Update the cyphesis default world for the 0.5.5 release

Registered by Erik Ogenvik

The default moraf world in cyphesis hasn't been changed much in the last years. It's unfortunately not using many of the more recent media additions, is not very optimized for the way Ember displays terrain and could in general be a little bit larger. In time for the next release we would like to update the default world to better reflect the current state of Worldforge. This involves:
* Use more trees, boulders and bushes. Currently we only use one oak tree, of one size. We should use more of the diverse tree meshes available, such as the birch, and make the trees differ in size. The forest framework in Ember allows for much larger forests thanks to the imposter techniques used. Likewise we should use more of the new boulder meshes.
* Add more natural mushrooms. Mushrooms usually grows in cluster. We have two different mushroom meshes and four different kinds of textures. These should all be used in the world.
* Add apple trees. We already have an apple mesh, do we have an apple tree too? If so we should provide an apple tree grove, with trees planted in rows.
* Update the village. We should use the new cg_house meshes instead of the older ones, we should make the village larger and more naturally laid out, where each house is more unique and with its own garden and accompanying items.
* Use the stone palisade. This should be used much more in the village to divide the houses, as well as along the path. Also add smaller boulders near.
* Replace the sty with a sty built with a more advanced sty built from instances of the wooden_fence.
* Add more animal enclosures near the village, using the wooden_fence entities, where we'll keep other animals such as horses and cows (for which we have meshes).
* Add the inn to the village. In general we need to make the village more naturally laid out, with the inn in the center and a larger road running through it (as usually is the case with villages)
* Replace the ogre camp with a camp built with the different palisade meshes. The ogre camp could also be a little further away and should have more "debris" lying around, like instance of the bottle, the bowl, ham and skeletons.
* Add barrels and crates to the village, though try to keep the number down. You don't see that many crates in real life, though most older villages tend to have barrels close to the house (for collecting rainwater).
* Add barrels and crates to the jetty. This is more natural since crates and barrel actually do come in play when you ship stuff.
* Add carts both the the area around the jetty and to the village. Carts could also be added to the enclosures where we'll keep livestock.
* Make the world larger and the mountains not as steep. The Ember terrain engine can easily handle far away mountains, but whenever there's too steep slopes the LOD system is taxed, so rather than having close, looming mountains we would like to have as high, but much more far away mountains.
* Add a chopping block to where the butcher is.
* Put the monster_skeleton in the world somewhere. It's such a nice mesh, so it should be somewhere, even though it might not be obvious why. Perhaps some place a little more remote, up near the mountains, so to prepare for some kind of quest?
* We need to think on how to best add the furniture to the world. We have quite a collection of furniture, but he problem is that since we don't have collision detection inside buildings we can't let players enter buildings in a good way, and thus have a little hard time to actually show off the furniture.
* Add a food merchant to the village. One of the ideas with how players now starve is that they should as their first order of business go and get some food, but alas there's currently really no place to get it.
* In general I think we should try to redesign how people enter the world. I'm thinking that new players should start out at a small peninsula, sloping downwards towards the village. Near the starting position should be both a npc as well as some signs (for which we need to create a mesh) informing the players. There should be a path for the players to follow; everything to make it more natural for them to venture further into the world.
* The players should also start out with the correct clothes entities attach to the correct places (the shirt to the torso and so on) so that we more properly can use the modelmapping framwork for the male.

This is quite a large list of items, and it's vital that the tools in Ember for more easily generating atlas type definitions as well as exporting entities are improved so that we don't have to do all of these things by hand.

Blueprint information

Status:
Started
Approver:
Erik Ogenvik
Priority:
High
Drafter:
Erik Ogenvik
Direction:
Needs approval
Assignee:
Erik Ogenvik
Definition:
Approved
Series goal:
None
Implementation:
Beta Available
Milestone target:
milestone icon 0.5.5
Started by
Erik Ogenvik

Related branches

Sprints

Whiteboard

(?)

Work Items

Dependency tree

* Blueprints in grey have been implemented.

This blueprint contains Public information 
Everyone can see this information.

Subscribers

No subscribers.