todd

From Void to Vegetation, Vacations and Videos Verify Voluminous Vistas

Image from the top of Orcas Island...

Spent a week in the San Juan Islands up in Washington - very interesting place. Relevant to this discussion is that the islands seem to have an excellent "balance" in terms of level design - a nice mix of water, land, meadows, forests, and towns. You could do worse than start from its USGS data to make a terrain-based RPG or MMO.

A few games and projects I've been keeping tabs on:

Spore - A lot of the planetary simulation is getting me interested, actually. Some decent adaptation of planetary and interstellar theory, if you believe the rumors. The creature editor is impressive, and quite a bit of fun. I'm mainly modeling critters from my own mental spaces. The whole affair has made me value my own internal muse. Trying to do creatures from others sources is also fun, but this being a wired world, odds are several people have beaten you to the punch. At day two after release I already found 3 instances of Opabinia, and some of the spare parts given seem like they were made for creating an accurate Anomalocaris - don't even get me started on other things.
Spore encapsulates a lot of things you'd want in a typical universe - From that, I'm immediately searching for the things it doesn't do. The outliers and freak points suddenly become much more interesting.

LoveMMO - Not only procedural, but also impressionistic. A little abstraction goes a long way. Some interesting observations on his blog about narrative, open-ended gameplay, and procedural methods.
The game is certainly taking the strategy of fun dynamics - For instance, there's a tectonic system that will shift things around over time. Adding such a device may seem like paying too much attention to detail, but adding geologic processes will probably occur to a lot of people building a dynamic world. There's a Tao to building systems that will last. If you model erosion (i.e. destructable environments) into a world (from rain, wind, or grenade launchers) eventually the whole place will smooth out to nothing or sink into a dead mire. As system for making things go down needs another one to provide upheaval. Indeed, our own physical world platetectonics do exactly this - it's a crucial ingredient for life as we know it.

Dwarf Fortress - I've talked about this one before, and it's the only one on the list that's accessible to play at the moment. I've played a ton of this (strangely enough, about the same time everyone else was playing GTA4). The single player mode, actually. Running around mucking up an incredibly detailed procedural world can be quite fun, even with faux-ASCII graphics. It's got me thinking about text again. The combat, for instance, is an incredible amount of fun because it's described in text. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a word can be worth a million models, animations, and texture assets. The whole affair can come off as fun, absurd, and incredibly useful, yet any form of graphical representation would be almost prohibitively complicated. The text hides what would otherwise be considered goofy graphical gaffes, while allowing the player's own imagination and sense of disbelief to take over.

Abandoned airfield on near a peak of Cypress Island