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by qchris 1566 days ago
This is really interesting, thanks so much for the reply! It's awesome to get a little bit more insight into projects like this, especially because I've got a limited (but growing) insight into both playing games and building projects with game engines.

Just to parrot back what (it sounds like) you're saying: using voxel-based assets in a game with community-contributed assets that extends itself using procedural generation is that the difficult of integration tends to be lower. This is because voxel shapes allow "artists" (which don't necessarily have to be highly-skilled) to build game-appropriate assets fairly easily, and for the generative process to more easily combine those elements into a cohesive world model than might be possible with polygon-based assets. Does that sound about right?

1 comments

Ya, it's certainly a art style that gets complimented by both the artists, and the developers that work on worldgen. There's a lot of grey edges as well; at our last release party we had an artist create an entire pre-made city, and load that in for players to explore at our release party. None of the city was proc-gen, but it was really great to see how the architecture was put together when it was crafted by a human, compared to how our different proc-gen cities/forts/encampments look a lot more like they're part of the landscape.

So basically + Cohesive world + Ease for artists + Doesn't need to look so real

> So basically + Cohesive world + Ease for artists + Doesn't need to look so real

I think this is the basic principle as to why Nintendo was able to get away with underpowered consoles for as long as they did. At least in comparison against other beefier consoles out during each releases duration.

So long as the aesthetics and quality are consistent, people are willing to accept a lot.

See also The Witness, which is gorgeous and probably could have run on a dreamcast.
From what I understand about the Dreamcast and even the Sega Saturn, is that both were underutilized in a myriad of ways, but one of the, the dreamcast I think, had technically two gpu chips.

There are comments from some developers over the matter from a while back. I think one of them was Todd Howard, back from when 'Todd rays' still weren't a thing.