EverQuest Next: Landmark - Catch All

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Using the voxel technology and with a mix of Minecraft and EverQuest Next we get to help with development.

This is getting released this winter.

I am excited about this.

I loved it. Not a Minecraft fan, again I kind of like the idea but the lego style visuals put me off so much I can't even care about anything else.

This subthread on reddit makes an interesting point. This MMO can't be completely datamined, so you can't have a database site that says "go here, do this, kill that" to get what you want as it'll be different on your server, you'll need to find it yourself. On the broad strokes there can be guides though.

Scratched wrote:

This subthread on reddit makes an interesting point. This MMO can't be completely datamined, so you can't have a database site that says "go here, do this, kill that" to get what you want as it'll be different on your server, you'll need to find it yourself. On the broad strokes there can be guides though.

Correct... key words in that presentation that was used multiple times. 'procedural' and 'change over time'. So not only will it be different on your server what's happens over time will be.

We're going to get to see some of the stuff that Garriott envisioned years ago and wasnt able to make happen due to tech.

I'm not really up on voxel tech, but I seem to remember (which may be a long time ago, like in the Outcast days) that the problem with voxels was that video cards are made to push polygons. Is that still the case?

cheeba wrote:

I'm not really up on voxel tech, but I seem to remember (which may be a long time ago, like in the Outcast days) that the problem with voxels was that video cards are made to push polygons. Is that still the case?

Dont think it's an issue anymore.

Kat Bailey's article on IGN describes it as, "...a sort of massively multiplayer Minecraft with elves, crafting, monsters, and all of the other trappings of a fantasy RPG.".

I can get behind that.

I really hope this is a one time purchase or has a one time purchase option. I fear they will be lured by the potential cash cash of nickel and diming us with themes if you want to do something other than desert or grassy mountain.

I think they may be able to get enough from skimming off the top of players selling to each other.

A neat way to get around the nickle and diming would involve the contests they are planning on having. For instance, some of the prizes for participating or placing could be that you unlock that region's theme/tileset for personal use. (like a competition to design Oasis of Marr would net you coastline themed water, and coconut and palm tree textures... or I guess everything is supposedly material based so you would get access to tropical water, pirate themed wood and metal, and palm leaves and trunks)

I guess it will be all right so long as the base materials given are good enough. One of the things they also mentioned is exploration and being able to collect materials from different regions. I hope they are unlocks and not every time I run out of stone, I have to go mine it across the world. Or worse yet, they give you a monthly allotment on top of having to mine when you want more.

Well, winter can't come soon enough. My real wish for the editor features is to keep it simple but add a couple more primitive types (cylinder and wedge in addition to block) or allow us to tweak the shape of the cube brush (more rectangular, or shear edges to make it into a wedge).

Is this somehow different from the other Everquest Next? Not understanding why the threads are multiplying, given the similarity of info in both threads.

AnimeJ wrote:

Is this somehow different from the other Everquest Next? Not understanding why the threads are multiplying, given the similarity of info in both threads.

Landmark is the world building part of the game. It's separate and will be released before the actual game.

fangblackbone wrote:

I really hope this is a one time purchase or has a one time purchase option. I fear they will be lured by the potential cash cash of nickel and diming us with themes if you want to do something other than desert or grassy mountain.

I think they may be able to get enough from skimming off the top of players selling to each other.

A neat way to get around the nickle and diming would involve the contests they are planning on having. For instance, some of the prizes for participating or placing could be that you unlock that region's theme/tileset for personal use. (like a competition to design Oasis of Marr would net you coastline themed water, and coconut and palm tree textures... or I guess everything is supposedly material based so you would get access to tropical water, pirate themed wood and metal, and palm leaves and trunks)

I guess it will be all right so long as the base materials given are good enough. One of the things they also mentioned is exploration and being able to collect materials from different regions. I hope they are unlocks and not every time I run out of stone, I have to go mine it across the world. Or worse yet, they give you a monthly allotment on top of having to mine when you want more.

Well, winter can't come soon enough. My real wish for the editor features is to keep it simple but add a couple more primitive types (cylinder and wedge in addition to block) or allow us to tweak the shape of the cube brush (more rectangular, or shear edges to make it into a wedge).

I suspect they're going to pull from SWG when it comes to mining. Not only did you have to explore to get certain materials their locations shifted over time. Sorry but in almost all crafting oriented mmos you have to go gather more when you run out of materials.

It's too soon to guess on the nickel/dime aspect. They talked about being able to get multiple claims it makes it seem like they're going to be competitive on what able to be used.

ranalin wrote:
cheeba wrote:

I'm not really up on voxel tech, but I seem to remember (which may be a long time ago, like in the Outcast days) that the problem with voxels was that video cards are made to push polygons. Is that still the case?

Dont think it's an issue anymore.

You're confusing techs. Voxels are more a method for storing data, not rendering. When it comes to "rendering" them, you either choose to go with the traditional polygonal rendering or ray casting. Ray casting tends to be the easiest method for rendering voxels due to their properties. They already line up with the data structures needed to ray cast. That said, ray casting is slower on modern video cards due to not being optimized for them. You can render them as polygons (just render each cube), but really you need to convert them into more manageable polygons. (Just rendering every cube would push too much data to your video card.)

Edit: Of course, the larger the voxels, the less you have to worry about bandwidth issues. i.e. Minecraft.

Voxels are also resolution dependent. The higher the resolution, the much greater the horsepower required to render them. The same thing goes with polygons but not to the same degree. A basic voxel renderer is setup to render each pixel like it was a polygon. So at 2500x1600, that is many, many millions of voxels being rendered like it was a polygon.

Whereas a polygon scene built with 750,000 polygons will render 750,000 polygons whether the screen resolution is 800x600 or 2500x1600.

Modern voxel engines use hybrid techniques to tesselate the voxels into polygonal representation in real time so that you get the best of both worlds. (destructiblity without the dramatically increasing computational overhead at modern screen resolutions)

There are also lighting limitations with voxels that go away with a hybrid voxel/polygon engine. It is not that voxels can't do it. It is that the polygonal rasterer engines are so much more sophisticated from decades of development.

The worldbuilding behind this MMO sounds suspiciously like the one created in Neal Stevenson's novel "Reamde". Tectonic shifts, wholesale geological environmental design, player creation and economic interaction. Call me interested, right up until I have the first quest giver shoot out a request for 5 rat pelts.

fangblackbone wrote:

Modern voxel engines use hybrid techniques to tesselate the voxels into polygonal representation in real time so that you get the best of both worlds. (destructiblity without the dramatically increasing computational overhead at modern screen resolutions)

Also wasnt this pushed all to the CPU or Video back when this first came out? Now with the advances of tech with vid cards and cpu its that much less of an issue along with being split between the two.

Johnvanjim wrote:

The worldbuilding behind this MMO sounds suspiciously like the one created in Neal Stevenson's novel "Reamde". Tectonic shifts, wholesale geological environmental design, player creation and economic interaction. Call me interested, right up until I have the first quest giver shoot out a request for 5 rat pelts.

lol Tanglebones and i were talking about that on irc but yea it does. Especially with it having multiple tiers of depth. Plus with them going F2P makes it seem that much closer also.

Also wasnt this pushed all to the CPU or Video back when this first came out?

Yes, it was all cpu. In some cases it still is with digital sculpting tools like the industry standard Zbrush. Zbrush has its own tech called pixols but it is essentially modified voxels that they had tweaked to allow realtime sculpting and painting of 50 million pixols on just an above average CPU.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/08...

Starting with personal plots, players are able to set permissions on their individual claims. You can build solo or allow friends to help. You can also make things open for destruction or keep them locked and safe. The plot itself is a 3-D volume, so owners will be able to build a certain distance into the ground and up into the sky, but not indefinitely. This allows other players the opportunity to still adventure underground and acquire minerals in the world under your plot.
players will be able to save templates of what they build in order to recreate the format -- or even share with friends!
Objects such as better equipment for gathering materials and housing decorations can also be crafted. Players will find such objects in the game, and they can either be placed in the home or deconstructed for their material components
The relationship with EQ Next

So why is there a Landmark game? Because the devs wanted to share the experience of building Norrath with players. And it is coming out before EQ Next for precisely that reason, not because they have to have the community's help to get assets in the game. But because they want to give players the opportunity to be a part of it all. As such, there will be various contests where players are invited to create structures that might possibly be included in EQ Next. Maybe the devs will ask for a specific tower for Qeynos, or a thatch-roofed hut. The community will be allowed to vote items up or down, but devs have the final say on any selection for the game.

Earlier, I asked Georgeson if player characters will be shared between the worlds; will characters ever be able to move between the two games? The answer is currently no, but could a favorite character made and played in Landmark be replicated in EQ Next? There's a possibility, and the team is discussing and working on things to that effect.

One other thing that will make the housing enthusiasts happy: Remember those templates we talked about? They can be used in EverQuest Next. So any really cool housing you design (on the Norrathian landmass, that is) can be used to construct the same structure when you earn a plot of land. So if your guild builds an awesome guild hall in EQ Next Landmark, you won't have to spend the time recreating the design in EQN, you only need to gather the required materials. SOE sees this as another benefit to launching Landmark first -- it gives players plenty of time to make these creations in preparation for EQN's launch.

What if I'm only interested in EQN and want to build stuff for it? I wonder if there is going to be a mode where I can skip the "game" part of Landmark (e.g. mining resources and stuff) and just build using every asset available to me.

skystride wrote:

What if I'm only interested in EQN and want to build stuff for it? I wonder if there is going to be a mode where I can skip the "game" part of Landmark (e.g. mining resources and stuff) and just build using every asset available to me.

Not sure if there will be a market for materials or not. They've said that you'll have to gather specfic materials for specific items so unless you're part of a guild where you're just a builder and have other folks gathering for you then you may be super limited. Way it worked in SWG.

What if I'm only interested in EQN and want to build stuff for it? I wonder if there is going to be a mode where I can skip the "game" part of Landmark (e.g. mining resources and stuff) and just build using every asset available to me.

That was my question too. But it seems like the only recourse for that is buying materials from other players that have mined it. How you get the money to buy the materials without venturing out, I don't know. The only thing I can think is to sell your designs but that requires materials and hence we have a chicken or the egg scenario.

One other possibility is that you have a starting allotment of resources. Then you can build stuff with that to create the saved design to sell and then dismantle the object to recoup the materials to build another item to store and sell. Hopefully, they won't give you a %less materials from dismantling your design or at least be able to recoup all of the starter resources from whatever you build with them. That way players can design bigger buildings in pieces. (it would be cool if you can layout the schematics so you can see what they look like and build off of them without having to build them first)

fangblackbone wrote:
What if I'm only interested in EQN and want to build stuff for it? I wonder if there is going to be a mode where I can skip the "game" part of Landmark (e.g. mining resources and stuff) and just build using every asset available to me.

That was my question too. But it seems like the only recourse for that is buying materials from other players that have mined it. How you get the money to buy the materials without venturing out, I don't know. The only thing I can think is to sell your designs but that requires materials and hence we have a chicken or the egg scenario.

One other possibility is that you have a starting allotment of resources. Then you can build stuff with that to create the saved design to sell and then dismantle the object to recoup the materials to build another item to store and sell. Hopefully, they won't give you a %less materials from dismantling your design or at least be able to recoup all of the starter resources from whatever you build with them. That way players can design bigger buildings in pieces. (it would be cool if you can layout the schematics so you can see what they look like and build off of them without having to build them first)

With this being SOE and Smedely i suspect they'll pull heavily from their SWG experience. The only way to do the truly unique stuff was to go out and get the rare materials. This will take a group effort. Only way to do this solo is to spend a LOT of time doing piece meal work to get some kind of income that will then allow you to expand and trade/buy for the higher end tiers. Not saying it's not possible, but slow.

Oh and they had it set up where you did not get 100% from breaking items down. No word yet if this will happen with Landmark, but they even had failure chances built in. So you had a % chance to lose everything on the final build.

In SWG I made a ton of credits by mining for other people. It would be interesting if I could do something similar here.

Kehama wrote:

In SWG I made a ton of credits by mining for other people. It would be interesting if I could do something similar here.

same. still had some stacks of EXTREMELY rare ore (worth multiple millions of credits) when the game shut down.

Well hopefully there still is a viable option to do cool original works with basic ingredients in addition to making something special because of the rare ingredients. Options are better.

Don't get me wrong. I love to explore and so long as that doesn't follow the SWG model where you explore to find the space where you can setup 100 moisture vaporators and then the next day 100 people set up their bazillion moisture vaporators next door.

Here is a link to the engine technology SOE licensed for EQN

http://voxelfarm.com/vfweb/index.html

Fascinating stuff...

Curious if EQN is game 1 or game 2?

or Titan...?
Hahahahaha ;P

fangblackbone wrote:

Here is a link to the engine technology SOE licensed for EQN

http://voxelfarm.com/vfweb/index.html

Fascinating stuff...

Oh that's so cool. I've been following that guy's blog for 2-3 years and his stuff is just incredible. He procedurally generates continents, provinces, landscapes, and even buildings that are amazing looking. I was excited about EQNext but if they are using that dude's tech, wow. Hope he made a lot of money off of it If you are even remotely interested in procedurally generated content at all you should check out his blog and start from the beginning.

Johnvanjim wrote:

Call me interested, right up until I have the first quest giver shoot out a request for 5 rat pelts.

The virtual world economy is *built* on rat pelts, buddy! Why all the hate for the little guy? Entrepreneur quest givers are the foundation of the economy! At least rat pelts are *real* money, with inherent value that all the King's men can't take away! Resist The Man! Farm rat pelts!

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