this is something i have always been asking, all the MMOs i know work in a plane world, since my experience with SPORE i have been following the development of procedural generation and im really interested in applying it to my own projects, but then i have come to the question, it exist an MMO made with procedural generation?, why the worlds are always simple plane maps?, why not simulating a whole planet via this method?, with elements like simulated gravity and fluids, volumetric clouds. its because of the server capacity?, or devs are just lazy to do it?, 

WurmOnline has it down.   But it's just a sandbox which means you just need terrain, tree growth simulation(that still continues), and a few other things.

but wurm is done in an spherical world or is just another "plane earth"?

In most MMOs, locking into a spherical known world and creating volumetric clouds doesn't really add much of anything to the game. 

Originally posted by Loktofeit

In most MMOs, locking into a spherical known world and creating volumetric clouds doesn't really add much of anything to the game. 

realism maybe?, also, it can be exploited for new areas, if i can generate the planet i can do it modificable, so player structures or other forms of terrain modifying can be possible, the other is the feeling of not having barriers, you can travel from 1 point of the planet to another one, without having to teleport to another chunk of map, the whole world is generated at the moment and you can actually have an "80 day voyage arround the world"...

Originally posted by xaritscin

this is something i have always been asking, all the MMOs i know work in a plane world, since my experience with SPORE i have been following the development of procedural generation and im really interested in applying it to my own projects, but then i have come to the question, it exist an MMO made with procedural generation?, why the worlds are always simple plane maps?, why not simulating a whole planet via this method?, with elements like simulated gravity and fluids, volumetric clouds. its because of the server capacity?, or devs are just lazy to do it?, 

 because  simulating a planet with all it's laws would be incredibly difficult and expencive.

for example, just simulating water with all it's functinos and interatcions with absolutely every possible texture or object as well as gravity, etc, etc would be an insane undetaking for any programmer.

water that actually interacts differently with every type of material depending on it's shape, consistency and porosity, water that splashes and gets displaced by objects, has weight and volume and erodes the land it flows through. water as rain that fals effected by wind, then collects and follows the lowest points of the terrain as it's pulled by gravity down to the lowest possible point. water that separates into drops and even turns into vapur when heated, or frozen into ice......just a staggering ammount of work is required just for this one feature.

and after all that, playes will splash in it once or twice and then completely forget about it. when was the last time you said "man i really have to log onto -insert game of chioce- to interact with the water".....never. it's just fluff, you look at once ro twice on your way to your task and then forget about it. same would go with 80% of all other features of your planet.

Originally posted by Jakdstripper

Originally posted by xaritscin

this is something i have always been asking, all the MMOs i know work in a plane world, since my experience with SPORE i have been following the development of procedural generation and im really interested in applying it to my own projects, but then i have come to the question, it exist an MMO made with procedural generation?, why the worlds are always simple plane maps?, why not simulating a whole planet via this method?, with elements like simulated gravity and fluids, volumetric clouds. its because of the server capacity?, or devs are just lazy to do it?, 

 because  simulating a planet with all it's laws would be incredibly difficult and expencive.

for example, just simulating water with all it's functinos and interatcions with absolutely every possible texture or object as well as gravity, etc, etc would be an insane undetaking for any programmer.

water that actually interacts differently with every type of material depending on it's shape, consistency and porosity, water that splashes and gets displaced by objects, has weight and volume and erodes the land it flows through. water as rain that fals effected by wind, then collects and follows the lowest points of the terrain as it's pulled by gravity down to the lowest possible point. water that separates into drops and even turns into vapur when heated, or frozen into ice......just a staggering ammount of work is required just for this one feature.

 

and after all that, playes will splash in it once or twice and then completely forget about it. when was the last time you said "man i really have to log onto -insert game of chioce- to interact with the water".....never. it's just fluff, you look at once ro twice on your way to your task and then forget about it. same would go with 80% of all other features of your planet.

you have a point there, it would be really complicated to created so much code, but in the case of it has been done, why not making a part of the gameplay?, i mean, vapor and ice could be needed for several things in the game, i mean, water tends to be just eye candy, it would be cool to give the players the tools to get water inside bottles, or use it for steam engines, agriculture, maybe for creating potions and chemical compounds, water could even be used for some magic attacks, or for fighting common fires.......it doesnt need to simulate all the conditions of the fluids, maybe just their phisical changes, weather effects are possible, the same as splash effects, the idea is to create new types of inmersion which aren't only to give realism to the environment

To simulate even basic chemical compounds takes more man hours than I can imagine to design, much less even when you have a working system for chemical compounds you don't even have a chineese box yet.   You just have a system with input and output, but haven't defined meaning for the two yet(IE CH3CH2CH3 means what exactly when it's drunk/set on fire/spilt on ground).

You're going far deeper into simulation than you need to.   Video games are not simulation they are idealization.   You can tell the player they can shot fireballs and they'll accept it as reality for a short while, they'll also be able to accept steam engine that is to them just a bunch of sliders, likewise a chemistry set like TES alchemy system.

im seeing it from the basic crafting system, im not trying to make "Chemistry Online", it would be just easy mechanics, like:

-"use this bottle to fill it with water, you must be on a river or other water bodie, it can be freswater or saltwater"

-"to make this steam engine work you have to deposit water in the container, you'll get an empty bottle again" then when you start the engine with some coal, the game simulates that there's steam going out from the chimney.

those are some examples, im not talking about complex real simulated chemistry...

Because, the only quantum computer we have is only able to factor 15 ?