Just Write A Game

When developing a game you're passionate about, sometimes you turn into a perfectionist. Hours of googling are sunk into researching shiny bits of tech that don't really matter. There comes a time when you need to quit obsessing and just write a game.

Just this last week, I became utterly obsessed with the thought of huge-scale worlds. ArmA of course was a big inspiration, supporting absolutely gigantic maps of 50km or even 100km, far eclipsing the size of games like Skyrim. This is made possible because ArmA is based on a military simulation engine, which was designed for accuracy and huge scale and uses double-precision to represent coordinates. I don't get this luxury out of the box in Unity, but I wanted it so badly I sunk hours and even days of research into fighting Unity to get what I wanted. Floating point origin, terrain streaming, and even customized builds of third-party physics engines - nothing was out of the question to me.

I never even came close to completing my research and testing, and haven't even come close to creating a semblance of a game with it.

I realized that I needed to put down Google, and actually write a goddamn game.

I mean, hell, 32-bit floats give me 10km away from origin. That comes out to a usable world space of 20km (from -10km to +10km on each axis, if the world is perfectly centered around origin) before precision issues kick in.

That's huge. It's nearly the size of Skyrim (actually 37km, but approximately a quarter is hidden behind invisible walls and artificial barriers). It's bigger than Chernarus from ArmA/DayZ, which as far as I know is 15km x 15km. For a mostly on-foot multiplayer survival game, that is massive.

Even if I could have enormous 50km maps, what would I fill it with? Big stretches of the map would end up barren, leading to a huge but boring world. Small, but interesting, worlds are better than huge, and boring, ones.

So I need to just stop worrying and start writing something productive.