Wishlist STARS REACH and its living world

Over the years, I’ve tried many ways of making living worlds. This video here explains how we are doing it on Stars Reach. Which you can now wishlist on Steam.

As you can see if you watch the video, we’re already pulling off something a bit unusual: modelling a world at MMO scale using cellular automata. What that means: we know the humidity, the temperature, the material, the viscosity, the adhesion, for every cubic meter of the world.

In gameplay terms, it means that you can dig a pond, fill it with water, watch the plants around it green up, watch the dirt in the pond turn to mud, get slowed down by the mud when you trod through it, watch the pond freeze over in the winter and slip and slide when you walk on it.

It means you can drown a monster who breaks through the ice. You can heat up the pond and watch it turn to steam, and float away. That’s OK — it’ll precipitate somewhere else.

Everything does what you expect it to do. Which sounds sort of ordinary, until you realize it’s also kind of magical.

Cardboard and stage sets

On LegendMUD, I would carefully handcode NPCs in ways that made them more interactive than just fodder for slayage. You could play blackjack against one in Victorian London. I made an Indiana Jones bot that roamed the whole MUD and could speak about a ton of trivia details garnered from the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV series. But it was super apparent this was a ton of work, and players just consumed the content.

Think about that word. Consumed. They ate it, chewed it to bits, spat out the bones. There was no way to keep pace.

On Ultima Online, we swung for the fences with a creature ecology based on abstract properties. It still serves as the basis for the crafting system and more, but we never managed to get it performant enough to be worthwhile, and it wasn’t directly visible enough to players. But even though you could take an axe to the trees, they never fell.

On Star Wars Galaxies, we had shifting resource maps, and the ability for players to even found cities that existed on the map. But when when you dug up special ore, you never made a hole in the ground.

The fact is that one long-term legacy of themeparks and earlier online worlds is that they are really built more like stage sets, than as inhabitable places. They look good from a distance, but they are really not designed to be lived in.

To go beyond that, you have to simulate.

The approach in Stars Reach

As the video describes, we are doing a cellular automata approach. And from the video you might think that only applies to the terrain. But what is really going on is that we are pulling the evolved version of how the simulation worked in UO and SWG into 3d space.

Like UO, every “tile” knows what materials it is. Unlike UO, they can change. (On UO, we could only change the totals every 64 tiles, and we couldn’t reflect it visually at all, because the map was baked down and static).

Like SWG, we have the notion of these materials actually having varying statistics. But now, instead of these only being used for crafting, they can affect the physics of the world.

Like UO, creature AI is driven by looking for these underlying qualities — not by referencing specific object types. And like both games, crafting also uses these resource types and statistics.

There are new tricks, like states of matter, having everything affect locomotion, having chemical reactions between things, and so on. All in all, it should let us do much richer gameplay on many fronts. Even something mundane like farming can now draw from a host of variables that normally aren’t available to the game system.

Static on top of dynamic

One concern people always have is that this can mean that you have a soup of procedurally generated stuff that doesn’t cohere or cannot accommodate narrative. But the beauty of simulation, as opposed to just procedural generation of static content, is that you can always stack static content on top of it and it will fit in pretty well, because it also obeys the rules of the sim.

The real win, though, is always player empowerment. And that’s really what we are aiming for here: worlds that react to what you do as you play, in plausible and fun ways.

Again, you can wishlist the game here.