Chapter 611: Chapter 579: If only Chang’an was this simple!
Lincoln didn’t linger on the issue for long. Quickly he decided to put the matter aside and sent a message to Camille Victoria, asking if she wanted to help make the wedding gift for Randall and Little Chun.
Without any hesitation, Camille Victoria accepted and expressed her enthusiasm to participate.
Regrettably, she had class in the morning and wouldn’t be available until the afternoon.
Lincoln consoled her, saying, ‘Don’t worry, focus on your class. This task won’t be done in a morning. After your class, you can help whenever you have time.’
Afterwards, Lincoln and Mavis set aside their phones and began to get busy.
First, they utilized “My World” to randomly generate an island as the main battlefield for the game. They sat down on the floor, planning to layout the game development process first.
Lincoln had only watched live streams of the game “Fortnite,” he hadn’t actually played it.
Therefore, when it came to “Gunfight + Building”, his first reaction was “I think I’ve heard of it,” and not, “I have played it.”
This indicated that he would have to arrange and plan the development of this cross-over mod himself—
The first step, of course, was: deletion.
A battle royale game obviously cannot make use of every single block type in “My World”.
If someone comes up with a fortress made of obsidian, which can’t be breached even by an anti-tank gun, the game would be pointless.
Not just the material, many mechanisms also needed to be deleted.
If a player can instantly build a Nether Portal and escape when surrounded, the rest of the players would be left dumbfounded.
Even if the portals were banned, what about an MP18 submachine gun enchanted with Multiple Attack and Quick Reload?
How many brain cells would Lincoln have to sacrifice just to balance this aspect?
Obviously, Lincoln did not want to waste his precious brain cells on such a matter, so the solution was simple—
Delete!
Additionally, to prevent players from digging deep pits and turning a good old battle royale into a tunnel war, Lincoln simply banned player interference with terrain.
This way, any materials they wanted to give to players could be placed on the surface and there would be no need to provide those they didn’t. This greatly reduced their workload.
In terms of mechanisms, enchantments, crafting and more were all deleted, leaving only basic building functionalities.
Meanwhile, in order to adapt to fast-paced gunfights, the building system also had to be simplified.
If it was still the original building mode, with one block built on top of another, players would be shot dead before they could even finish building a wall.
However, this task could be postponed.
The second step came first: Unifying numerical values between the two games.
The key point here was the “Hardness” of the material, or, in other words, the “health bar”.
“My World” already had a concept of a material’s “health bar”, specifically how many bare-handed hits it would take to break a material. This served as the benchmark value.
Now though, they had to incorporate the numerical value of weapon damage in “Battlefield” and the hardness value of materials in “My World” into the same reference system…
This way they could determine how much damage different weapons could inflict on different materials.
As it reflected in the game content, it would determine how many shots a player-built cover could take before being destroyed.
“Hmm…” As Lincoln pondered on that, he began to feel a headache come on. He suddenly felt like there were still too many materials left…
“How about we standardize everything into three categories? All ‘wood’ has one level of hardness, all ‘stone’ has a second, all ‘metals’ have another. Any material that doesn’t belong to these three categories won’t be given to the players.”
“That’s right, it greatly reduces the workload. Let’s do it this way!”
Next came the third step: Random spawns of weapons and supplies.
This could be achieved by tweaking the pseudo-random generation algorithm of the “My World” map. It wasn’t challenging.
They just needed to delete some of the outrageous weapons in “Battlefield” and put them in the algorithm.
However, before that, another issue needed to be resolved: terrain design.
Considering that surface buildings were the only construction materials available to players, and also assigning different weights to the quantity of weapons and supplies based on the density of surface buildings, it would be better to have a fixed island map rather than randomly generating one.
This means that …
“I have to design an island from scratch??”
Thinking about this, Lincoln’s headache wasn’t the only thing hurting… his whole body ached!
“No…” Lincoln suddenly had a stroke of genius amidst his dilemma, “We already have an existing island!”
“Dinosaur Island!” Mavis excitedly raises her little hand to answer.
“Exactly! We need structures right? We can simply move the Jurassic Park over!”
“No, I misspoke!” Lincoln shook his head, “We’re not moving Jurassic Park over, we’re moving the [Construct] system over to Jurassic Park!”
We might as well since “Paradise” is a project also led by Little Chun, it’s only right for us to utilize it.
With this, the terrain issue is also solved!
We have the terrain, the weapons, the numerical values, all that’s left is to simplify the [Construct] system, and then the game will be complete?
“This seems way too easy!”
“If only [Virtual Chang’an] could be this simple…”
Lincoln couldn’t help but sigh. He saved the planned content and then got up and left.
The specifics of the job can be handled with Little Princess this afternoon.
For now, he needs to head to [Virtual Chang’an] to find Xu Chun.
Today’s training content is a fully realistic cold weapon combat!
There are no buffs, a hundred percent enhanced realism in terms of physical capabilities and sensory experiences, a truly tiring, muscle aching, bleeding and painful experience of cold weapon combat!
—The only thing that isn’t pushed to ultimate realism is the sensation of pain.
In the current sensory database of Cloud Dream, the reality effect of [pain] is only perfected to 96%.
But [pain], a highly intense physiological experience, doesn’t need to be pushed to 100% to be felt as real.
Moreover, there’s no need to.
Not just [pain], the majority of extreme negative experiences need not be pushed to 100% reality.
—Lincoln has never experienced it, nor intends ever to, and definitely hasn’t thought about fully introducing these experiences into the virtual world.
The relationship between human brain cognition and physiological effects still holds many mysteries that demand reverence.
Not pushing the reality of extreme negative senses to 100% is also done out of caution, worrying about the emergence of unexpected aftereffects over a long period of time.
As for “negative sensory experiences” at its extreme — the concept of [death], Lincoln has never thought about transmitting it to the players, and has even technically “erased” it.
For instance, when players die in the game, either the duration is very short, or the players remain conscious throughout, the system could even transmit some slight positive emotion suggestions to the player.
Of course, these only remain as “concepts” rather than “feelings”.
As for the actual sensory experience of [death], Lincoln doesn’t even know how to “translate it into data”, let alone having any ways or directions to script it.
Because he has never experienced the feeling of [death], and he can’t possibly try to experience it now.
Interviewing people who have had near-death experiences is useless — this isn’t something that can be grasped based solely on linguistic descriptions.
So, although [pain] hasn’t achieved 100% realism, it’s already perfectly adequate for training purposes.
Subjectively, there’s hardly any discernible difference!
But it can’t fool the subconscious, so as long as it’s used properly and correctly, there’s no need to worry about this pain sensation lingering into reality and generating negative effects like “phantom pains”.
However, it must be especially stressed: it must be used “correctly”!
“Pain” cannot be connected together with “pleasure”, “excitement”, “euphoria”… or any other jumbled senses.
That would be a massive problem!
