Hand Crafted Planets post Odyssey?

[Ian Doncaster]

Exactly. Putting down reasonably plausible city is 1993. Making it interactable/walkable with NPC presence is the 2023.

Or possibly the 2043, or the 2063. Doesn't mean that it's possible today.

I'm having trouble of thinking of a game that's dedicated to city-like environments that has full-scale NPC simulation and interaction on arbitrary street and building layouts ... never mind bolting it on as a side feature of a space sim.

 

[MariusTitus]

Or possibly the 2043, or the 2063. Doesn't mean that it's possible today.

I'm having trouble of thinking of a game that's dedicated to city-like environments that has full-scale NPC simulation and interaction on arbitrary street and building layouts ... never mind bolting it on as a side feature of a space sim.

Way I see it, people have been playing this game for so long they forgot it's a game (and far from perfect at that). You don't have to have some supreme sci-fi cyberpunk cities on planets, let alone generated randomly, that would bring even more pain. And with NPC simulation, why the hell would anyone want that? That's stuff for NASA computers to run simulations with, not for gameplay. You want cities, premade, numerous versions, with random NPCs walking around, maybe some random events, and that's it. Maybe add some ground missions in that city, shouldn't be hard. But to be honest, it's doubtful anything like that will ever happen, seeing how it goes. There's a lot of ideas floating around in this community, ship interiors, boarding, exiting your ship in space like in X4, exploring space wrecks yada yada yada, we can all dream, but that's about it. I wish I could visit a gas giant, witness the storms in it.. but we're beating a dead horse with our wishes. We'll be glad if they keep servers on.

 

[Planewalker]

FWIW, I saw a crater with a central peak in Odyssey the other day.

Seen a few of them during exploration. IIRC one was even in the bubble.

I think for ELWs a temporary solution could be an orbital transit station; that way you could have city/planet gameplay without the need for ship landing.
(temporary because then it is possible to work on the weather/ship mechanics both during and after the initial build)

Ie, you dock at the transit station and then go to a terminal like apex to choose your planetside destination and a shuttle will take you there.
-creating a hyperjump-like loading tunnel then enables transit and avoids the heavy load of CMDRs being able to land everywhere.


The above could be applied to gas giants or thicker atmo planets too, although for gas giants some sort of gas harvest via probes might be more appropriate.

 

[Fizzatron]

Could.

DB once did a TED talk about PG and talked about cities amongst other things. I think a video about Minecraft is even further away from what we might actually see in Elite some day.

I'll have to search that out, sounds interesting!

 

[Fizzatron]

Or possibly the 2043, or the 2063. Doesn't mean that it's possible today.

I'm having trouble of thinking of a game that's dedicated to city-like environments that has full-scale NPC simulation and interaction on arbitrary street and building layouts ... never mind bolting it on as a side feature of a space sim.

This is exactly why I posted that video in regards to the Matrix city demo. I think from a general technical standpoint, not specifically talking about Frontier/Cobra, we are at a place where it's plausible to do exactly that; place city-like environments populated with NPCs/traffic built to procgen templates inclusive of roads etc.. throughout the entire bubble and elsewhere. What's more is that the buildings in the Matrix demo aren't just shells, they actually have interiors and procgen rooms with furniture etc.. This is interesting from an Elite standpoint where one can think of large habitat zones in Corliolis stations full of apartments owned by NPCs, or players, where missions could literally start with a battle in space and end with a shootout onfoot in some apartment hideout.

 

[jojon]

I believe the rooms one see through widows in the Matrix demo are some sort of parallax texture, mapped to the window quad, rather than anything actually volumetric.

That said, they are astonishingly convincing (...on screen, at least - have not managed to run the demo in VR), and there are absolutely places in Elite, where I would have liked to see their kind applied. :7

 

[Alec Turner]

I'll have to search that out, sounds interesting!

Almost certainly this ...

Source: https://youtu.be/GEVutbSqBI0

 

[Helvellyn]

This is exactly why I posted that video in regards to the Matrix city demo. I think from a general technical standpoint, not specifically talking about Frontier/Cobra, we are at a place where it's plausible to do exactly that; place city-like environments populated with NPCs/traffic built to procgen templates inclusive of roads etc.. throughout the entire bubble and elsewhere. What's more is that the buildings in the Matrix demo aren't just shells, they actually have interiors and procgen rooms with furniture etc.. This is interesting from an Elite standpoint where one can think of large habitat zones in Corliolis stations full of apartments owned by NPCs, or players, where missions could literally start with a battle in space and end with a shootout onfoot in some apartment hideout.

DIdn't someone say that that took two hours to generate though?

ED generates on the fly, on the client. Whilst non-live procgen removes the need for everything to be handmade in terms of storage space it's no different, and if you add that up for every city on every inhabited planet that's masses. Possibly doable server-side but it would then the connection requirements jump up a lot, even if most of the base assetts (textures etc.) are on the client. Unless we just have the same handful of identical procgen cities repeated everywhere, which would be even more disappointing than the same few ports.

Before making cities a bit of livening up of surface ports wouldn't go amiss. Just chuck a random scatter of predefined buildings near the port, only need to make sure they don't overlap each other. Wouldn't change gameplay but would liven up the place a bit.

 

[Helvellyn]

On the subject of ELW in general, it depends on what you want. NMS style, doable enough, I don't think that there's massively more in that than there was in FFE (although obviously it's a lot more polished - significantly improved but the same basic approach).

If you want rivers that flow downhill in to seas and lakes, with networks of tributaries, if you want lakes not at sea level (and don't want hollows that should be filled with water but aren't), full-on forests, if you want vaguely convincing weather, and all generated live, on the fly, that'll take quite some doing. I keep playing around with ideas for it myself, not that I think "if I can't do it nobody can" (there are loads of people with a much better idea than I've got, I just find it fun to ponder about).

 

[Fizzatron]

DIdn't someone say that that took two hours to generate though?

ED generates on the fly, on the client. Whilst non-live procgen removes the need for everything to be handmade in terms of storage space it's no different, and if you add that up for every city on every inhabited planet that's masses. Possibly doable server-side but it would then the connection requirements jump up a lot, even if most of the base assetts (textures etc.) are on the client. Unless we just have the same handful of identical procgen cities repeated everywhere, which would be even more disappointing than the same few ports.

Before making cities a bit of livening up of surface ports wouldn't go amiss. Just chuck a random scatter of predefined buildings near the port, only need to make sure they don't overlap each other. Wouldn't change gameplay but would liven up the place a bit.

I'm under the impression that at it's most fundamental, the galaxy procgen algorithmic seed(s) are locked and aren't generated on the fly by the client, if I'm understanding what you mean correctly. It is why Frontier 'roll' out the galaxy, they generate the seed with all of the details for all things and, as we go around system to system, the game generates the system based on the precalculated results of the seed algorithm. This includes all station placement, names etc..

So based on that assumption, while generating the Matrix took two hours to put together, when someone loads up the city, it doesn't take two hours to generate before they get started. I guess I should clarify that I haven't actually loaded the Matrix city myself so it's possible that the demo requires a two hour render/generation time, but I would be very surprised if it did as that's not a reasonable expectation for a gamer to wait for their level to load.

I must also clarify that the video specifically mentioned that the city took two hours to generate from the source seed, meaning that based on their algorithm, they could spit out an entirely new, unique and fully functioning Matrix city every two hours.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[jojon]

The City Demo comes in a 100GB download, which contains all the assets, and a large-, and a small version of the "level", each prebuilt with every little item already in place - no local procedural generation (EDIT: At least none that threw up a notification while I was paying attention). It does however take a decent fraction of forever to launch, due to shader compilation.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

a decent fraction of forever

I have nothing to contribute to the topic, but that phrase made me chuckle and I plan to incorporate it into my collection of phrases for daily conversation.

 

[Fizzatron]

The City Demo comes in a 100GB download, which contains all the assets, and a large-, and a small version of the "level", each prebuilt with every little item already in place - no local procedural generation (EDIT: At least none that threw up a notification while I was paying attention). It does however take a decent fraction of forever to launch, due to shader compilation.

Ok, thanks for that extra info. Even with that though, I think there's a sliding scale that could allow for some optimizations, including the possibility that the shader compilation would be part of launching Elite.

But what you said checks out with what I'm saying, the assets are basic components that will load every time and place according to the precalculated seeded layout, which means that the procgen isn't happening at the time of visitation. Which, given the right balance, could mean that these cities could 'spawn' without any extra wait time as is the present case with the larger starports we currently see, which I'm assuming are seeded in the same way throughout the galaxy, where applicable.

 

[Northpin]

Almost certainly this ...

Source: https://youtu.be/GEVutbSqBI0

Ah, the video about Bad Procedural Generation, the one most quoted along with the bad Odyssey planets in the first patches, before they added some extra texture layers to cover the obvious patterns.

Quite ironic to see the issue coming back to haunt his latest Elite game (well not so much of an issue currently, but it quite was immediately post launch)

 

[Helvellyn]

Ok, thanks for that extra info. Even with that though, I think there's a sliding scale that could allow for some optimizations, including the possibility that the shader compilation would be part of launching Elite.

But what you said checks out with what I'm saying, the assets are basic components that will load every time and place according to the precalculated seeded layout, which means that the procgen isn't happening at the time of visitation. Which, given the right balance, could mean that these cities could 'spawn' without any extra wait time as is the present case with the larger starports we currently see, which I'm assuming are seeded in the same way throughout the galaxy, where applicable.

The problem though is that if the procgen isn't calculated at run time then it all has to be stored somewhere and delivered to the player - just what sort of servers, and how fast a connection will be needed for that (too much for an entire planet, let alone thousands, for it to be part of the initial install, installed locally)?

Offline procgen, which this city sounds like, is a way of generating a large amount of content with fewer human working hours involved but it isn't a solution where things are so large, e.g. the number of planets in Elite, that the only possible way of producing them is to generate them on the fly.

 

[Jack Winter]

IMO, it's a pipedream trying to attach a tech demo to an already existing game.

I think we should count ourselves lucky if we someday get uninhabited earthlike planets with flora and fauna, and possibly some enclaves that they let a commander access on inhabited earthlike planets. Forget about entire procedurally generated cities for this game..

 

[jojon]

...including the possibility that the shader compilation would be part of launching Elite...

Well, we do get the message (...and the associated wait), about the planet generation shaders recompiling, every time there is a client update; Or every time the game is launched, if one disable shader caching... :7

The developers have in the past talked about a "baking" (...I think was the word chosen...) procedure for settlements, so it does sound like their placement may in fact be generated off-line, possibly hand-tweaked in some cases, and fed to the client by server, rather than plonked down according to seed, client-side... Less sure about orbitals.

Not that this has managed to stop weird things from having happened when the game switched over to the new terrain-gen, with things like the research base in the California Nebula, which was expressly built next to a field of one the first signs of life we got to see on planets, in order to study them, now being on opposite sides of the planet to that field, and the field now containing some different class of scatter object to what I believe it still says in the tourist beacon added to it; And the Salvation-story-relevant "Fort Asch" in HIP22460, which used to be carefully laid out into the topography of valley, but now sits on this manufactured-looking plateau mid-height on a steep crater wall, with its POI marker soaring in the void, miles above it.

Bar environment/loot-object-spawn-point-, and colour variations, there is of course also only a relatively small handful of prefabbed locations to go to.
-I for one am rather tired of 30% of all surface distress signals being those exact same smugglers who had somehow managed to strap two cargo cannisters onto a Condor... I guess knowing exactly what to expect at a POI, from its name, is good for grinding -- not so much for variety... :7

Actually, after doing a bunch of reactivation missions in Thargoid Recovery systems, I found myself wondering if the rules for placing settlements do not specify a small number of certain locations on certain terrain prefab heightmap tiles, because I only too often found myself landing on the exact plateau outcrop, and driving over to the exact same settlement entrance gate, located and oriented in the exact same way relative to the plateau, in several different systems...

 

[Fizzatron]

Well, we do get the message (...and the associated wait), about the planet generation shaders recompiling, every time there is a client update; Or every time the game is launched, if one disable shader caching... :7

The developers have in the past talked about a "baking" (...I think was the word chosen...) procedure for settlements, so it does sound like their placement may in fact be generated off-line, possibly hand-tweaked in some cases, and fed to the client by server, rather than plonked down according to seed, client-side... Less sure about orbitals.

I think there's a mixture tbh. It may be part of the reason why Frontier initially decided to make the game online only. I would suggest that the 'baking' term would be similar in effect to the city generation in the Matrix demo.

Actually, after doing a bunch of reactivation missions in Thargoid Recovery systems, I found myself wondering if the rules for placing settlements do not specify a small number of certain locations on certain terrain prefab heightmap tiles, because I only too often found myself landing on the exact plateau outcrop, and driving over to the exact same settlement entrance gate, located and oriented in the exact same way relative to the plateau, in several different systems...

It's possible that the base layout includes some surrounding terrain which might be causing that? It is difficult to say either way for sure unless Frontier talk about such things.

 

[jojon]

It's possible that the base layout includes some surrounding terrain which might be causing that? It is difficult to say either way for sure unless Frontier talk about such things.

I think we can probably safely assume it does -- that smooth ground, needed for the buildings, etc, and the consistent-from-settlement-to-settlement embankments that roadways snake between and climb, can't come from nothing after all - there's got to be some sort of terrain modifier that belongs to the POI; But I believe I spotted a pattern on a larger scale than those, with shapes that appear frequently regardless of whether they contain a settlement, and span greater areas than the bespoke terrain at engineer sites (EDIT: ...although maybe not necessarily greater areas than the larger Guardian and Thargoid sites).

 

[Alec Turner]

When Dav Stott spoke about the "baking" process used to place settlements he did say there was a terrain flattening algorithm too that makes a suitablty flat area to put the prefabricated settlement buildings down on. Settlements are modular so it doesn’t have to be perefctly flat as the buildings can sit on slightly different levels to each other. I'll see if I can track down the video where Dav spoke about all this.