I’ve worked as a level designer on FPS games. Dynamic generation might suit certain types of games (or something like an event mode), but a huge amount of design work and iteration goes into the layout of multiplayer game levels to make them enjoyable.

It’s also important that players/teams can memorise the level layouts in order to form strategies.

Still a cool idea though!

I haven't designed levels, but playing maps across a few games, I'm constantly amazed at how well small details are thought out. A seemingly random crate actually blocks off a line of fire that would give one team a major positional advantage; a tree breaks up the line of sight between two objectives; a decorative fire provides visual cover in an otherwise overly open lane; a curved passage has exactly the right proportions to give cover on one side while being open on the other, letting players choose when to engage.

In a well-designed map, every part has to play well with everything else, at least within line of sight. Even small changes to the layout result in unbalanced maps that lead to frustrating play. Randomly generated maps might be fun out of novelty, but they won't play well in the long run, at least for games like Counterstrike.

Compared to Fortnite, where every match is a unique experience with the addition of player-crafted buildings, and the static game map is under constant transformation each season.

"Guided by human actions" isn't exactly random; chaotic and unpredictable, sure!

On big budget games like Call of Duty, some of the multiplayer maps would be very finely tuned over thousands of hours of testing. A friend and I play regularly (just us against bots) and not a session would go past without either of us remarking that they'd nailed the maps. There's nowhere you can truly dominate a map. Everything has been tweaked to balance it all.

Oh yeah. I remember modding Quake and Unreal and such back in the day--after a lot of practice and experimentation, one learns to read a map like a book. Gameplay is built right into the structure of the world. When the map is made by an expert, players can still enjoy it without directly understanding it or even noticing it. It's an incredible example of intuitive design.

Not to say there isn't a way to make some form of satisfying gameplay out of a randomized sandbox, but it certainly won't be the same as an FPS map designed with experienced intent. That aside, it would probably produce a spot with excellent gameplay every so often out of pure serendipity, which would be fun to hunt for! I'd try it.

> It’s also important that players/teams can memorise the level layouts in order to form strategies.

I'd like to see someone challenge that notion. I mean, that's certainly a known and reliable model for multiplayer play, but we see single-player games like Spelunky where familiarity means being able to recognize how common elements interact and construct your strategy on the fly, as opposed to a Super Mario where you're just memorizing the layout. Has anyone seriously attempted that in a multiplayer game? Obviously there's a lot of ways it could fail, but I feel like it could be spectacular if done well.

Look for blind races of Super Mario Maker at Games Done Quick.

You kow what would be more fun - is a game with a squad that needs to advance along a path to a goal co-op style taking out hoardes coming in the opposite direction - and the prize goes to longest life of the team.

I can't tell if you're trolling by commenting with a basic summary of Left4Dead versus mode, a 10-year-old game.

Left4Dead?

If the level was ever changing and expansive it wouldn't matter if one side has a major advantage. Balance is important for small amounts of limited maps, balance is not so important when you have infinite maps and someone might never encounter that same setup as before after hundreds of games. Plus it will be way harder to find advantageous points to utilize when you have to find that spot through observational skills, rather than seeing somebody else use it or kill you from it and copying them.

It is definitely a different play style this way, but im sure many people would have a preference for it.

> but im sure many people would have a preference for it.

hardly, for shooters it will become very frustrating very fast, because a lot of the time you're going to get outrandomed rather then outskilled.

I mean I don't get why everyone is focusing on shooter style games, this would be really great instead for assassination games or hide&seek games, including path findings, runners, treasure hunt etc.

I think Arma is proof against it not working. Sure the maps are static in Arma and not random, but they are also large enough that I might utilize a same spot twice over hundreds of hours of play, while in something like CS or CoD I use the same spots hundreds if not thousands of times. Plus with the larger maps without artificially small arena limits there is very rarely a 'safe' area to camp anyways. In CS or CoD you can block off two lanes and be immune from a surprise flank, but when somebody can literally go 1km circle around you and your team without you ever knowing about it there really isn't a safe area.

If you want a more direct comparison on how map limits effects playstyles, compare Insurgency with Arma, they both have similar weapon deadliness and player types where running and gunning isn't really possible, but the overall game strategy players use and rely on is very different. You regularly see players in Insurgency using the map limits to their advantage and can just assume they won't get shot from certain directions because of it, in Arma you might try and utilize a similar area but there is no guarantee someone might not take the time to completely flank you or pop out of the sea or just take pot shots from 2km out on a hill top.

You could design to have repetitive features, ex. you know that any tunnel will always have stairs to a higher level next to a lamp.

Are the combatants channelled into the same area? If not you end up with a game of “needle in the (forever growing) haystack”.

Careful design of the "tiles" and some restriction to the play area could go a long way to make a "fun" map that is still hugely random.

You could throw in some magnets there, like a flag whose position is known and has to be captured before the other team does it.

Doesn't have to be a stationart target. Just mark the position of the leader in a deathmatch scoreboard on the map and tge problem solves itself while the game can keep moving over the map.

It would have to work somewhat like PUBG - people caught outside a given area slowly start to bleed health. (Or for bonus fun, are catapulted towards the center of the current combat area.)

As someone who already has an abysmal sense of direction (I basically never play 3D games because I'm just always lost), this is my nightmare.

If the playable area was small enough, this could actually reduce your disadvantage: nobody else would know what the map looked like, either.

Minecraft in survival mode is probably the worst. You can very easily get hopelessly lost - especially in the Nether world. Very easy to lose track of your portal which is not fun.

It can be fun. It can also be fun to come up with some sort of breadcrumb system and movement planning.

Exploration in proc gen worlds is mostly pointless anyway. Build roads to everywhere you want to go and you'll never get lost.

Yes, solved that by making big arrows out of bright coloured blocks pointing back the way I came. Once you find one arrow you're fine.

I also carried a lot of dirt around for those times when a bridge or stairs were needed to keep moving.

Pointless yes, but you could say that for most games.

I actually do play a lot of Minecraft, but my play style is probably unusual.

I almost never explore caverns. I strongly prefer to dig my own systematic mines to get underground resources, even though it's more work.

On the surface, I never explore without a map. I take copious notes of the coordinates of my home and interesting features.

I tend to spend most of my time building and acquiring, and very little time exploring (even though I love the procedural generator Minecraft uses).

couple that with some mirrors edge like free running mechanic. maybe a team vs 1 chase so all players would be running toward the same thing. reminiscent of a chase scene from a movie through an unfamiliar city, where a dead end could be just around the corner.

It's not infinite or procedurally generated, but the basis sounds a little like the Battlefield Rush modes present in the Bad Company 2 (my fav), BF3 and BF4 games. Haven't played the newer games. Maps have only 4-5 "sections" where conflict occurs each with different design, layout and challenges.

I knew if I scrolled enough I would find a comment about gaming. I have often wonder if well balanced, authentic looking, fun maps can be generated. This type of research looks to be part of the solution.

Would be fascinating to see if key BF maps concepts can be incorporated.

Since the algorithm is not deterministic I imagine it would be a nightmare to make all clients see the same world. But I agree it would be fun!

someone explained above that it’s just a bunch of “tiles” (assume they’re premade), so it’s a fairly simple matrix. it would be much less to transfer than custom maps for example, where clients download a large payload at the start of the game.

or, you don’t really care about tiles except that are directly around the players, as long as there’s a reasonable path between them. the city between them can regenerate and it wouldn’t matter; it’s not like they’d compare notes (and if they did, it’d be an odd coincidence rather than broken)

or, you can always use a map seed so the PRNG that makes it non deterministic (assuming that’s the only thing that does) generates the same numbers so that it is deterministic. the age of empires (old yes, but still relevant!) team wrote a great little piece about their multiplayer, and how they kept all their PRNGs in sync so that the games remained the same across hosts

> generates the same numbers so that it is deterministic.

The problem is, that the algorithm is path-dependent, deterministic PRNG is most likely already used, and doesn't help.

So if 2 players started at (x0, y0, z0) and went to (x1, y1, z1), but took different paths to get there - they would see a different tile :)

oh it's not? is it at least deterministic on the same architecture (ignore float precision) or is just inherent to the implementation?

someone mentioned that it’s random, but i feel like a PRNG seed would make it deterministic?

I get the feeling it's path-dependent. If I start uptown and you start downtown the algorithm could potentially show us two different cities. So we would have to agree on a city beforehand.

This is exacly it. Collapsing one area changes the possible blocks for nearby areas. If you use the same seed, you can still get different results by exploring places in a different order. Maybe there is a way to get around this though.

The server can establish an ordering for the collapse events, and send back to the client that ordering.

Edit: depending on how complex the world is, the server could probably just send out the world changes itself, rather than relying on each client to correctly (deterministically) apply the changes. It needs to do so anyhow for late joiners.

Just keep some buffer of generated tiles around the players, and either use a server to asynchronously decide on when which player moved to cause which tile to be generated. You can also use something distributed if you go for peer-to-peer communication. fix the seed and ensure everyone aggrees on the order in which they tell the generatoe that a certain chunk needs yo be fixed or should be freed from memory. Consider just aggreeing on added/deleted blocks inside fixed intervals, and then process the list in e.g. coordinate order. Consider Raft for peer-to-peer aggreement of the exact diff for the most recent period. Consider chunks of like 0.5 seconds per diff. Don't apply the diff tk the generator until a moment later. You can interleave the cknsensus process of successive blocks a bit.

Peer to peer greatly complicated multiplayer architecture- you _can_ build it like that, but it will be 10 times more difficult.

You kind of have to have the server doing the collapse anyway, or clients can cheat by biasing the collapse towards tiles that are beneficial to them in some way.

You can partially work around this by requiring the client to use a server-provided PRNG seed, although even then a kind of aim bot could help the player decide which path to explore to get favourable tiles.

So your best bet to avoid cheating is to do the collapse on the server using a hidden RNG.

either you have a server doing the collapse or you could send explored tiles as constraints to the other clients (this also reveals your position, but oh well).

of course tiles would need to be large enough to keep latency reasonable.

Something like this I think would be better suited to something like an infinite roguelike or even an idle game perhaps.