless transitions in any direction. The terrain and entities would be stored in batches representing sub-zones and streamed via a second core in when the player gets close to them, allowing for seemingly endless worlds, limited only by the hard drive availability and your patience in creating such a vast map.

OK my visa number and pin is .......

@LeeBamber

So DX11 by end of next week, few other tweaks the week after, and infinite worlds some time in June - OK? Great. And oh thanks - LOL

Now seriously:
I seam to remember something about the lightmapper messing up when entities are scaled, but could be wrong.

But your solution - seaming infinite worlds - now that sounds very cool indeed!

But can you not add it to the board - just make it a personal wish\want\need and add it anyway?

Seams to me the GG has almost got to a full gallop!

Reliquia....

As far as I know there are only issues if the entity is scaled in the fpe. If it's scaled before hand, it's fine.

I made that option in GameGuru Loader:


But i use the scale in nearly all aspects of the code , so your into a lot of coding , simple stuff like moving a object to a new position/light position-radius/camera position/collision/raycast ... ... ... everything will be wrong if the scale is not in the calculation, it need to be included in nearly all calculations.

I made another approach for a old AGK 3D mobile demo that needed 60 fps on mobiles , it fake it by repeated the same terrain 9 times , when the player camera get near the edge of the terrain, it moves the camera directly backward by the terrain size , and you always end up at the exact same "view" position , and it looks like its a unlimited terrain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbIzyNcGAXQ

But Lee's zone system would be the ultimate one

Edit: btw. Trying Lee’s CA 10 hour, only at 1:13:20. not sure i make it

I seem to know what you mean, Honkeyboy. For myself, I wouldn't even ask for an Open World solution, I just "some more space". I wanted to recreate a map depicting my home area, and I had to make big compromises and reductions for a quite small landscape.
And if you are involving rivers and lakes, that's where I say: you don't have to fill them, naturally.

Personally, I am a bit at a loss for normal terrains how a big empty/unfilled space would be so attractive, maybe, I'm just missing a proper example ? The only thing I can think of were big army moves, as in Napoleonian times ?

But don't get me wrong, I'm not against your idea, generally, rather, I'm always open to try things I never did before.

I asked about a way to scale the player ages ago. Mainly because by default you appear to be about as tall as Tyrion Lannister in comparison to all the buildings included and purchased. It would also be useful for game ideas as playing an ant for instance or someone the size of one would be a different game perspective to normal. Still for me just to make the player appear higher than 4 foot would help ;p

When I asked, I was told I could scale the buildings down, which is true, but a whole lot more work than just scaling the player up a little. Also a little hit and miss with no direct way of typing in a scale in the editor. I don't like to start altering FPE's in general, as that can affect other games and projects and I don't want hundreds of copies of the same objects either.

Scaling your player would be useful. I'm surprised it didn't make it into the new lua commands.

Wow thats a cool lot of response and i grinded up to the jedi trials while i was at it @ Lee that really sounds pretty cool m8 will look forward to see how that would work, i did have some success shrinking the player on my space maps which actually did look and feel like a big space area so as DVader says control of the player size is one good possible way around it but i did mine with a space ship not a player might have to try that with a fuse character see what goes
@ reliquia lol m8 very funny we wish
I know SWG was probably not the best game to compare this with as the graphics don't really compare with the current GG graphics, lol even the x31 has flat decals for the engines bit like the blue flames in mega pack3 and they only used one so looks even worse lol (bring on the volumetrics) but the content and the size of the game are what made it popular back then and with the emu popular now they get 2k players on the server sometimes, i did notice a couple of other things that were pretty cool, Ive been tinkering with player housing and noticed that the house doors are actually a part of the model, which i guess makes it a lot easier when placed to just have a working door (modelers?) the game also uses LOD a lot to increase speed i would suppose i also noticed when setting up my own private server that the whole game is written in Lua! lol

@Lee, literally bouncing with excitement to hear that idea of zone swapping, very neat indeed, would love to see it!

Easy to model. Harder to have proper collision on it in Game Guru

I used to play SWG back in the day as well. Just me, and the desert, oh and my 2 AT-ST's. I had a short while as a jedi before they totally nerfed them.

The houses in SWG are actually separate from the doors, but they're separate objects within the same model and assigned as a limb, their door code works by proximity to the limb. I'm not sure if we can do that in gameguru, I think the player distance only works in regard to the whole model.

Terrain/world streaming sounds AMAZING and I am going to be very excited when that's created.

What game is SWG?

In our open world game, I was (and still am) going to rely on background loading of a level when the player comes to a certain zone so that we come to a cut scene or some thing to take the player's attention away from the loading of the level and then the new level will be up before they know it. We are using GG for level design, GG loader to AGK2 to convert and then AGK2 for the actual game code, AI, etc.

So, each very large level (as it is now) in GG will serve as a 'scene' and at the end, the next will load in - and there will be around 12 or more scenes, so a pretty large game overall.

I have already been perfecting the game asset pipeline and have it down to using either Shade 14 Pro or UU3D Pro to convert all the obj and fbx assets to directx files and then GG's own internal importer to import static assets. Still not sure how to get our own rigged and animated characters into GG, but someone already offered their services on this board and I am sure we will be using him/her for these assets.

PBR texturing would really make games look incredible in GG and AGK2 (I am hoping PBR is coming to AGK2 as well). Preben's ggloader utility has made it very possible for us to get our game done in good time using tools and languages I am already comfortable with. Thank you Preben.

But I am very much looking forward to Lee's terrain or level streaming being implemented in GG.

Mike

@ World Class Media SWG = Star Wars Galaxies pretty old game now Mike, its been taken over buy a team of guys who have reverse engineered the code and now goes under SWGEMU they have pretty much cracked it now just needing to complete the Jedi side of things 4th of june but in its time it was a massive game by Sony/Lucas Arts which they ditched unexpectedly leaving us all in the lurch. But now its back up and running if you have the original disks.
Graphics are abit dated as its around 15 years old now if memory serves but the content is next to none

SWGEMU s a little behind at the moment, here's about three other emulators now, and they've all surpassed SWGEMU's efforts by a long shot. SWHLegends is about the best apparently.

Problem is with the other servers m8 is that they are empty, i tried a few the other night and there was nobody there, SWGEMU lets not forget kinda has the consortium on the code if they go so do all the others plus they generally have 800-2k players on on any given day. Admittedly The EMU server sticks rigidly to the pre CU game and in some ways i did like some of the CU bits that other severs have, house decor, some new vehicles and buildings etc, but i did that anyway when i set up my own server it was pretty easy to make Jedi work on it and add this and that so for small groups of mates that just want to say meet up on a saturday night and run round questing as Jedi,B/H etc etc it takes like 20 mins to set up your own and open it up to your mates

SWG Legends has two servers (main server and test server) up hitting 3k users regularly.

They're not just another EMU server like you're doing, they have their own software (they actually started a long time before SWG shut down but kept quiet) which is being worked on by a couple of ex-SOE devs, it's a lot closer to the real thing than EMU is, and EMU doesn't effect them at all.

In my opinion the map size is more than large enough.

So far I have not seen a single game that has managed to fill the whole map in any meaningful way.

Sure one can brush a ton of trees or rocks over the map, add several dozens of random cannon-fodder enemies and then complain that the map is to small to give an open-world feeling.........but such a game wouldn't get better with 4 times the space, only more boring and meaningless.

Stalker and Half-Life used rather small maps with lots of transitions and those where great games. I've played dozens of Half-Life single maps and those that where well designed, took the modders months of work for about the same size as a GG map has.

Making an GG map look like p.e. Stalker, Fallout or Half-Life would be a herculean task even with the size we have now and until I get to play such a map, I Ithink we're fine.

@ Storyteller01 Agreed m8 with those types of games, but SWG wasn't those types of games, the maps were large and sparce with random mob spawns and poi's (it could take 15 mins or more to cross the map on a speeder, But the empty ish style maps were populated with player cities in which you had to have 10 member to plonk down a city hall, then the players could lay their houses around the city, they also could just place a house anywhere which kind of populated the maps. Point being here is not to slate the size we have already as you can use winzones if needed, but with the progression of GG it might be nice to have later at some point if others would like to try that sort of game

@ Belidos cheers m8 will check that out

I haven't played on there myself, can't bring myself to play an emulated SWG yet, still hurting from the server closure. This is just from what my ex-guildies have told me trying to get me to play, i'd love an impartial report from you if you do try it out, let me know if it's really as god as they are saying.

Yeah sure m8 will do, as i said tho the EMU is pretty close all professions work now, Jedi arrives on the 4th of june, I'm pretty established on the Balisik server now most toons are masters and docs/dancers buffing 24 /7 in cantina's , didnt think it would gel but running Nym's, Jabba's and the rebel theme park kinda brought it all back lol.
Speaking of filling GG maps I've just got the foundations in for Galaxy's main city map (just the buildings and the ground layer, used hide terrain to boost the fps up to around 40 still lots to add but the maps pretty bloomin full

Now that's funny, Honkeyboy.
Just the other day, from out of nowhere, I felt the urge to search YT whether there were any videos of the good old ZX Spectrum game "3D Seiddab Attack", and, there are!

And they made me ponder whether something like Seiddab Attack could be implemented with GG.

And now you come up with your Galaxy City which looks like it is coming VERY close to an ideal city for that.
Did you model those buildingss yourself ?


And what is the framerate you're getting with the current Galaxy City ?

@ Yrkoon no m8 they are Cosmic Prophets free ones on the free section of the forums , Wolf's and i use some of reliquia's off the stores, personally i prefer to buy them as they are pocket money prices for really good models from these guys so i have no problem paying that at all for their hard work.
On occasion i will model something if i cant find it on the stores or the forums.
The framerate now here's where the issues I'm having with it start lol really good on medium but then Wolf's signs don't glow as they should Medium around 60-65 on highest 23-28.
It would be really cool to be able to have the buildings on medium and the signs on high that way the fps may still be pretty good.
What i tend to do is build the whole level on medium then up it to high and try to increase the FPS. Wolf has a good post on how to achieve that.
You can always check out my Galaxy W.I.P on the forums to see what im trying out, I've just tested the galaxy city map with abit more content and it takes 5 mins to run around it and actually feels pretty big so im pleased with it so far kinda giving that blade runner feel

I absolutely second that, Honkeyboy, and I do likewise. And sometimes, it really makes me angry when a YT review starts with "oh, we're treated AGAIN with $#1??& GG models", before they have seen ANY significant part of the actual gameplay.

You are doing fantastic work with your Galaxy.
Hope you get the framerate optimized, although 25 frames is not really great, but likewise not that bad (but I assume, you're getting that while no AI is around, yet. Hope the improved multithreading will help with that.).
On the other hand: sometimes, it takes what it takes when it comes to hardware requirements.

Thanks Yrkoon appreciate that m8, funny you should mention the FPS thing i found a really nice workaround today while populating the Alpha1 city
I set the entities to medium and used the sun factor slider to get the signs to glow properly (this works very well) as an added bonus i found i then can use bloom and shadows with no real hit to the FPS, i dont really use bloom alot but the new advantage of being able to whack the shadows up is a proper bonus its made the map look a very different story, i also notched down the fog values to create a darker background and looks 10x better than it did and around 50+ FPS plus ive added around 100+ entities to the map. This is making a very different level as i now have a really decent looking map and next to no change in the FPS no matter what i seem to add = chuffed
will video this when its done and show my settings
p.s this is the map the 4 corner buildings will zone into maps with quests etc etc, its hard to see from the map but there is shed loads of entities on there, still need to finish the paving and add the ai but its looking very cool indeed now