I know progress happens in incremental steps, but this seems like quite the baby step from other world gen demos unless I’m missing something.
These AI generated towns sure do seem to have strict building and civic codes. Everything on a grid, height limits, equal spacing between all buildings. The local historical society really has a tight grip on neighborhood character.
From the article:
> It would also be sound, with different areas connected in such a way to allow characters to roam freely without getting stuck.
Very unrealistic.
One of the interesting things about mostly-open world game environments, like GTA or Cyberpunk, is the "designed" messiness and the limits that result in dead ends. You poke at someplace and end up at a locked door (a texture that looks like a door but you can't interact with) that says there's absolutely nothing interesting beyond where you're at. No chance to get stuck in a dead end is boring; when every path leads to something interesting, there's no "exploration".
Explores what’s outside the bounds in video games.
For example:
Off Camera Secrets | Goldeneye (N64) - Boundary Break https://youtu.be/Reaz4aKYci8
Hidden Secrets in GTA 3 https://youtu.be/xBpNWVDQ5QM
While this sentence makes sense from current game design perspective, I have to say it strikes me as very unrealistic. Facing dead ends has always ruined the immersion for me.
Other parts of Second Life have roadside motels. Each room has a bed, TV, bathroom, and maybe a coffee maker, all of which do something. One, with a 1950s theme, has a vibrating bed, which will make a buzzing sound if you pay it a tiny fee. Nobody uses those much.
No plot goes with all this. Unlike a game, the density of interesting events is low, closer to real life. This is the fundamental problem of virtual worlds. Realistic ones are boring.
Amusingly, Linden Lab has found a way to capitalize on this. They built a suburban housing subdivision, and people who buy a paid membership get an unfurnished house. This was so successful that there are now over 60,000 houses. There are themed areas and about a dozen house designs in each area. It's kind of banal, but seems to appeal to people for whom American suburbia is an unreachable aspiration. The American Dream, for about $10 a month.
People furnish their houses, have BBQs, and even mow their lawn. (You can buy simulated grass that needs regular mowing.)
So we have a good idea of the appeal of this.
Eve is a game about interstellar corporate fuckery where gigantic starships fling missiles and lasers at each other.
That... is not a recreation of real life.
For instance second life might be a lot more interesting if you could kill someone, assume their identity and pull off other such shenanigans. At the same time there should be real user “law enforcement” continually tracking down criminals of this nature. Being arrested should mean real jail time/account suspension for a fixed amount of time etc. Criminals should get a real user driven trial where they can argue their case, real user lawyers you can hire etc.
But that's the point! Daggerfall is like this too: huge areas (both cities and landscapes) with nothing interesting in them. That's what makes them feel so lived in. They're not worlds designed for the player to conquer, they're worlds that exist independent of the player, and the player is just one of a million characters in it.
The fact that I pass by 150 boring buildings in a city before I get to the one I care about both mirrors reality and makes the reward for finding the correct building all the greater!
Reminded me of this clip of Gabe Newell talking about fun, realism and reinforcement (behaviorism):
You must live in a different reality. The one I live in has fractal complexity and pretty much anywhere I look is filled with interesting ({cute..beautiful},{mildly surprising..WTF?!},{ah, that's an example of X..conundrum}) details. In fact, so far as I can tell, it's interesting details all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in any direction I probe.
I do think Meta has the tech to easily match other radiance field based generation methods, they publish many foundational papers in this space and have Hyperscape.
So I'd view this as an interesting orthogonal direction to explore!
that's 95% of existing video games. How many doors actually work in a game like Cyberpunk?
on a different note , when do us mere mortals get to play with a worldgen engine? Google/meta/tencent have shown them off for awhile but without any real feasible way for a nobody to partake; are they that far away from actually being good?
The quality is currently not great and they are very hard to steer / work with in any meaningful way. You will see companies using the same demo scenes repeatedly because that's the one that looked cool and worked well.
There's also plenty of games with fully explorable environments, I think it's more of a scale and utility consideration. I can't think of what use I'd have for exploring an office complex in GTA other than to hear Rockstar's parodical office banter. But Morrowind had reason for it to exist in most contexts.
Other games have intrinsically explorable interiors like NMS, and Enshrouded. Elden Ring was pretty open in this regard as well. And Zelda. I'm sure there are many others. TES doesn't fall into this due to the way interiors are structured which is a door teleports you to an interior level, ostensibly to save on poly budget, which again, concerning scale is an important consideration in both terms of meaning and effort in-context.
This doesn't seem to be doing much to build upon that, I think we could procedurally scatter empty shell buildings with low-mid assets already with a pretty decent degree of efficiency?