Creating a Dynamic World

Raph Koster has updated his blog with a look at the creation of the dynamic world of Star Wars Galaxies. The post gives a detailed look at the complexities of creating a world from a design perspective.

Procedural environments have a sameyness to them, though. If you have the rules tweaked enough, they can actually add more detail than a human will, because the algorithm isn’t bound by time constraints. But you need quite a lot of fine detail variation on the rules to get back to where the terrain really does surprise you. Like the real world, most of it is fairly bland. (In fact, one of the classic videogame map tricks is to heighten slopes dramatically compared to the real world; after all, most real world slopes are much gentler than 30 degrees!)

Read the full post on Raph Koster's blog.