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What is Terasology
The what's what of Terasology - for the who's who see DevTeam.
While the exact destination of Terasology is subject to change as we're still early in development we try to give some ideas of where things are heading via milestones on GitHub and history on the DownloadTerasology page - but for a nice short summary here's a quick list:
- Minion management akin to Dwarf Fortress or Dungeon Keeper - creatures that will have needs that take up space to provide that then in return provide you with various benefits. This helps fill out the world.
- The simple visual appeal of 3D in a voxel world like Minecraft - not too focused on providing hi-res splendor, as that inevitably leads to the high-cost race towards photorealism. At the same time, if we can jam in some fancy effects on top of that, like reflective water, so be it! :-)
- A deeper tech tree to climb, achievable mostly solo but heavily aided by minions or other players
- Crafting more focused on realistic workshops improving quality and quantity based on upgrades, specific minions, etc
- A more vivid world that's alive and changes over time, even without direct manipulation by the player
- Autonomous NPC societies that grow on their own and can both be source of minions as well as valuable trading partners. Or be your greatest enemy...
- Various kinds of blueprinting to allow the reproduction of specific objects, tradeable with other players. Also similar systems to designate areas as special in some fashion, like enclosing workshop areas or defining defenses
- Portals to center societies around and allow easy travel (but not transfer of goods) between settled areas
- Meaningful (and meaningless!) statistics about your world
- Realistic simulations of world elements like liquid flow, structural support, natural growth, and the dangers of delving deep
- And maybe most importantly: Build a community around an open source project that will be able to achieve all this and more - making Terasology more than just a game
Why "Terasology" ?
Like many other starting games Begla started out with a quick name, "Blockmania" in this case, when the goal was just making a cool voxel engine. After our team grew and we set serious goals we needed a serious name that was unique and memorable. During an everyday ranting session between organizer Cervator and wordsmith Stuthulhu "Anthropology" came up as a goal for the game, but for creatures (Anthropology is specific to humans). Stuthulhu came up with "Teras" and other fancy latin/greek terms and it more or less just lined up with -ology perfectly
An astute fan came up with some more details on the name after the fact:
On minor correction is that the word Terasology is coming from the greek word (τερατολογία) which the combination of the two greek words teras (τέρας) and logos (λόγος). In english the combination of Teras + Logos should be Teratology not Terasology. Because (Τέρας + λόγος = Τερατολογία)
Teratology does exist as a term (see Wikipedia), but we're taking a little artistic liberty with the correct formation of the word to make it our own and arrive at unique territory :D
Post your questions in the forum, reply to tweets, comment on Facebook / Google+ or GitHub, whatever gets our attention!
Multiplayer is planned and the architecture to support networking is being developed. We're aiming for low-scale multiplayer at first, but interested in how far we can push the numbers. The Portal system allows us a good way to cut the world into distinct pieces to possibly support multi-node worlds as well as build in-game hierarchies to ease collaboration