I imagine a counter strike scenario where the area of engagement is constantly moving throughout this infinite city, so the fight is waged over a constantly changing landscape. Hecka fun or hecka confusing?!
It’s also important that players/teams can memorise the level layouts in order to form strategies.
Still a cool idea though!
In a well-designed map, every part has to play well with everything else, at least within line of sight. Even small changes to the layout result in unbalanced maps that lead to frustrating play. Randomly generated maps might be fun out of novelty, but they won't play well in the long run, at least for games like Counterstrike.
Not to say there isn't a way to make some form of satisfying gameplay out of a randomized sandbox, but it certainly won't be the same as an FPS map designed with experienced intent. That aside, it would probably produce a spot with excellent gameplay every so often out of pure serendipity, which would be fun to hunt for! I'd try it.
I'd like to see someone challenge that notion. I mean, that's certainly a known and reliable model for multiplayer play, but we see single-player games like Spelunky where familiarity means being able to recognize how common elements interact and construct your strategy on the fly, as opposed to a Super Mario where you're just memorizing the layout. Has anyone seriously attempted that in a multiplayer game? Obviously there's a lot of ways it could fail, but I feel like it could be spectacular if done well.
It is definitely a different play style this way, but im sure many people would have a preference for it.
hardly, for shooters it will become very frustrating very fast, because a lot of the time you're going to get outrandomed rather then outskilled.
I mean I don't get why everyone is focusing on shooter style games, this would be really great instead for assassination games or hide&seek games, including path findings, runners, treasure hunt etc.
If you want a more direct comparison on how map limits effects playstyles, compare Insurgency with Arma, they both have similar weapon deadliness and player types where running and gunning isn't really possible, but the overall game strategy players use and rely on is very different. You regularly see players in Insurgency using the map limits to their advantage and can just assume they won't get shot from certain directions because of it, in Arma you might try and utilize a similar area but there is no guarantee someone might not take the time to completely flank you or pop out of the sea or just take pot shots from 2km out on a hill top.
Exploration in proc gen worlds is mostly pointless anyway. Build roads to everywhere you want to go and you'll never get lost.
I also carried a lot of dirt around for those times when a bridge or stairs were needed to keep moving.
Pointless yes, but you could say that for most games.
I almost never explore caverns. I strongly prefer to dig my own systematic mines to get underground resources, even though it's more work.
On the surface, I never explore without a map. I take copious notes of the coordinates of my home and interesting features.
I tend to spend most of my time building and acquiring, and very little time exploring (even though I love the procedural generator Minecraft uses).
Would be fascinating to see if key BF maps concepts can be incorporated.
Edit: depending on how complex the world is, the server could probably just send out the world changes itself, rather than relying on each client to correctly (deterministically) apply the changes. It needs to do so anyhow for late joiners.
You can partially work around this by requiring the client to use a server-provided PRNG seed, although even then a kind of aim bot could help the player decide which path to explore to get favourable tiles.
So your best bet to avoid cheating is to do the collapse on the server using a hidden RNG.
of course tiles would need to be large enough to keep latency reasonable.
or, you don’t really care about tiles except that are directly around the players, as long as there’s a reasonable path between them. the city between them can regenerate and it wouldn’t matter; it’s not like they’d compare notes (and if they did, it’d be an odd coincidence rather than broken)
or, you can always use a map seed so the PRNG that makes it non deterministic (assuming that’s the only thing that does) generates the same numbers so that it is deterministic. the age of empires (old yes, but still relevant!) team wrote a great little piece about their multiplayer, and how they kept all their PRNGs in sync so that the games remained the same across hosts
The problem is, that the algorithm is path-dependent, deterministic PRNG is most likely already used, and doesn't help.
So if 2 players started at (x0, y0, z0) and went to (x1, y1, z1), but took different paths to get there - they would see a different tile :)