Procedurally Generated Maps for Radios

[krj12]

I think one of the things that makes the game feel stale is having to do the same maps over and over, regardless of the opposing faction.

This suggestion applies mostly to radio missions, though it could potentially come into play in mission arcs.

 

What would be nice is to create a series of small map sections that can be procedurally linked together something like the linkages in the base editor.

 

In addition to this:

1.  Random music clips played at the beginning.

2.  Random lighting effects - kind of like the dark blue or disco light you see in the Carnie warehouse map.   Environmental effects like fog would be nice as well.

3.  How about more than 1 enemy faction present on the map - just to give a little variety?

4.  Could be wrong, but most if not all radios are indoor maps, how about some outdoor missions as well?

 

On an unrelated note, it would be nice if it could be fixed so that the map is correctly mapped to the entrance - as opposed to entering an office building through a rickety door in a hillside.

 

 

[srmalloy]

1 hour ago, krj12 said:

What would be nice is to create a series of small map sections that can be procedurally linked together something like the linkages in the base editor.

As I'm sure most people have noticed, the office and cave maps look like they're assembled out of premade map blocks in different layouts. In a discussion with Matt Miller during one of the meet&greet events at SDCC, he confirmed that this actually was how the office and cave maps were created. My question was whether this could be opened up to allow people, say, creating AE missions to have a map editor where they could create new map layouts. Unfortunately, as he described, the interface for doing this was still primitive enough that it takes a significant amount of skill to get the map pieces positioned correctly. Longtime CoH players will no doubt remember the 'black wall' bug in office maps, where there is a black wall across a corridor that you can walk through to find the corridor continues on the other side, and you can look back and see the corridor you came from, but couldn't see where you're standing from the other side. This is the result of a minor misalignment between adjacent map sections, and fixing it requires moving an indeterminate number of map sections to get everything lined up. With the cave map sections having varying amounts of vertical change between endpoints, this makes creating these maps even more fiddly. Matt said that it was something he would like to be able to do, but that they didn't have the programmer/art resources to clean up the map builder to make it a snap-fit process.

[ArchVileTerror]

"Remember?"  I still experience it from time to time.

[Parabola]

The maps wouldn't need to be generated, there are a huge number of variants for the common map layouts. They could just be grouped into pools to be chosen at random. Anything to provide more variety.

[Rathulfr]

I thought they already were generated randomly, from a finite set of possible maps.  I always saw the problem as one of too few maps in the predetermined set.  The AE mission creator seems to have a larger set, so why not include those in the set employed by the radio mission generator?

 

[WanderingAries]

17 hours ago, Rathulfr said:

I thought they already were generated randomly, from a finite set of possible maps.  I always saw the problem as one of too few maps in the predetermined set.  The AE mission creator seems to have a larger set, so why not include those in the set employed by the radio mission generator?

 

This has always been my understanding (as is with most games of the past). I think what you're seeing is mostly related to the limited styles within the game as well. So while layouts may have X number of variations, there are only Y number of thematic differences (different Baddy types). So the overall randomization only results in a pretty small number of variations. IRL, there's not a dramatic difference in office building design in large buildings and most of that is to keep costs down. So to those of us who often play more open/dynamic world based games, things like CoX will feel rather cookie cutter.