It’s becoming common for me to have a few weeks between posts to the blog.\u00a0 Makes me feel a little sad.\u00a0 I’ve just not been feeling very creative, lately, and so I haven’t had much to talk about.\u00a0 MMORPG Tycoon 2 development has been completely stalled for the past few weeks, not for any good reason;\u00a0 just because the tasks I’m working on are large enough to induce paralysis.\u00a0 I think things over, I get ready to write code, I think about them some more, then suddenly Reddit or GSL or YouTube or (gasp) an actual book seems really interesting, and I wind up doing something else instead of sitting down and focusing enough to write code.\u00a0 It’s a bit like when I was refactoring character ability code;\u00a0 it was such a big problem and was touching so much of the system that it was scary to start actually writing any of the code.\u00a0 Of course, once I actually started, it only took a few days to complete the conversion.\u00a0 But it was terrifying at the time.<\/p>\n
And I’m on another one of those tasks right now.\u00a0 Specifically, the generation of MMO buildings.\u00a0 I’ve been arguing with myself for ages about whether the game should generate building geometry automatically, or whether the player should be able to create them with some sort of UI.\u00a0 And lately, I’ve even started to wonder whether it would be a better choice to just build traditional models for the buildings, and not even procedurally generate them at all.<\/p>\n
Here’s my current thinking about MMORPG Tycoon 2:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I’m still arguing this with myself.\u00a0 There are huge benefits to switching to a “zoning” system, both in terms of memory usage and in terms of CPU efficiency.\u00a0 But I’m not sure it feels right.<\/p>\n
I’ve finally come to my senses and realised that the first-person-perspective camera I was using (and which you can play with in the public MS1 and MS2 builds) was probably a bad idea.\u00a0 And flying on the “graveship” was definitely a bad idea.\u00a0 It made sense thematically for what I was originally trying to do with the game, but I can see that in practice, it was very much in the way of actually playing the game.<\/p>\n
The problem with switching away from the FPS camera is one of figuring out what should replace it.\u00a0 And this was a big problem;\u00a0 I’m a bit of a camera specialist, and so I’m surprisingly fussy when it comes to camera behaviour.\u00a0\u00a0 And in my opinion, there has never been a 3D Tycoon-style game which had a usable camera (But feel free to suggest some, if you know of good ones that I should look at).<\/p>\n
My first attempt at modifying the camera was to use a Roller Coaster Tycoon 3-style camera, which holds about a 40 degree downward angle, and rotates around the middle of the screen (and provides extremely limited support for adjusting the camera up and down).\u00a0 And I hated it in MT2 just as much as I hated it in RCT3 (I know some people who worked on RCT3 — no offense to you guys!\u00a0 I’m just absurdly picky about cameras);\u00a0 it was just an awkward angle for the camera.<\/p>\n
In the end, I’ve settled on a camera which behaves a little like the one used in the CitiesXL games;\u00a0 it’s facing almost flat downward when you’re high up, but as you move the camera down toward the ground, it pitches up so that you’re looking forward.\u00a0 Once you’re all the way down at ground level, it unlocks looking around freely with FPS-like controls.\u00a0 I’m happy enough with this behaviour that I’ve put it away in a drawer for a few days, and I’ll look at it again fresh later this week, to decide if it’s really as good as I thought it was when I first wrote it.\u00a0 Assuming all goes well, this will be visible in the MS3 build which I’m hoping to put out sometime in February (if I can break the coder’s block on building generation).<\/p>\n
This also gives me a really easy interface to easily allow an “infinite zoom-out” which was a core UI concept in the original MMORPG Tycoon.\u00a0 And which I’ve always sort of wanted in MMORPG Tycoon 2, but could never figure out how to make available.\u00a0 (My original design for MT2 called for a “mothership” which the player’s graveship would fly up to and dock with, high above the game surface, and the high-level editing controls would be mounted on the mothership, and thus only available from high altitude.)<\/p>\n
The down-side of this mostly-top-down view is that my current procedurally generated trees don’t read at all from that perspective;\u00a0 they just appear to be green circles.\u00a0 Switching to coniferous trees, or any sort of non-umbrella-based tree construction would probably help that.<\/p>\n
I’ve been playing some Evil Genius<\/a> recently, for inspiration.\u00a0 I really like its interface for hiring workers;\u00a0 you specify how many workers you want, and how quickly you want to hire them.\u00a0 Instead of the RCT3 hiring system, where you just pay the static cost for workers, in Evil Genius the faster you want the workers hired, the more you have to pay for them.<\/p>\n