Presentation and doubts about mapping

[LordAioria]

Hi all, 
My name is Manuel, and I was an admin/coder of another 2D MMORPG game/environment (ragnarok) but this adventure finished due I was interested in progress in 3D MMORPG games. Now this is the day that I am starting my new adventure with my knowledges of C# C++ and other programming languages and i have approfitate an offer to buy atavism license ... 

Now I have the solo environment working in my laptop without problems and i have reviewed some of the atavism tutorial videos.  Great work , they are very useful!!!!

Now this is my current status... My experience with Unity is 0 and i have started all tutorials from unity website from the begginer status.

This mail is not to talk about my knowledge limitations   my idea is to explain my next steps and try to obtain some valid information or recommendations from you to detect which are the tools that i need or at least a general idea (or maybe code or tutorials) to solve my first problem:

1st problem: MAP --> In the demo the map is limited, and my idea is to obtain a huge map that becomes every time bigger. 
I will explain my idea first trying to be more understable my objective:

Create at first time 3 or 4 big regions where i will allocate the human race world . It would be a fantasy MMORPG world.  This first "map" will contain rivers, cascade, a big human city and some other small villages. 
This world will be the first to check all features that i want to recreate .... fishing, mining etc . To create the first mall with shops etc   More or less like demo world but bigger. 
Then the idea is to upgrade the map with new regions to the old map with deserts etc and more other things ... and every time in a new release increase the map....

After checking some utilities i was thinking to use Gaia PRO with Gena because i was reading that it's a procedural world and there is a feature of Terrain Addition etc... But I have some doubts:

* Taking into consideration that the game will be played with a laptop or PC, and i want to focused in 3 aspects:  UX, Design and Performance ... do you 
think that they are the best solution? 
* I was reading some code about tiling maps and invoke surrounding tiles to the player and destroy the others to avoid to have enough information in memory... Is this necessary or with Gaia and its procedural work all this is done?
* It seems that there are 2 techniques about how to "move the world" ... have an static person and move the world arround it ... or static world and it's the person that moves ...  The first one seems that solve a problem related with Unity and the position calculations (if i have read well...) I have to take this into consideration with Gaia and Gena solution or is not necessary?

* Is there any problem later in Gaia Pro and Gena to introduce custom items (programatically) , mobs etc ?  My idea is to define an IA that depends on the position invokes different items/mobs etc ? What about to modify a montain to include a gate ?  something like in MORIA (Lord of the rings)? 
Is there any manner later that every time the system detects if one person is swimming? or if he is walking over snow terrain? 

My idea with this mail is to obtain a general directrives to avoid known issues and avoiding reinvent the wheel... and focus myself in the tools or techniques
to be more effective

Thanks for your time and patience
Manu

 

 

[Martin (Dragonsan)]

Hello Manuel.

20 hours ago, LordAioria said:

* Taking into consideration that the game will be played with a laptop or PC, and i want to focused in 3 aspects:  UX, Design and Performance ... do you 
think that they are the best solution? 

For better performance and proper streaming, you will want to use World Streamer 1 or 2 that you can find on the Unity Asset Store or SECTR. They are very similar, but WS is recommended by us because Atavism has included integration for it out of the box.

20 hours ago, LordAioria said:

* I was reading some code about tiling maps and invoke surrounding tiles to the player and destroy the others to avoid to have enough information in memory... Is this necessary or with Gaia and its procedural work all this is done?

Same as in the previous point, streaming will solve most of these problems, but I would use it at the very end, as using it earlier will extend your designing and building time by X times, so I would get to know the software to know how to use it, and how to organize your structure, and then at the very end use streaming solution.

20 hours ago, LordAioria said:

* It seems that there are 2 techniques about how to "move the world" ... have an static person and move the world arround it ... or static world and it's the person that moves ...  The first one seems that solve a problem related with Unity and the position calculations (if i have read well...) I have to take this into consideration with Gaia and Gena solution or is not necessary?

As I understood correctly, you are thinking about preventing from floating-point issue and moving your player to 0,0,0 each time he will reach a value high enough? If so, as far as I know, it's not used in MMO games, as you are not alone in the game where you can move all objects, mobs, and the whole world by X, Y, Z, as there are other players, other mobs, that are visible by others, buildings, etc.

I would do that, but I think you won't even have to do that. Map in the demo is 0,5x0,5km, while pretty safe map size in Unity is 8x8km, I would go max 16,x16km, which is extremely big. If it won't be big enough for you, you can always have a teleport to another map through some portal, canyon, etc. Massive worlds are risky due to huge navmesh, more resources that you will need to handle them in the editor, etc. 

21 hours ago, LordAioria said:

* Is there any problem later in Gaia Pro and Gena to introduce custom items (programatically) , mobs etc ?  My idea is to define an IA that depends on the position invokes different items/mobs etc ? What about to modify a montain to include a gate ?  something like in MORIA (Lord of the rings)? 
Is there any manner later that every time the system detects if one person is swimming? or if he is walking over snow terrain? 

Atavism uses a server-side that is authoritative, so spawning mobs is handled by admin using an in-game spawner. The same for NPCs, so right now you wouldn't be able to spawn them using Gaia. Not sure what you mean by items are also handled by the server like most Atavism's elements, so you are creating items in the Atavism Standalone Editor and then assigning them to loot tables, resource nodes, quests, starting player templates, etc. 

 

[LordAioria]

First thanks for your response  and guidance.

Currently seeing all information about World streamer to understand how it works  

Is there any guide in atavism that explains that integration of WS inside it?

 

Regards

[Martin (Dragonsan)]

integration with WS2 is as simple as having WS2 package imported and ticking a checkbox.

https://unity.wiki.atavismonline.com/project/world-streamer-integration/