Expansions.........

Taiphoz

I just did a little infograph in another thread to show just how large a concept sub design actually was and it really got me thinking, what if everything in the world we know of right now was all just an island on a water world with no metal core but rather every bit of land we see at the moment is just one huge floating island.

This gives the dev's an easy way to add new content in the future by simply adding in more world/floating islands, or better yet fill the world with procedural world/floating islands.

I can imagine it now, we strive to survive in what we know of the world, we build bases, raise our tech and advance, we feel like were dominating and have what we think are all the subs, then we get a distress call and the computer/ai tells us that its coming from xxx meters to the south beyond the deep bottomless ocean, problem is when you venter out there super beasts spawn that eat the cyclops so we need a new sub, one that's able to not only carry the seamoth but also the cyclops and everything in our base that we have gathered upto that point.

So we guild the super sub, fill it with out crap dock our subs and set out toward some distant beacon, we can either travel there without seeing any land/islands or we could bump into some small ones, to explore but eventually we spot the real land/massive floating island thing which would constitute the games first expansion/dlc, with our super sub to big to explore this new land we dock it in deep water, get out our seamoths and cyclops and go explore and setup a new home, discover new creatures, new threats, the blue prints.....


long way off, but that would be really cool.

starkaos

Not sure how such a world would form naturally. Maybe a liquid hydrogen core would be able to do it, but that is supposedly found in Gas Giant cores due to the pressures involved or a small chunk of a Neutron Star at the center.

As far as expansions go, they can just keep on extending the map. The other possibility involves finding wormholes to other interesting locations.

Taiphoz

an almost totally water world would probably have a frozen or hard water core, water under so much pressure it becomes a super solid, but so deep that nothing man made could survive so for us essentially the ocean would be bottomless.

As for the huge floating land mass' that we would call places to explore filled with biomes, the game has already answered that for us just look at any of the floating island biomes, and scale the floater jellyfish up enough to hold up all the playable land mass, its not like the player would ever see that tho so you just need a little text lore to explain it.

zetachron

I was assuming that long ago. Perfect solution to have a supersized floating island as the whole player map, because it would be the best way of expanding it and the game itself introduced the floating islands already. The biggest problem would be explaining the massive active lava, but the game already has bent logic enough, so really no problem.

Then DLC or mods could easily expand the map and even without larger mapspace by using warper portals linking totally different global maps. Finally Subnautica 2 could adress going down to the real deep planet core. If UWE manages to make this game a success.

Sometimes I wonder about their decisions. Like creative mode being perfect for mod creation, but not using it. In creative you could terraform and create your own bases and much more and then save this all as a mod to the game. And all the devs talk about is that terraforming is too powerful, causing performance issues and has to be taken out of the game. WTF? Why not limit it or restrict it to creative mode or doing mods with it?

You know what tools the game needs for modding or doing your own creative worlds?:

• Terraformer with the ability to transform terrain types
• Farming plants and a special seeder tool to replant them into the world at any place
• Breeding creatures and releasing them to repopulate regions
• Builder tool with access to the full type library to build bases or wrecks of all types
• Build modifier to change base modules into abondoned or wrecked parts
• Scripting tool to create events or control creature behaviour

Taiphoz

The performance issues I suspect stem from the voxel engine which enables terraforming and not the actual terraforming itself, the world was essential like minecraft but with a nice sleek layer of cloth draped over it with nice textures, when you sculpted the world the blocks were removed and the cloth ajusted to hug the new shape in really basic terms that is to say.

All that for what ever reason was causing performance issues, personally I think its more likely that the engine is to blame rather than the technique itself given how well other games have pulled it off in better engines.

they could do Diablo 3 style random worlds, by building a selection of Biome set peices or tiles and then randomly populating the world with them to make up sorta semi random worlds, worked well enough in diablo 3, just random enough that you felt like you had not seen that area before but not so random that you didnt know where to go..