But what I'm looking for, is how quickly could a zone be finished up now (within. 5-10% completion) now by switching to Gaia?
I guess VR needs to answer that as we have no scale of reference. The only mostly completed zone that we know of is Faerthale which they have worked on for a long time. We only know that they can sculpt the zones a lot faster now, skipping a lot of grey boxing state. But the remaining tasks is likely not a lot faster, and we dont know how long they take to begin with.
We have seen them speed up virtually every process of the zone creation mechanics as they build towards alpha. Terrain generation and AI implementation, both have been made multiple degrees faster, but the brute force work on animations and designing the small scale world will be the bottle neck. The beauty of it though is that is an easy to implement change in the future. Every table or cup on the table in the world may be the same until one day they are not. So far they seem to have been building things to allow for efficient cutovers. It really depends on what you mean the zone going from 0 to 95% completed.
Gaia creates only a portion of the terrain. Outdoors, caves, underwater, roads can be built quickly using Gaia, but you need the graphical assets built out for it. This cave is made of clay, this cave is made of rock and carved out by hand, this cave appears to have been made from flowing lava, this cave is under a massive tree and held together with root systems, this cave appears to have been burrowed out by a large creature. The process will be much faster than doing it all by hand but you need to have the assets.
VR will still build out their city or settlements by hand. You may quickly build out the forest, the lakes, the all the trees, all the caves, but the cities are still built by hand from what they have said. There will be massive areas sculpted to fit the theme in the middle of the gaia created world.
You may see things like reusing premade settlements but that can be problematic as a player when every location is the exact same 10 buildings (looking at you new world) Initially doing this is perfectly fine for alpha. Build out the NPCs in and working on quests. It won't matter until you get closer to launch and want the places looking unique. The point is a zone can be entirely playable and testable, but the assets to give it the individual look simply are not created yet. Given the time consuming nature of the process it wouldn't be anywhere near 95% completed, but hiring an army of graphic designers can eventually take care of all of that work once everything else is in place.
I was one of the Alpha 2021 false prophets for a long time now. I would like to say in defense of myself the VR Alpha is now a polished alpha and not a normal alpha. They want additional features, classes, and content available before the alpha release. This move could very well draw in tons of new backers and get the game out sooner.
The only remaining event for the bland Alpha is the networking upgrade as they finish out their HDRP pass. Thats it, only one big update remaining. We won't see the VR marketing Alpha for a while, but the game will have hit the alpha phase in my eyes once this networking step is done. Everything shows them to be on track for 2021 networking implementation. Managing unrealistic expectations for people who have never played an alpha but will gladly report on how unfinished and broken the game is to the masses is something worth considering. I hope it pays off and lets VR bring in more people allowig them to hire more to speed up the process.
Jobeson said:[...]but the brute force work on animations and designing the small scale world will be the bottle neck. The beauty of it though is that is an easy to implement change in the future. Every table or cup on the table in the world may be the same until one day they are not. So far they seem to have been building things to allow for efficient cutovers. It really depends on what you mean the zone going from 0 to 95% completed.
[...] The process will be much faster than doing it all by hand but you need to have the assets.
[...] but the cities are still built by hand from what they have said.
You may see things like reusing premade settlements but that can be problematic as a player when every location is the exact same 10 buildings (looking at you new world) Initially doing this is perfectly fine for alpha. Build out the NPCs in and working on quests. It won't matter until you get closer to launch and want the places looking unique. The point is a zone can be entirely playable and testable, but the assets to give it the individual look simply are not created yet. Given the time consuming nature of the process it wouldn't be anywhere near 95% completed, but hiring an army of graphic designers can eventually take care of all of that work once everything else is in place.
[...something somethng network something important...]
Iirc, before there were streams, the newsletters had displayed defined graphic assets down to...tree knots... for at least 3 races? maybe 2? and I mean culturally identifieable assets so I would say at least some of the assets are already created.
Project Faerthale was something along those lines.
BitCrunzh said: I think the tools they have presented in the last dev stream allows to speed up the sculpting of the zone. It allows them to get the rough shape and layout of a zone done quickly. There will still be a lot of handcraftet elements to add and manual adjustments as they mention. Apart from the sculpting, the zone also need to be populated, itemized, perception quests/tasks which I assume will take the majority of the time. All the stuff that makes the zone have an identity and feel alive.
I'll be that the creation of 'the zone', meaning just the terrain upon which everything in the zone resides, is the least time-intensive part of building a zone. It's all the stuff that goes into it which takes the vast majority of time of creating a fully functioning zone. How much might these new tools reduce the time it takes for this game to reach release? Not much I'll bet.
Vandraad said:BitCrunzh said: I think the tools they have presented in the last dev stream allows to speed up the sculpting of the zone. It allows them to get the rough shape and layout of a zone done quickly. There will still be a lot of handcraftet elements to add and manual adjustments as they mention. Apart from the sculpting, the zone also need to be populated, itemized, perception quests/tasks which I assume will take the majority of the time. All the stuff that makes the zone have an identity and feel alive.I'll be that the creation of 'the zone', meaning just the terrain upon which everything in the zone resides, is the least time-intensive part of building a zone. It's all the stuff that goes into it which takes the vast majority of time of creating a fully functioning zone. How much might these new tools reduce the time it takes for this game to reach release? Not much I'll bet.
They said in the stream that the conversion of a zone from greybox to "complete" would take a day. For them that's probably a 12 hour day, and probably without major complications. The greybox part is another story. I bet that's an iterative process with many tweaks Based on team and leadership feedback. Wouldn't surprise me if such a simplistic looking thing takes a week or two At a minimum. It's the foundation that the flow of all the gameplay and player progression relies on and it needs to be rock solid.