Different ground levels in camps to metropolis. Metropolis look. Py'rai node.

Skyri02

Everything i will write here is just suggestion and ideas. And i dont know everyhing that is written in the wiki so maybe the ideas i already have wrote here, already exist and i am sorry if so.

I noticed that the ground level the camps to metropolis are build on looked very flat and it did not give a feeling of uniqueness.
Here is what i mean about looking abit flat.




I would love to see some difference in ground levels inside the camps/towns/metropolis, kinda like small hills .
Example 3-5 player houses are very near each other on a hill like the bluish picture below. Or the blacksmith shop is alittle bit higher up than the rest of the shops. This pictures below explains well what i am thinking about ground level looks.




A nice touch to the tavern in a town/city/metropolis would be to make a tavern porch that is abit over the ground where ppl can roleplay and play cards and drink while looking down on bypassing adventures. The picture shows what i am thinking



Another nice thing that would make the "town" feel more unique would be to not place different shops and player houses in a straight line like the picture (1) below. The town would feel more fantasy and give a cozy feeling if the houses was placed "crazy" like the picture marked as (2).
I know that this is not the most realistic or most convinient placement for buildings, but i see this as a fantasy game and things dont need to look perfect or reflect reality. I love to enter a fantasy world where some stuff are crazy looking or crazy placed and just get a feeling of a magic world Ofc every house dont have to be placed weired, its nice to mix it




At metropolis stage it would be awasome to have platforms/paths high up on the different heights of buildings where you can look down on your city and admire the view.
This pictures below also show different looks of big "metropolis" that would looks so good if it was in the game :P Ofc we might wonder how can a Node siege happen in a metropolis that looks like this? to small paths and narrow spaces to fight 250 vs 250. I was thinking that a solution to this would be to have this huge buildings at the back and sides of the metropolis so they dont interfer the sige battle while smaller buildings with a more open space will be in the middle of the metropolis. Lets just say that it has to be designed in a way so the inside of the metropolis looks awesome and mighty while also be able to have a big sige battle. This means that the attacker wont have to fight battles in the narrow spaces or huge building to get inside the "throne room" and win the sige, it will be a more forward way to get to the "throne room". Well we can have rogues and other attackers that want to sneak around this huge narrow buildings so its important to have guards in the "throne room" so they dont capture it






We have seen art concept about the Py'rai camps. And Steven spoke about how they can make trees grow in the middle of nowhere if the Py'rai wanted to start to build a town in the dessert.
I was thinking, since it is a fantasy game everything dont have to make 100% sense xD It can be they have magic seeds that will grow anywhere. So if they plant it in the desert it will grow a tree there so they can make buildings around or inside the big trees. Kinda like the picture below
I would love to see a town/city/metropolis like this. All the leafs around the houses, lanterns glowing in the dark with fireflies around them and some fog/mist high up where the tree houses are with ambient sound and knirking tree sounds

The question is again how can we have a 250 vs 250 battle sige there? The explination is the same as i did before. Have the big player house/shops trees at the back and sides of the town/city/metropolis and let it be abit more open in the middle where the fight can be. The more open space can ofc have ground building and some few shops up in the trees but the space need to be more open.

McShave

Here is my recollection of my what I know about cities on landscape.

A city will have the rough layout as the land that the city spawned on. The highest point in the node's city's area is the mayor building.

Also they had an interesting video explains their random city generating abilities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYFKi4j-Zaw

I also want to say that node cities will be battlegrounds when they are being sieged, so they have to be interesting when fighting large battles in them.

unknownsystemerror

As McShave has pointed out above, how node settlements are generated has changed over the years. Those early iteration flat blocks were there for early testing. Intrepid has now mentioned a couple times that changes to the node generation system by their world manager has gone beyond that and now takes terrain and verticality into account on "pop." We hopefully will see this realized in Alpha 2 testing. As to how siege mechanics work in actual nodes, that is also a wait and see.

Dygz

Also, I think we only made it to the start of Stage 3 in Alpha 1.
We could elect Mayors, but we couldn't construct the buildings and services that would likely begin vertical growth, i.e, town and city stages.

unknownsystemerror

@Dygz Ahh, sorry if I wasn't clear. By vertical growth I meant that a settlement may slope to fit available terrain. If if "pops" initially on a hillside it wouldn't just dig into the side of the hill as it expands, but would slope up or down. Also that the layout is more procedural in generation when it comes to layout and terrain impacts. (Steven has said he doesn't like to use "procedural" because people get the wrong idea.) Meaning that certain things will affect that layout in certain biomes. From last info I remember there are 5-6 spots in a node area where the world manager looks at placement of the initial camp for that node. Once down, that is where it will radiate from. Which means even more variety server to server, since AppleJack node settlement in AppleOrchard node will not always be in the same place depending on the random.

Caww

I'm too old for all those stairs and hills... ranch-style is fine with me...

Zekethephoenix

It was a little bit immersion breaking in the A1 to have all the available level 0 node spawns be bit flat spaces out in the world. I would hope the towns would have a nice natural grading rather than the pre deforested and flattened zones we had.