Dungeons, Enemies, Progression and Nemesis

[Jester_hell_696]

So I've been chewing on this since the discussion of balancing with Lightning in my "Degrees of Success" thread.

How do you give the player continued challenge without following TES oblivion and just replacing the Goblin Cutters lvl 1 with Goblin Cutters lvl 2?How do you achieve growing challenge in a simulated world without throwing out the simulation?

It was a recent discussion with Kaylo where they mentioned removing old dungeons from the map and I made the argument that clearing a dungeon doesn't remove the physical structure of the dungeon that started me down my current path of thinking.


Record dungeon lvls, track dungeon populations in the abstract, allow dungeons themselves to "level up" and grow though dungeon "actions" and allow for "nemesis system" somewhat like shadow of war.

I'll be presenting mostly hypothetical system with no hard "balanced" numbers, this is meant more to represent the concept rather then an actual functional implementation.


World generates, dungeons spawns lvl 1 goblin dungeon.

Lets say that dungeons range from in levels from 1-10 and enemies range in levels from 1-5 + uniques.

lvl 1-3 dungeons have mainly lvl 1 enemies with rare lvl 2 enemies
lvl 4-6 dungeons have mainly lvl 2 enemies with some lvl 1 enemies and rare lvl 3 enemies
lvl 7-9 dungeons have mainly lvl 3 enemies with some lvl 2 enemies and rare lvl 4 enemies.
lvl 10 dungeons have mainly lvl 4 enemies with some lvl 3 enemies and rare lvl 5 enemies.

Unique's can appear at any level and are the "note worthy" ones, this is either a bandit leader, goblin warlord, Spiders Shelob etc or a player nemesis, more about this later.


The game determines a population number for this dungeon in a style similar to settlement populations.

Lets say level 1 goblin dungeon gets 20 pop, this pop represent what an "attacking force" either the player, a "rival hero" or another dungeon faction must beat to clear the dungeon.

When a dungeon is attacked by or attacks another dungeon, settlement or "mobs" on the world map the dungeon system is abstracted, its not recording individual goblins making individual attacks against individual town guards.

Instead its doing some weighted dice rolls with modifiers based upon factors like dungeon size/pop, type, level, terrain, weather vs the opponents size/pop, type, level, terrain, weather, combat should go for a couple of rounds.

For instance each faction/group in the combat could get HP equal to the size/pop stat, then lost HP is an abstract way to measure lost pop/units without tracking individual combatants, the factions take their turns trading blows and allows them to perform actions like retreating if "wounded" aka suffering loses.

The game records the broad strokes of the combat, who wins and loses in which turns and by how much, then depending upon how much of a win or lose it awards xp and "loot" to the factions involved.

The reason for tracking win and loss of rounds is that just because an attacker loses the overall combat doesn't mean they get nothing from it, a goblin raiding party might be driven off but still gain some xp and loot in the process.

As a dungeon earns xp by taking part in these attacks and defences the dungeon itself "levels up" this increase the dungeons stats for combat actions it take part in against other factions on the world map while also effecting both the types and amounts of enemies that the player can face when attacking the dungeon themselves.


Dungeons should be able to attack each other, thematically goblins and bandits aren't friends, wolves and spiders will try and eat each other, mechanically this allows dungeons to "grind" against each other without necessarily alerting the player or "kingdom" factions which could bring enough force to wipe them out early before they're a threat.

Also not all dungeons are close to towns or roads so sometime the only thing they can attack is each other, be a bit odd to go out into "uncivilised" lands and only find a bunch of lvl 1 dungeons.

When dungeons attack each other they can take over the other dungeon, spiders can claim a wolf den, goblins and takeover a bandit hive, the "structure" of the dungeon remains just the owning "faction" changes, this would also allow for dungeons that have been cleared but not claimed to be "reclaimed" by another dungeon faction.

Player clears out a spider cave? wolves, goblin or bandits can move into the now empty dungeons without fighting for it.

This means dungeons are only temperately cleared and another dungeon enemy can takeover cleared dungeons, if you want to create a safe zone around your tower or settlement of choice you have to maintain that safe area with patrols, either in-person or with hirelings, or if the player is a powerful enough mage, destroy the dungeon structure itself.


Now all this abstraction starts to become a little bit problematic as part of having a living reacting world "simulation" is making the players interactions with NPCs including "enemies" more unique then random "Goblin Cutter" 4234.

But how do you do that without tracking every single enemy in the game as a unique existence? this is where "unique" enemies comes into play.

Unique enemies represent the famous named enemies, the bandit leader whose name is reviled, the Goblin warlord leading the goblin war host, when the game generates these types of enemies can be pulled from dungeon pops.

Newly spawn Goblin Dungeon lvl 1 technically has a leader but they're unknown to the world and they don't need to be tracked, Goblin Dungeon level 1 successfully raided a town and killed some guards, the goblin "leading" that attack gets a name and is tracked semi-independently.

For the most part they're just counted in pop for attacks, something like the "heart attack" check roll to determine if that unique goblin gets killed during a fight or challenge, they get "ear marked" for lvl promotions when the dungeon levels up.

As they participate in more successful dungeon action their existence within the game world becomes more "absolute", actions and events that their "dungeon" performs get attached to their name, then when you get a quest to kill some goblins you might get a quest to hunt down "Snozgob the Wretched Cutter of Ambara" who killed the guards of the town of Lakeside, butchered the villagers of Farmville and harasses caravans along the road between the two.

The number of unique enemies within a dungeon could be limited to the dungeons level bracket.

lvl 1-3 = 1 unique enemy.
lvl 4-6 = 2 unique enemies.
lvl 7-9 = 3 unique enemies.
lvl 10 = 4 unique enemies.

These "extra" unique enemies fill rolls like "lieutenants" or "mage adviser" to the leader, when the dungeon "attacks" a settlement or dungeon sending out its "mob" one of the unique enemies leads it, this means higher lvl dungeons can "spawn" more mobs to roam the map and the player can encounter a unique enemy in general town defence without killing the dungeons "leader" unit.

As a Dungeon get more unique enemies some other options open up, for instance if a dungeon "mob" takes over another dungeon either from an rival dungeon faction or because its been cleared and left empty, the "leader" of that mob of enemies takes the "leader" roll in that new dungeon.

This also allows dungeons to "keep each other in check" to a degree, break off factions/dungeons take some of the pop/xp from the parent dungeon slowing dungeon growth.


The final problem is that to make the world seem really "real" NPC's including enemies need to be tracked based upon their interaction with the player, this is where a Shadow of War "Nemesis System" comes into play.

When the player interacts directly with an enemy and both parties survive that enemy has a chance at becoming unique independent of the normal rules.

If some goblins ambush the player and injure the player then the goblin that did the injury gets some "points" towards uniqueness, if the goblin survives, either by the player retreating or the goblin retreating then boom a "nemesis" relationship is born.

The player is likely to want revenge against the enemy that cut off their hand, the goblin is likely to want revenge against a player that killed their allies and set them on fire.

This would really make the dungeon enemies feel far more real without needed to track each and every single one, the player will know that they lost their hand to a goblin in the area around the town of Lakeside, they can search for Goblin tracks and lairs in that area and when they find one they can find a unique enemy that taunts them about cutting off their hand.

[Jester_hell_696]

Part of the reason for tracking "loot" is that a dungeon that raids a rich village will have better loot then a dungeon that raids a poor village.

This would transfers "economy" points from the raided town to the raider which is used to generate dungeon loot with some tokens added to the dungeon depending upon what services are available in the raided town.

Goblins raid a village with a weapon smith the dungeon will have more weapon loot, the player sells or even "returns" that loot to the raided town and the town can recover its lost economy points.

[LordYabo]

Hey Jester just want to thank you for your excellent design ideas here. You demonstrate incredible insight into how the game systems can and do work. I enjoyed Shadow of Mordor a lot.

We will have named uniques for each lair. Hunting down those uniques will be an important town quest.

How monster lairs work and populate the world is in flux as right now we are heads down on NPCs and Combat. So you are getting in early which is good. Now that we have Mark around I'm real interested to get his ideas on how we implement what you've outlined.

Couple things I have decided having wrestled with this problem for years:

1. Monsters don't attack other monster lairs. It's not important to the simulator and it's near impossible for the player to see it vs other ways of simulating it.
   
2. We are not doing level scaling. I don't like it in Assassins Creed Odyssey nor Skyrim. I like D&D where a hill giant is just hard and will smoosh you if you are foolhardy enough to walk up and challenge it level 1. I think this makes the victory so much sweeter when you can come back and take it on.
   
3. We are going to have 'levels' of monsters. If I had a larger team and budget, sure we could make unique monsters for every 'power level' of the player from 1-100. But we don't, so we gotta reuse... just like JRPGs, Diablo, WoW have goblins, then red goblins, then blue goblins. In our case we will have 'clans' and clan A is level 1 (normal) monsters, clan B is 5, clan C 10. These are modifications of the base monster, meaning a level 1 Ettin or Gargoyle is late game combat.
   
4. Having said the above, we do have a range of creature races for early, mid, and late game so there is always fresh content.
   
5. Respawning of lairs is thorny, I don't really want to do it because it unwinds obvious player progress, but I agreed to doing it on another thread. Still need to work it out.
   
6. The placement of lairs is one of the largest game changes we need to do so the world becomes more dangerous the more you venture from civilization. Our current algorithm is failing hard on this.

Since you thought so hard on this, here is some secret insider knowledge of the races we are working on. Most of the art and animation work is done, programming and combat balance is the hold up. This isn't a promise list, and some may be cut or moved to DLC, but it paints a picture of the breadth beyond the 4 you currently see. We didn't make a specific "monsters" update on the roadmap because we are going to include them in the other updates as they are ready:

Already done:
Goblins
Wolves
Spiders
Skeletons

Various states of completion:
Bandits
Renegades
Boars
Bats
Scarab
Scorpions
Ettin
Crocodon
Slimes & Oozes
Carrion Crawler
Blood Hawk

DLC:
Gargoyles

[kaylo7]

Amen to an unleveled world. Absoluately hate leveled NPC mechanics myself.

I don't really like the idea of dungeons being recycled - a few makes sense, sure. But not every cave or hole in the ground or open field is going to be populated by monsters, and when new monsters move into a previously cleared area, they're not going to always choose the same cave, hole or field to set up shop. They may pick another hole, cave or field that was previously uninhabited.

It just doesn't make sense for monsters and wildlife to behave that way, like it would for humans recycling castles and similar strongholds. And the player knowing exactly where previously explored dungeons are exacerbates the issue as now they somehow know where all the wolves that just moved into the area are located, against all logic.

[Jester_hell_696]

Originally posted by LordYabo:

Hey Jester just want to thank you for your excellent design ideas here. You demonstrate incredible insight into how the game systems can and do work. I enjoyed Shadow of Mordor a lot.

No, thank you for listening.

Any insight I seem to posses comes from having plays a lot of games, I have over 300 titles in my steam library and a dozen of so have 400+ hours, this is also why I tend to do a lot of comparison "this system like that game, that system is like this game."

I really enjoyed Shadow of Mordors Nemesis system, it really made the game for me, both in having favourite subordinates and harassing one guy all the way down to mook level with the shame option.

Originally posted by LordYabo:

We will have named uniques for each lair. Hunting down those uniques will be an important town quest.

I was thinking something like this might be planned, but there is no way to know until; you say so.

Originally posted by LordYabo:

How monster lairs work and populate the world is in flux as right now we are heads down on NPCs and Combat. So you are getting in early which is good. Now that we have Mark around I'm real interested to get his ideas on how we implement what you've outlined.

Dwarf fortress uses a "savagery" map of sorts for its world generation process, basically it tells the game where to place certain biomes filled with say giant creatures in the more "savage" areas.

I made these screen shots using the Perfect World utility made by "cephalo" on the DF forums while thinking about your world generation process, it was for another possible future thread that I hadn't given much thought to yet, savagery is the 13th image.

https://imgur.com/a/IpsSrxn

Technically everything the 3rd party utility does can be done by DF alone, its just like many aspects DF GUI is/was terrible making the process like pulling teeth.

I mainly use the PW utility to make Australia based maps.

https://imgur.com/a/exqitg3

Originally posted by LordYabo:

Monsters don't attack other monster lairs. It's not important to the simulator and it's near impossible for the player to see it vs other ways of simulating it.

Very fair and reasonable, the main reasons I suggested it was to enable lairs to level up far away from player activity, so the player doesn't go out into the wilds and find nothing but lvl 1 dungeons.

Originally posted by LordYabo:

We are not doing level scaling. I don't like it in Assassins Creed Odyssey nor Skyrim. I like D&D where a hill giant is just hard and will smoosh you if you are foolhardy enough to walk up and challenge it level 1. I think this makes the victory so much sweeter when you can come back and take it on.

Thank you Edar-Ara-Lunin, I loved Morrowind so much for its lack of lvl scaling and Oblivion was such a let down, I only made it as far as I think his name was Martin before the lvl scaling killed it for me.

I personally really like going back to low lvl areas in the late game, I get a lot of vindictive satisfaction from wiping out enemies that I used to struggle against, this is how far I've come type deal.

Originally posted by LordYabo:

We are going to have 'levels' of monsters. If I had a larger team and budget, sure we could make unique monsters for every 'power level' of the player from 1-100. But we don't, so we gotta reuse... just like JRPGs, Diablo, WoW have goblins, then red goblins, then blue goblins. In our case we will have 'clans' and clan A is level 1 (normal) monsters, clan B is 5, clan C 10. These are modifications of the base monster, meaning a level 1 Ettin or Gargoyle is late game combat.

It was while killing some goblins I was looking at the lvl 1 cutter and thought, Okay, they planned some sort of monster level system, I'll chuck in my 2 cents early and let the devs chew on it.

Originally posted by LordYabo:

Having said the above, we do have a range of creature races for early, mid, and late game so there is always fresh content.

Nice, I do like some verity in my slaughter of worlds,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcbazH6aE2g&t

It gets samey if you only killing one race, also kind of racist, I'm an equal opportunity murder hobo.

Originally posted by LordYabo:

Respawning of lairs is thorny, I don't really want to do it because it unwinds obvious player progress, but I agreed to doing it on another thread. Still need to work it out.

I can see and respect that, I was viewing it solely from a simulated world perspective in that, the cave, ruin, castle or whatever doesn't magically disappear when you cleared it but leaving an empty dungeon sitting there is pointless and messy.

If however dungeons can get repopulated, potentially with different enemies then they have a purpose, just need to provide the player with a means of managing that, hence hirelings to patrol and kill "young" dungeon re-spawns and spells to collapse them permanently.

Originally posted by LordYabo:

The placement of lairs is one of the largest game changes we need to do so the world becomes more dangerous the more you venture from civilization. Our current algorithm is failing hard on this.

I can see that, I figured that it was in early stages since improved world gen is 5 and dungeons are 7.

Originally posted by LordYabo:

Since you thought so hard on this, here is some secret insider knowledge of the races we are working on. Most of the art and animation work is done, programming and combat balance is the hold up. This isn't a promise list, and some may be cut or moved to DLC, but it paints a picture of the breadth beyond the 4 you currently see. We didn't make a specific "monsters" update on the roadmap because we are going to include them in the other updates as they are ready:

Already done:
Goblins
Wolves
Spiders
Skeletons

Various states of completion:
Bandits
Renegades
Boars
Bats
Scarab
Scorpions
Ettin
Crocodon
Slimes & Oozes
Carrion Crawler
Blood Hawk

DLC:
Gargoyles

Nice, thank you kindly.

I did figure that Bandits and Renegades where likely to show up as a sort of standard fair, also their counter parts in Town Guards and Conclave Mages if you go evil, which I 100% will.

I had seen the Ettin, Carrion Crawler and I think it was called "black pudding" in some videos but the others are good news to hear.

[Jester_hell_696]

Originally posted by kaylo7:

Amen to an unleveled world. Absoluately hate leveled NPC mechanics myself.

I don't really like the idea of dungeons being recycled - a few makes sense, sure. But not every cave or hole in the ground or open field is going to be populated by monsters, and when new monsters move into a previously cleared area, they're not going to always choose the same cave, hole or field to set up shop. They may pick another hole, cave or field that was previously uninhabited.

It just doesn't make sense for monsters and wildlife to behave that way, like it would for humans recycling castles and similar strongholds. And the player knowing exactly where previously explored dungeons are exacerbates the issue as now they somehow know where all the wolves that just moved into the area are located, against all logic.

My thinking was that wild life will use whatever cave or crevasse is available unless it is already inhabited by something else, and in some cases will compete for the same cave.

I mean if you know where the caves in a given tile are you just have to check those caves, once you've hit 100% explored you know where any potential spider den could possible be in that tile.

Do we know that physical "size" of a tile? only so many landmarks can fit inside a given space and it would make much less sense IMO for one tile to have housed 30 different unrelated dungeons over the course of a game.

How many caves are there in this space?

[kaylo7]

Tiles are 3-5 miles across. 100% explored I assume isn't REALLY 100% explored - it's just you locating all major landmarks in the area. I certainly cannot go looking in 5 square miles of forest and find every nook and crevice that animals may hole up in. I can find an area where deer bed down, sure. But there are plenty of other bedding areas I didn't stumble upon.

There are black bears where I hunt. I've seen a couple over the years. I've never found a den, despite hunting and scouting all over the same 150-ish acres over and over. Unless you check every single windfall and hollow and potential cave system you're gonna overlook a lot of potential spots where animals can set up shop, and only a fraction of potential areas to set up a den are inhabited at any given time, even with healthy animal populations.

And where there are caves, there are likely a LOT of bigger and smaller caves nearby, some accessible from the surface, others not. You're not going to find them all by exploring the area - though you CAN locate a given cave that is occupied by the trails they form.

Again, its not like there are a limited number of spots available that are constantly recycled by local wildlife. And I assume that once dungeons are fleshed out, they're going to be more than just caves and multiple-floored buildings located out in the wilderness for no apparent reason. They might have spider dungeons above ground, with "rooms" sectioned off by webbing between trees, for example. Same with wolves and other animals - no reason they can't be above ground dungeons. Goblins and such could also be a series of hovels/primitive shelters. I hope they go that route over caves and mysterious mansions in the middle of nowhere for EVERY encounter type; large caves aren't that common and mansions all over the place deep in the bush don't make much sense.

And once skinning, pelts, etc. are implemented hopefully we can have a system where "loot" is available on a given dungeon clearing quest, without having to explain away why a den of wolves has a loot chest in the final room. A valuable "alpha" pelt or something would be a nice way to maintain a bit of realism for encounters like that. Though I'm not sure how the current system of a "teleporter room" at the end of every dungeon would tie into that.

I'd certainly like the Devs to give the dungeon system a bit more thought and avoid the same format for all enemy types. It makes more sense when facing intelligent monsters like goblins, but less so for things like wolves. Maybe "clearing" quests for regular monsters should be more an event-based system of searching tiles in an area for a series of wolf dens, rather than inexplicably finding 30 of them all crammed into a cave. And instead of a teleporter in every dungeon, just have them in ancient ruins/mage fortresses and instead have a simple "exit dungeon" trap door or something where it makes less sense to have something as powerful as a teleporter.

That may be a little nit-picky, but I'd just like a bit more of a reason for things like wilderness mansions and magic teleporters rather than them being everywhere for every type of encounter. Ruins immersion a bit from my perspective.

[Jester_hell_696]

Originally posted by kaylo7:

Tiles are 3-5 miles across. 100% explored I assume isn't REALLY 100% explored - it's just you locating all major landmarks in the area. I certainly cannot go looking in 5 square miles of forest and find every nook and crevice that animals may hole up in. I can find an area where deer bed down, sure. But there are plenty of other bedding areas I didn't stumble upon.

There are black bears where I hunt. I've seen a couple over the years. I've never found a den, despite hunting and scouting all over the same 150-ish acres over and over. Unless you check every single windfall and hollow and potential cave system you're gonna overlook a lot of potential spots where animals can set up shop, and only a fraction of potential areas to set up a den are inhabited at any given time, even with healthy animal populations.

And where there are caves, there are likely a LOT of bigger and smaller caves nearby, some accessible from the surface, others not. You're not going to find them all exploring the area - though you CAN locate a given cave that is occupied by the trails they form.

There is a big difference between 3 and 5 miles across and the thing is we're not looking at every possible location, just locations of sufficient size to house a "dungeon" that dramatically reduces the difficulty.

Also, this changes based upon terrain, it sounds like we're both a bit biased based upon where we live.

Where I live is rather, open and flat and it would be possible to completely map a 5 mile area if you really wanted to, it would take awhile but in this game you can spend as much time as you want on it.

How much time and effort have you put into the express purpose of mapping that 150 acre area, not just scouting and hunting but mapping cartography/survey style?

Because that is sort of what I envisioned "exploring" being in this game, so I'm personally of the mind that if the game tell me 100% explored then it is 100% explored, once I hit 100% I expect for nothing else to be hidden in that area, anything else is a lie.

Hitting 100% should be hard but once I hit it I expect no surprises, if there is a cave system underground I've mapped that too, anything else isn't 100%.

Its not like I'm thinking of exploring every single map tile in the world to 100%, just the ones in "range" of my home.

Originally posted by kaylo7:

Again, its not like there are a limited number of spots available that are constantly recycled by local wildlife. And I assume that once dungeons are fleshed out, they're going to be more than just caves and multiple-floored buildings located out in the wilderness for no apparent reason. They might have spider dungeons above ground, with "rooms" sectioned off by webbing between trees, for example. Same with wolves and other animals - no reason they can't be above ground dungeons. Goblins and such could also be a series of hovels/primitive shelters. I hope they go that route over caves and mysterious mansions in the middle of nowhere, and large caves aren't that common and mansions all over the place deep in the bush don't make much sense.

This... this is a very good argument, and like you say very much preferred over a dozen mystical mansions, that being said if a ruin or mansion dungeon does appear it shouldn't disappear just because you cleared it, that should require active effort.

Originally posted by kaylo7:

And once skinning, pelts, etc. are implemented hopefully we can have a system where "loot" is available on a given dungeon clearing quest, without having to explain away why a den of wolves has a loot chest in the final room. A valuable "alpha" pelt or something would be a nice way to maintain a bit of realism for encounters like that. Though I'm not sure how the current system of a "teleporter room" at the end of every dungeon would tie into that.

I agree, but spiders cocoon their prey so items carried by prey can be taken back to their lair, kind of like the mummies in the current dungeons.

As for wolves, I mean that three eye alpha wolf isn't like anything IRL so maybe its sapient? that would be a bit of a cop-out though.

Originally posted by kaylo7:

I'd certainly like the Devs to give the dungeon system a bit more thought and avoid the same format for all enemy types. It makes more sense when facing intelligent monsters like goblins, but less so for things like wolves. Maybe "clearing" quests for regular monsters should be more an event-based system of searching tiles in an area for a series of wolf dens, rather than inexplicably finding 30 of them all crammed into a cave. And instead of a teleporter in every dungeon, just have them in ancient ruins/mage fortresses and instead have a simple "exit dungeon" trap door or something where it makes less sense to have something as powerful as a teleporter.

That may be a little nit-picky, but I'd just like a bit more of a reason for things like wilderness mansions and magic teleporters rather than them being everywhere for every type of encounter. Ruins immersion a bit from my perspective.

I agree for the most part, but I see static locations as just that, static, they're not going away so a cave once found will always be there and if wolves are in the area again then the first place I'd check in known caves and if I've explored an area enough I'll know where all the caves are.

[kaylo7]

I agree that "unique" locations such as large cave systems and buildings should be persistant, and thus can be "reoccupied" by other creatures later on. I just don't think that should be the case for all dungeons, or the majority of dungeons, or even a decent percentage of dungeons - I think most should be one and done, non-unique locations because that makes the most sense.

Regarding searching tiles, yea this is what I'm envisioning:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/fzibac5k24776mx/-3791491443246173424.jpg?dl=0

That's a view out of my ground blind last year. And it's in the fall/winter, when you can see about 5x further because there is no spring/summer growth. In the summer (like during a scouting trip I have planned for next weekend) you can only see about 10-15 yards inside the forest. And that's the FOREST. The swamps nearby? You'll see an alligator only after you've stepped on it. Plenty of extremely thick forests in the world - most of what people see along hiking trails has been largely tamed and/or had controlled burns reducing undergrowth.

Edit: Here's a better one:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z9b4kpkstp1g4tg/6707967996439768149.jpg?dl=0

I'm at the edge of a small clearing - you can see how thick the forest is at the edge of the clearing. Again, that's during winter. In summer you'd see a fraction of the distance.

Originally posted by Jester_hell_696:

How much time and effort have you put into the express purpose of mapping that 150 acre area, not just scouting and hunting but mapping cartography/survey style?

I use "onX Hunt", which allows me to download high-res maps of the terrain that I can use locally without a cell signal via GPS positioning to mark out scouting/hunting areas. It has filters for tree species, trails, creeks and rivers, topographic mapping, etc. So its far superior to anything a skilled medieval cartographer could accomplish.

It also overlooks 95% of useful information. I may mark out a location with conifers or oak to scout for deer. Then I get out there and "oh look, a pond". Or "oh look, a branching stream" or even "oh look, an entire swampland" I missed because they were concealed in the aerial view.

That's the perspective I'm viewing "100% discovered" from - if you're in a forest, you could get something really slow like a Ozone wing, literally paramotor the length of the forest 50 feet above the treeline, and you'd miss the vast majority of terrain features despite flying within a 100-150 feet of them from a bird's eye view. Most forests are thick, unlike the handful of famous old growth forests in the western US and parts of Europe. A lot of forests are closer to the Amazon than they are to that, as far as visibility goes - you'll miss a cave in all of that unless you're literally right on top of it.

[LordYabo]

Originally posted by kaylo7:

I don't really like the idea of dungeons being recycled ...

Don't worry about it. I don't like it either.
It's for the possibility of generational play, long time scale, happens slowly.

[LordYabo]

I read all the above, and the DF pics!

Only thing to add:
Dungeons are nothing more than a start, it's simply all we have right now.

My 3d artist developed carpal tunnel (the whippings will stop when morale improves!) and she went into a different field before we could get to the natural cave environment. We moved onto other things and now need to revisit.

This just in: Mark is going to help us make our dungeons more interesting, compelling. He has been a lead level designer on many AAA titles, level design is his jam. He has thoughts. We'll just leave it at that.

[kaylo7]

What's a DF pic?

[Jester_hell_696]

Originally posted by kaylo7:

I agree that "unique" locations such as large cave systems and buildings should be persistant, and thus can be "reoccupied" by other creatures later on. I just don't think that should be the case for all dungeons, or the majority of dungeons, or even a decent percentage of dungeons - I think most should be one and done, non-unique locations because that makes the most sense.

I can see spider tree nests and wolf clearings being one and done, but I also think that static structures are more likely the you think.

LordYabo said that this is a world is inspired by like Europe, specifically France and Germany, so having lots of abandoned manors and castles and dungeons makes more sense here unlike something inspired by North America.

It seem to be a world built upon the ruins of multiple previous civilisations and empires so that means lots of static structure that aren't going away after being cleared.

Originally posted by kaylo7:

Regarding searching tiles, yea this is what I'm envisioning:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/fzibac5k24776mx/-3791491443246173424.jpg?dl=0

That's a view out of my ground blind last year. And it's in the fall/winter, when you can see about 5x further because there is no spring/summer growth. In the summer (like during a scouting trip I have planned for next weekend) you can only see about 10-15 yards inside the forest. And that's the FOREST. The swamps nearby? You'll see an alligator only after you've stepped on it. Plenty of extremely thick forests in the world - most of what people see along hiking trails has been largely tamed and/or had controlled burns reducing undergrowth.

Edit: Here's a better one:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z9b4kpkstp1g4tg/6707967996439768149.jpg?dl=0

I'm at the edge of a small clearing - you can see how thick the forest is at the edge of the clearing. Again, that's during winter. In summer you'd see a fraction of the distance.

Yeah I figure based upon what you were saying you were thinking about your local area much like I was thinking about mine, like I visited my brother a few years back and he live in a heavily forested area even denser the what you presented here.

I suppose it really depends upon how in depth you see 100% exploration to be, the local indigenous people that live near my brother know all the nooks and crannies in their reserve area despite it being a dense rain forest.

That's kind of what I expect from a high survival skill and high exploration level, an indigenous level of local knowledge, only since where a mage it would have a academic cartography/survey style bent to it.

Originally posted by kaylo7:

I use "onX Hunt", which allows me to download high-res maps of the terrain that I can use locally without a cell signal via GPS positioning to mark out scouting/hunting areas. It has filters for tree species, trails, creeks and rivers, topographic mapping, etc. So its far superior to anything a skilled medieval cartographer could accomplish.

It also overlooks 95% of useful information. I may mark out a location with conifers or oak to scout for deer. Then I get out there and "oh look, a pond". Or "oh look, a branching stream" or even "oh look, an entire swampland" I missed because they were concealed in the aerial view.

True modern tools are 1000% better.

You have a hunter, nature-man type approach which means leaving the forest undisturbed, but that not really what I'm talking about when I say 100% explored.

The sort of thing I'm thinking of is what you'd see when they're surveying and area for development, not leaving it "natural", that is the kind of cartography/survey I think 100% explored is.

I'm talking about a section of land where I'm going though making carving marking on almost every tree so regardless of where I look I can see a tree marked with something like A14 telling me that tree is in grid reference point A14.

How frequently those marking are is determined by how dense the forested area is, A very skilled indigenous woodsman could achieve that same level of local knowledge without the markings, which is what high Survival skill is, which I don't have hence why I'd use markings.

Originally posted by kaylo7:

That's the perspective I'm viewing "100% discovered" from - if you're in a forest, you could get something really slow like a Ozone wing, literally paramotor the length of the forest 50 feet above the treeline, and you'd miss the vast majority of terrain features despite flying within a 100-150 feet of them from a bird's eye view. Most forests are thick, unlike the handful of famous old growth forests in the western US and parts of Europe. A lot of forests are closer to the Amazon than they are to that, as far as visibility goes - you'll miss a cave in all of that unless you're literally right on top of it.

I think this is were we disagree.

The reason I asked how much time/effort have you spent mapping the area is because the vast majority of areas are not explored to 100% and I know you don't consider yourself to have 100% exploration in your area and you're unlikely to put in the time and effort to hit 100%, you don't need that for what you're doing.

In games terms you're hitting 60-70% and your good for your hunting and scouting needs, if nature is an obstacle to my goal of 100% then nature has got to go.

If I have to hire a team of hireling to clear cut the forest so that I can get my 100% exploration of the land around my tower or town then that is what I'm going to do, if the only way to reach 100% is to do burn it down then that is what I'm going to do but 100% is just that, 100% is not 99%.

Originally posted by LordYabo:

I read all the above, and the DF pics!

Only thing to add:
Dungeons are nothing more than a start, it's simply all we have right now.

My 3d artist developed carpal tunnel (the whippings will stop when morale improves!) and she went into a different field before we could get to the natural cave environment. We moved onto other things and now need to revisit.

This just in: Mark is going to help us make our dungeons more interesting, compelling. He has been a lead level designer on many AAA titles, level design is his jam. He has thoughts. We'll just leave it at that.

Ouch, that sucks, I look forward to seeing what mark presents.

Originally posted by kaylo7:

What's a DF pic?

Dwarf Fortress, my go to on world simulation, caves, ruins, shrines are very static and largely permanent features of the world.

Originally posted by Jester_hell_696:

Dwarf fortress uses a "savagery" map of sorts for its world generation process, basically it tells the game where to place certain biomes filled with say giant creatures in the more "savage" areas.

I made these screen shots using the Perfect World utility made by "cephalo" on the DF forums while thinking about your world generation process, it was for another possible future thread that I hadn't given much thought to yet, savagery is the 13th image.

https://imgur.com/a/IpsSrxn

Technically everything the 3rd party utility does can be done by DF alone, its just like many aspects DF GUI is/was terrible making the process like pulling teeth.

I mainly use the PW utility to make Australia based maps.

https://imgur.com/a/exqitg3

[Jester_hell_696]

I'll start by Apologising to @kaylo7 you were far more right then I gave you credit for.

Continuing to think on the subject the vast majority of dungeons should be "disposable" and impermanent.

Thinking about it different terrain types should have different base difficulties in exploration, its harder to explore a thick forest or bog then some open grass plains.

Even then getting to 100% should be difficult, something you would only try with the tiles in the immediate vicinity to places of importance, basically the concept of creating a "safezone" around your tower or home town to ensure no threats to them from random mobs.

Also like you said 100% exploration doesn't mean you know exactly where the enemies are, at best it means you know everywhere they "might" be, you still have to actually check those possible locations to find which one they have inhabited it is fast then finding them in unexplored lands but still takes some time.

My focus was on avoiding the Project Zomboid problem where enemies can spawn inside your cleared safe space, it makes me want to turn zombie spawns off altogether, but then you end up with a dead empty world with nothing to do but farm and cook, how can I fix problem A with out causing problem B, this was what I was hyper focused and caused me to fail to see the forest though the trees.

I do still think that permanent structures should exist and stay after being cleared, ruined castles & towers, abandoned manors & mines, cave complexes etc but they shouldn't be the "bread & butter" dungeons so to speak, they should be memorable not just "castle dungeon 337".


So after some thinking and had a couple of ideas.

First is that exploration is not permanent, like Kaylo said when talking about seasons things change a lot in nature across time, animals migrate and nest is different areas then last season, trees grow, fall and grow again changing the environment, seasonal rains can change the landscape etc.

With this in mind your "exploration" value should decrees over time, the higher a tiles exploration value the faster the tiles exploration should decline, it take less change for you to need a "remap" of the area when you are after the fine details over general details.

Also movement and tracking should be faster in highly explored tiles, you know the paths and water sources though that area, this could be something as simple as every 10 points of a tiles exploration value equals -0.1 time spent on travel/tracking to a more complex formula for greater "fine" measurements.


Second is that a tile exploration value can be used as a negative to "dungeon" generation chance, if we assume that tile exploration does decrees over time then that mean keeping exploration high requires you to consistently explore an area.

I would say that there is less chance that a dungeon level spiders nest/wolves den will appear in an area that see frequent traffic from a hostile "predator" like the player character.

This could be simple as percentage modifier to dungeon generation chance based upon the tiles exploration value, tiles 80% explored then its -80% to dungeon generation.

[Dhuran]

Jester_hell_696 got me thinking that an NPC occupation of ranger could work.

Basic idea is that they explore out regions that are near/surrounding the city and keep them at like 80% ish explored (if they're able to do their job). This could aid the player, but more likely tell other town professions where resources can be harvested. You might even approach a ranger to accompany you giving an exploration/survival bonus. Or ask them if they know directions generally to some specific location.

[kaylo7]

I'd suggested something similar regarding asking directions for resources - 2 tiers, one being asking a relevant tradesmen or specialist (i.e. surveyor/scout) where resources can be found, and up to "x" distance they'll provide cardinal directions and approximate distance (very close, nearby, medium distance) of the nearest node. Past that distance they don't know, and you'll need to try again in a town closer to a given node. 2nd tier is hiring a specialist who will take you there for an additional fee.
Specialists can range from generalists like a woodsmen, panhandler, ranger, etc. up to prospector.

If tile type is called in the dialogue script, they can even give landmarks in their generated directions for it and adjacent tiles (in a plain, next to a mountain, surrounded by swamp, etc.) Size of node is selected from those nearby based on a combination of skill of the hired specialist and a randomization factor. So a surveyor gives a greater bonus than a panhandler for the game to give you directions to a larger local node over a smaller one.