random levels?

[Asraniel]

there was a thread in the old forums where this came up, and i wanted to bring it back. it would cool if there where random levels, like in hellgate london. add some roleplay features (look dungeondoom mod for doom3) and you got a roguelike in 3d.. would be the best game ever

[esteel]

I think someone said in the old thread that bsp maps are not really good for being generated on the fly. And as some maps can take hours to compile from .map to .bsp i think this is correct..

[Shoe]

They did say, however, that entity placement could easily be randomized, since it's handled by the engine at runtime... I think

[esteel]

Yes though i think this should be possible..

[tChr]

It is.. Minstagib uses this for the powerups.

[KadaverJack]

It is.. Minstagib uses this for the powerups.

No, mistagib just switches already existing entities.
Randomly placing new entities is a bit harder, since you might want to make sure that it's inside the map and not stuck in a wall.

Using entities to create random maps is possible, but afaik it would be not a really good idea performance-wise. Afaik visibility checks are done by the enigine by using bsp portals. An empty "base" map for randomization would have almost no portals and i doubt the engine would consider "wall entities" for visibily checks, so it would always render the whole map.

[tChr]

But it wouldnt be a poroble creating spawnpoints as you wish and use them by random, right?

[esteel]

Spawn points are just entities and those can be placed randomly.. if you can make sure they are within the map

[Vermeulen]

Enemies will not be at fixed locations, and there will not be a fixed amount of enemies, but the levels will stay the same. I think it would be pretty much impossible to randomly generate levels.

[hellborg]

Hey, hellborg from DungeonDoom here. I read your discussion about randomization and I can give you the basics of how it was done in DungeonDoom (bsp based Doom3 mod): No entities are placed or moved during randomization. Before level randomization all walls are in place, complete with a vis portal and an aas obstacle. During randomization, selected walls are made invisible and the associated vis portals and aas obstacles are enabled/disabled. Done that way, there is no hit on gameplay performance. Enemies or other objects are spawned from hiden spawnentities that are distributed all over the map and a number of additional objects (light sources, torch models, traps, stairs, ceiling heights) are changed according to the general dungeon structure. Please let me know if you have any questions.