~ Dig Dig Dig For victory! pull your sleeves up!! ~
~ Dig Dig Dig For victory! pull your sleeves up!! ~
Author Victor Tiller
Intro
Will E2V1 present a case study in the capabilities and limitations of terrain manipulation within a game environment? Well - it’ll definitely do one of those! Capabilities, or, limitations?!
It is worth noting that I am talking about Modifying landscapes; referring to changing the physical terrain of an environment, such as creating valleys, mountains, caves, or bodies of water. This can be a part of many games where you can shape the land to suit your needs or desires.
We are not talking about Terraforming which is a broader concept that includes altering a planet’s atmosphere, temperature, and ecosystem to make it habitable for life (or not). I will say though that i think E2 should implement something like this! Anyway…
Gaming Engine
The Unity3D engine, which powers E2V1, offers tools for the devs to create terrains, but will we be able to modify terrain in-game? Answer;very unlikely. It’s never been stated but it is unlikely to ever be a thing players could do inside of the game - if you have a property on the side of a mountain you’ll never be able to flatten it!
The ability to modify terrain in real-time has been done many times - seen in No Mans Sky and the more obvious voxel-based Minecraft and Roblox.
These examples use unreal or Havok etc but E2 is built using Unity3D which whilst being a great engine for many things, its terrain system traditionally has been used for surface-level modifications only. While it allows for the creation of hills, valleys, and other topographical features, it does not natively support the creation of overhangs or fully enclosed spaces like caves. This is due to the way Unity handles terrain, which is essentially a heightmap where each point on the map corresponds to a specific elevation - you can’t go lower than the floor, obviously!
Super Devs
Not wanting to speculate! (there are after-all a number of workarounds such as custom mesh generation) it is worth looking at a recently-ish released Planet Crafter to get an idea of how mining inside of E2V1 could work!
As you can see, these are static mining rigs “creating” resources - they are not dug out of the ground but rather the game code creates them.
Speculation time; is there are option to allow for this terrain modification? well, maybe.
By combining pre-determined mesh areas alongside cellular automata and/or Perlin noise/worms could be a method. In this example a player, upon discovering and “activating” the mesh in-game sets off a real-time loop which creates a cave system underground. Computational power would be interesting on a world scale! It would definitely need a queuing system to manage. Also how would tile ownership work?
Emergence
This in-connectivity in the metaverse also brings up another issue; Emergence. Simply being able to modify landscapes could be game breaking for other players (imagine destroying a a lake oasis, or a high cliff face constructed around an entire property).
A great example of complex situations in gameplay arising from simple rules is Play John Conway’s Game of Life (playgameoflife.com) whereby small changes can to a simplistic ecosystem can have huge (unforeseen) results! Even better though - people have discovered space ships and other cool things!
Conclusion
What is obvious is that the devs would need a super-human level of Unity3D and programming skills to pull anything close to player-modified terrains in a metaverse the size of Earth. What we’ve seen so far at least with the scale of the planet is remarkable, we saw it played in real-time at GDC 2024 and I would be be very surprised if Untiy3D themselves do not advertise these feats themselves soon!
Modification maybe not, impressive gaming definitely!