Realistic Ship Maps - Procedural Generation (With Video)

[OrphanMaker]

Hi, I like to do survival runs on mercury for fun. While doing these runs I have noticed the crazy and unrealistic maps. This is what got me started. On the grineer ship I went into the room with the large class windows, and though "cool I suppose to be on a ship." But later I lost the immersion when I looked at the map and saw how crazy it was. The big window room, to my right, was connected to a hall that went straight then immediately to the right past the big windows. How could that be possible.

 

I think the map procedural generator needs to be tweaked to produce maps realistically. Us players need to have an idea of how big the ship is, how the ship is built and so forth. This ship maps should be constructed as if we are on a large ship. We need to feel that immersion.

 

The ship needs less of a horizontal size. The ship map should increase the ship size vertically rather than horizontally.  This give the ship a more realistic feeling. The ship will not feel big, flat, and chaotic.

 

The ship needs to have an engine room, crew quarters, captain/officer quarters, storage, Hangar/flight deck, escape pods, bridge, and etc. These rooms to need to be spawned in a map layout that is believable. There needs to be a deck system, that these rooms would correspond too. The ship needs deck signs on walls to help players see where they are at. This will give the players an overall immersion.

 

Deck 1 Bridge + flight deck / Cannons

Deck 2 Information room/ captain + officer quarters /

Deck 3 Crew quarters / escape pods

Deck 4 Hangar

Deck 5 Engine room

Deck 7 Storage

 

 

The ship needs to spawn enemies in a more organized way that's realistic The spawn rooms should be the hangar room. The hangar room could have windows that let you see grineer getting off ships and preparing to run through enemy spawn doors. This will give the ship a more realistic atmosphere. Also enemies should spawn from random places like air ducts.

 

http://youtu.be/k6X-p2ErZyg

 

This video only show about 65% of the map that was grown by the map procedural generator. The map was much larger. I cut the video short because of the lag that was in the rest of it.

 

The Grineer Galleon is by far my favorite tileset. I like the atmosphere and vibe.

 

I believe the Grineer Galleon could benefit from a skeleton that would produce a more organized, intuitive map that would allow players to be able to navigate it through intuition. This map could benefit from the inclusion of one really large curved glass room. This room would serve as a skeleton for the other rooms to generate on. I have other idea but will post them later.

Edited August 2, 2014 by OrphanMaker

[Kestral9999]

I agree. The maps make absolutely 0 sense as of now at least as far as the ships are concerned.

[HunterHog]

I didn't think of how unrealistic it was until now. Thanks for the eye opener. +1.

[[DE]Momaw]

Or just make the levels static. You would lose the element of surprise of having two unexpected tiles joined together, but you would gain the fact that players could learn the ship and know where they are going in an immersive way.  Also opens up the possibility of having multiple KINDS of ships with different challenges.  Maybe there's a transport type ship which is huge corridors and big cargo bays and very little cover except in the side rooms, or a military type ship with clearly defined strongpoints designed to hold out against intruders.

[noveltyhero]

Or just make the levels static. You would lose the element of surprise of having two unexpected tiles joined together, but you would gain the fact that players could learn the ship and know where they are going in an immersive way.  Also opens up the possibility of having multiple KINDS of ships with different challenges.  Maybe there's a transport type ship which is huge corridors and big cargo bays and very little cover except in the side rooms, or a military type ship with clearly defined strongpoints designed to hold out against intruders.

Having each map different is what makes Warframe, my first experience on Apollodorus might not be the same as yours, it adds to the experience

[OrphanMaker]

Having each map different is what makes Warframe, my first experience on Apollodorus might not be the same as yours, it adds to the experience

I like the randomness, but we need more realistic map generations. It can be random but follow a general layout. The layout will be a Grineer - battleship in this case.

Edited July 28, 2014 by OrphanMaker

[egregiousRac]

Or just make the levels static. You would lose the element of surprise of having two unexpected tiles joined together, but you would gain the fact that players could learn the ship and know where they are going in an immersive way.  Also opens up the possibility of having multiple KINDS of ships with different challenges.  Maybe there's a transport type ship which is huge corridors and big cargo bays and very little cover except in the side rooms, or a military type ship with clearly defined strongpoints designed to hold out against intruders.

 

I kinda like the idea of static levels for the ships. It wouldn't take too much time to create static levels with the current tile system, and if there are a fair amount of spawn points, exit points, and objectives the levels would be more intricate and interesting than they are now.

 

Thinking about it, if you have three or four ships per tileset with crew quarters, a brig, reactor, and so on they can be used for all the mission types with many different paths. This would put as much variance as there is now, while being way cooler. It would also give a meaningful difference between the ship and planet missions. Ships would give you more choice in your path, planets would have larger spaces.

 

If DE is on the fence, do a one-off map for a quest to try it out. I think players would love it.

Edited July 28, 2014 by egregiousRac

[[DE]Momaw]

Having each map different is what makes Warframe, my first experience on Apollodorus might not be the same as yours, it adds to the experience

 

Not in a meaningful way though.  I couldn't tell you anything about the layout of my first experiences in Warframe except that it made no intuitive sense and my team left me behind to fend for myself.   There is different for the sake of different, and then there is different that actually affects the gameplay.  Consider loading into a mission and you learn that the target is a Grineer Type 4 cruiser.  "Nooo", says your team.  "FML", says your team. Why?  Because Grineer Type 4 cruiser has something about that it makes it unique and memorable.  Can you honestly say that you even notice the map layout at any point other than when the waypoint gets stupid and starts leading you in circles, or the game spawns the extraction zone a kilometer away?

[XCureWhite]

Hm, yeah it would be way cooler if the map generator for ships would make it realistic.

Because it really doesn't make any sense now in ships, if you can go around like that in circles, when there are windows in one of these tiles.

Warframe should be immersive now, because of the new player ships and so on, but it kills it with unlogical maps like this.

Defenses have already static map layouts, the grineer galleon only has one defense map, so why not make normal maps like this too with more variation.

 

So the random map generator makes sense on planets, but not on ships, you are right.

 

I would like to see this implemented...

[Gildemesh]

+1

 

It's not just impossible world gen, either. Sometimes, after leaving a room, an identical room will be past a door.

 

I got the same room three times, and I went 270 degrees. I thought I was going to go in a complete circle.

 

Also, one or two predictable levels would be nice, if it's not a generic mission like Exterminate. Something like Assassination would warrant such a thing.

[antano]

Having each map different is what makes Warframe, my first experience on Apollodorus might not be the same as yours, it adds to the experience

I love procedural level generation, it is really enjoying!!

[vaugahn]

They could make the tiles spawn in the same place every time, but have a large variety of different tiles. For example, you'd always get the engine room tile in the same place, but there are 10 different kinds of engine rooms that all require different play styles. 

[DSpite]

I'm pretty sure that the DE devs are looking at this thread with the same look on their faces as I have on mine.

 

"What are these people on" looks.

 

You know what will happen? You will get rooms with NO view of space, because it's easier and it will shut you the hell up.

 

This argument here is the equivalent of nit picking a Star Trek episode. It's a game where we kill things. Please stop imagining anything "realistic" in the equation, and move the hell along.

 

Are you people paying a monthly fee to ask for "more realistic map generation" ... in your ... game? No. Didn't think so.

Edited July 29, 2014 by DSpite

[Zeromanicus]

It's called Verisimilitude and i think people would be in favor of it. You can still have random maps, just less random.

[DSpite]

It's called "unrealistic expectations", that is what it is called.

I've seen ton of custom Portal maps that are completely out of wack when looked at logically, but I don't remember writing to the author asking for fixes. I was not there with the primary function of questioning why I could not just climb up the broken ceiling and escape to the surface when the climb looked really easy, but instead I was there to play Portal, ie fire ovals at walls and solve puzzles.

 

We are not in this game to send reviews to Better Homes And Gardens, we are here to shoot stuff. The layouts should not even be a blip on the agenda.

[DSpite]

And one more damn thing:

 

Realistic ships would be MASS PRODUCED and would LOOK exactly the same. Which means that at most we would be fighting on 1-3 ships with a set tile arrangement, and they will be "incredibly logical".

 

If that is what you all want, I'm sure DE can do that quite easily, so be careful what level of "realistic" you ask for.

[OrphanMaker]

Dspite why are you cursing? A realistic ship would be a lot better. It would help players navigate better, and it would feel more immersive. Last the unrealistic designs are very... bad looking.

Edited August 2, 2014 by OrphanMaker

[Jaycemonde]

It's a game where we kill things. Please stop imagining anything "realistic" in the equation, and move the hell along.

 

Maybe you should just sit in a room with an eye test machine and a pair of headphones playing beeps at random intervals. No graphics whatsoever. No aesthetic. No music, either, or voice acting. No story, no plot, no background lore to make things more interesting. Still randomized, of course, and the end score is the most important thing about the experience. It's the only thing about the experience, actually. You can't really get any more meta than this. Would that be better?

 

Obviously, everybody else cares about these things, or they wouldn't be giving feedback that the developers ask for.

 

 

Or just make the levels static. You would lose the element of surprise of having two unexpected tiles joined together, but you would gain the fact that players could learn the ship and know where they are going in an immersive way.  Also opens up the possibility of having multiple KINDS of ships with different challenges.  Maybe there's a transport type ship which is huge corridors and big cargo bays and very little cover except in the side rooms, or a military type ship with clearly defined strongpoints designed to hold out against intruders.

 

There's a lot of potential with this idea. Troop transports with lots of space dedicated to soldiers and a higher-than-average number of spawn points (it'd make extermination missions feel more meaningful, too), research vessels with all those really big, impressive energy beam rooms, small corvettes with a higher chance of "special forces" enemies such as Commanders and Seekers spawning, et cetera.

 

You could also hybridize approaches by having static templates based on ship types, but using several variations of the base rooms to give different feels--obvious examples include storage decks and hangars with varying levels of fullness, but there could also be cargo holds converted into makeshift crew quarters, damaged reactor auxiliary rooms (which is what I like to imagine those otherwise pointless green beams of energy are for) or fallback command posts and triage stations in ships that have already sustained damage (fire, invasion missions).

Edited August 2, 2014 by Jaycemonde

[OrphanMaker]

 

Maybe you should just sit in a room with an eye test machine and a pair of headphones playing beeps at random intervals. No graphics whatsoever. No aesthetic. No music, either, or voice acting. No story, no plot, no background lore to make things more interesting. Still randomized, of course, and the end score is the most important thing about the experience. It's the only thing about the experience, actually. You can't really get any more meta than this. Would that be better?

 

Obviously, everybody else cares about these things, or they wouldn't be giving feedback that the developers ask for.

 

 

 

There's a lot of potential with this idea. Troop transports with lots of space dedicated to soldiers and a higher-than-average number of spawn points (it'd make extermination missions feel more meaningful, too), research vessels with all those really big, impressive energy beam rooms, small corvettes with a higher chance of "special forces" enemies such as Commanders and Seekers spawning, et cetera.

 

You could also hybridize approaches by having static templates based on ship types, but using several variations of the base rooms to give different feels--obvious examples include storage decks and hangars with varying levels of fullness, but there could also be cargo holds converted into makeshift crew quarters, damaged reactor auxiliary rooms (which is what I like to imagine those otherwise pointless green beams of energy are for) or fallback command posts and triage stations in ships that have already sustained damage (fire, invasion missions).

 

One of my general Ideas was to have certain enemies spawn in certain locations. Like the commanders would spawn in the Bridge, and the lower lancers would spawn in the crew quarters. The grineer would spawn in area according to their rank. And in survival you would have new enemies entering the ship for out side, so they would come in through vents and incoming ships, like the ships you see landing on some of the corpus maps.

The deck system could be used to push players around. Like in a survival mission you start at the bottom of the ship and work your way up. The doors in the ship must be unlocked. Every 5 minutes the doors to the next higher deck unlocks. You must then rush to that deck before the lower level dock locks and you get no more air support. You would do this for every deck, and when you reach the top you fight the commanders. Then you work your way back down the decks. On your way down you fight all the enemies and it scale accordingly.

Edited August 2, 2014 by OrphanMaker