omicron1

One of the more common ways of addressing memory use is by partitioning and streaming. While typically regarded as a graphics technology, I see no reason why it couldn't apply to gameplay as well, especially as procedural content is made more prevalent. Say you have a person in your town who will go about his daily routine for you if you're zoomed in enough. This routine involves walking from a house to the town square, and from there to the library, and back. N

One cheap, easy way to do things is to slap a full-screen shader (compositor, in Ogre-speak) over the top of things - the equivalent of using those photoshop filters in the actual game. Change the saturation and value curve and you've got yourself a more colorful game; perform additional modifications (for example, using value or specific colors to influence the saturation curve) and you can have different color schemas in different parts of the world. Sure, it's possible to construct a light

I must say, I love working with terrain generation. It can take a while (depending mostly on the size of the world you're generating) but it doesn't take long to write, and you can do some really interesting stuff with it. I wrote a diamond-square (simple fractal) map generator once that did the following: * Cliff map decides where cliffs, valleys, and sloping terrain go. * Height map takes influence from cliff map. * Fertility, temperature maps take into accou