not talking Minecraft here, sinces its nether detailed, nor persistent MMO game world.

But How far has tech come along to allow players to build on and change the landscape of the world on a simlar manner as say Minecraft and UO does, without going into coding, like Second Life does?

I've seen some Indie efforts in terraforming and construction that were pretty impressive. I'm not sure how well it would work in an MMO, with thousands of players needing constant updates.

Overall, it really hasn't gone anywhere. I think there should be advancement in this in several ways. But they are busy selling rinse and repeat gaming to turn into FTP games later.

You could instance the build or terraform mode to let people play around, or even offline. There are solutions even without new tech that dont ruin immersion or restrict people from even having fun with it.

Originally posted by 5thofFikus

You could instance the build or terraform mode to let people play around, or even offline. There are solutions even without new tech that dont ruin immersion or restrict people from even having fun with it.

but soon as it need to be loaded into the world, than what?

would everybody nearby need to download a patch or something? could be exploited for PvP if thats the case.

Has nothing to do with available technology, just look at screenshots from Wurm or Xsyon, every building or structure or wall or fence or road you see is playermade.

Building and/or terraforming is an unwanted feature in mainstream games. Cutscenes, scripted dungeons, voice-overs and CGI trailers sell much better.

Originally posted by Larsa

Has nothing to do with available technology, just look at screenshots from Wurm or Xsyon, every building or structure or wall or fence or road you see is playermade.

Building and/or terraforming is an unwanted feature in mainstream games. Cutscenes, scripted dungeons, voice-overs and CGI trailers sell much better.

none of both have detailed masonry. they give you premade parts to puzzle them together.

not quite the same imo

Wurm Online has building houses in 3D, I dont know if gameworld has instances

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UffeI4MepAk

At A Glance - A Look at Wurm Online   http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/129/feature/2260

The freedom in Wurm really shines through the housing. Players aren’t restricted to doing things, the world is their oyster. Players’ key motivation for building houses is so they have a place to store things, since the bank spaces do not hold many items. Players need nails, planks, etc. to build their houses. The housing in Wurm is the best I have seen, since players can build where they want and every item involved in building houses can be crafted.

Building a house can take awhile. It involves patience and a large amount of materials to create a house, so be ready.

Originally posted by Larsa

Has nothing to do with available technology, just look at screenshots from Wurm or Xsyon, every building or structure or wall or fence or road you see is playermade.

Building and/or terraforming is an unwanted feature in mainstream games. Cutscenes, scripted dungeons, voice-overs and CGI trailers sell much better.

This. The genre has changed, it is no longer about virtual worlds its about providing discrete virtual experiences attached to some sort of world where you can meet other people. 

Originally posted by MMOExposed

Originally posted by 5thofFikus

 

but soon as it need to be loaded into the world, than what?

would everybody nearby need to download a patch or something? could be exploited for PvP if thats the case.

Sure it could be exploited. Especially if its "freeform building". Some sort of modular or pre-determined building system would reduce that ofcourse. But some fans wouldn't be satisfied with such.

Originally posted by Quirhid

Originally posted by MMOExposed

Originally posted by 5thofFikus

 

but soon as it need to be loaded into the world, than what?

would everybody nearby need to download a patch or something? could be exploited for PvP if thats the case.

Sure it could be exploited. Especially if its "freeform building". Some sort of modular or pre-determined building system would reduce that ofcourse. But some fans wouldn't be satisfied with such.

I think modular is the way to go its not just because of freeform building being exploited but because it wouldnt work with the setting, unless the plan is to make Second Life which is a mismatch of styles it just doesnt work to have "freeform", but on another note Infinity Quest for Earth comes to mind where some time back they said they wanted to allow players to upload their own ships, so if it was me doing it I would create a separate ingame editor ( much like UO house builder ) that could work offline ( no need to overload the server ) and allowed people to submit custom made parts to be built in game, these would go through a sort of approval process and be made available in game. These could be placeable items like decoration and exteriors etc..

The only problem with this is the legalities behind it, who owns what, what if someone infringes someone else's copyrights, but I will leave that to the lawyers as I dont have enough knowledge to know what would be the best solution.

Tech wise there are pretty good systems out there to deal with the problem of getting content on demand to people, WoW for instance already implements a similar system for their patches whereby you can already play with only the essential parts and the non essential are left background downloading, something along these lines would work.

Originally posted by MMOExposed

Originally posted by 5thofFikus

You could instance the build or terraform mode to let people play around, or even offline. There are solutions even without new tech that dont ruin immersion or restrict people from even having fun with it.

but soon as it need to be loaded into the world, than what?

would everybody nearby need to download a patch or something? could be exploited for PvP if thats the case.

It could DL at certain times. People dont expect to build a city in a day in a game any more than they do on this side. People will accept it as long as it has a few bells and whistles for immersions sake. As long as they could play with it as much as they wanted. Maybe small edits in the design would be immediate. Depends on what you want to offer.

You could even screen out all the Nazi symbols and other original jokes no ones ever tried before. Maybe even provide a job for someone wanting to get their foot in the door for cheap.

There are solutions.

Originally posted by MMOExposed

...

but soon as it need to be loaded into the world, than what?

would everybody nearby need to download a patch or something? could be exploited for PvP if thats the case.

No, the information that there's a house/wall/road/whatever just get's streamed to the people in the vicinity, just like the information that there's another player near you gets streamed to you.

The tech exists. The problem with it is maintaining a consistent and visually appealing game world, as the majority of what players will build will look like crap. It also means policing such environments for the less-than-appropriate content that players invariably will build.

It's also interesting to see the comment that Minecraft doesn't count. Minecraft is a creative environment. Brick by brick building has a purpose in such an environment, whereas it has little purpose in a linear and scripted game world, which most MMOs are.

Originally posted by Thane

Originally posted by Larsa

Has nothing to do with available technology, just look at screenshots from Wurm or Xsyon, every building or structure or wall or fence or road you see is playermade.

Building and/or terraforming is an unwanted feature in mainstream games. Cutscenes, scripted dungeons, voice-overs and CGI trailers sell much better.

none of both have detailed masonry. they give you premade parts to puzzle them together.

not quite the same imo

Premade parts are what is possible to do.  The polygon models and texture maps have to come from somewhere.  The overwhelming majority of players aren't competent to build their own.  And even if they were, streaming entire polygon models and texture maps on the fly takes several orders of magnitude more bandwidth than streaming data to say that prebuilt object i is at location (x, y, z) facing in direction d.

you can't really build houses out of individual bricks in real time and have those bricks be seperate entities.. waaay to much power required for that, it'd kill any computer to just run into a castle if the game is supposed to have any decent graphics.

However you could have a system where you build a castle brick by brick in a "design mode" and when complete it churns out a complete model of what you built. Letting you have a unique building.

Originally posted by dlld

you can't really build houses out of individual bricks in real time and have those bricks be seperate entities.. waaay to much power required for that, it'd kill any computer to just run into a castle if the game is supposed to have any decent graphics.

However you could have a system where you build a castle brick by brick in a "design mode" and when complete it churns out a complete model of what you built. Letting you have a unique building.

its not impossible to create a house out of individual bricks, the concern is do they all have physics?  If they do then you can enable modes similiar to the engine (UDK) I work in that turns off and on physics based on variables that can be set per brick, and the beauty is every brick is an instance which saves on memory/processing.  Now the beauty is once those brick are place they can be converted to prefabs which create bigger instances of the object and when it takes damage, collision etc.  The bricks would break apart.  I've done this and tested in multiplayer with a big player base and its definitely possible.

Originally posted by Laross

Originally posted by dlld

you can't really build houses out of individual bricks in real time and have those bricks be seperate entities.. waaay to much power required for that, it'd kill any computer to just run into a castle if the game is supposed to have any decent graphics.

However you could have a system where you build a castle brick by brick in a "design mode" and when complete it churns out a complete model of what you built. Letting you have a unique building.

its not impossible to create a house out of individual bricks, the concern is do they all have physics?  If they do then you can enable modes similiar to the engine (UDK) I work in that turns off and on physics based on variables that can be set per brick, and the beauty is every brick is an instance which saves on memory/processing.  Now the beauty is once those brick are place they can be converted to prefabs which create bigger instances of the object and when it takes damage, collision etc.  The bricks would break apart.  I've done this and tested in multiplayer with a big player base and its definitely possible.

Sounds pretty much identical to my "desing mode" :P

Originally posted by Larsa

Has nothing to do with available technology, just look at screenshots from Wurm or Xsyon, every building or structure or wall or fence or road you see is playermade.

Building and/or terraforming is an unwanted feature in mainstream games. Cutscenes, scripted dungeons, voice-overs and CGI trailers sell much better.

Winner winner, chicken dinner.

Also if Minecraft ever gets listed here I hope that it gets added to your sandbox list. Still can't beleive people said minecraft wasn't a sandbox.

Originally posted by MMOExposed

not talking Minecraft here, sinces its nether detailed, nor persistent MMO game world.

But How far has tech come along to allow players to build on and change the landscape of the world on a simlar manner as say Minecraft and UO does, without going into coding, like Second Life does?

As scary as it is to say this. I feel that tools such as 'Hero Engine' are great ways to open up enviremental changes to the players.

The Repopulation is doing some interesting things also; seems like a more advanced concept than whats going on in Mortal Online for example.