The next secret feature:
Shadows that work...
Shadows that work...
What the new secret feature should be
- Thread starter MPL3D
- Start date
Yeah the "storms" on Mars are certainly storms but more like a regular tuesday in Scotland rather than The Martian.
The storms on Jupiter are pretty intense, but again those random numbers are going to cause a fait bit of nerd gymnastics, the large one that we see so clearly from here on earth has been raging for over 400 years.
I was thinking that you could easily just pass out a different seed regularly and see that everyone gets the same seed when in the system, but the time scales, dang the complexity over those time spans and all with enough resolution to generate the details required, it's kind of mind boggling.
I was thinking that you could easily just pass out a different seed regularly and see that everyone gets the same seed when in the system, but the time scales, dang the complexity over those time spans and all with enough resolution to generate the details required, it's kind of mind boggling.
It's very simple. Procedural generation is not a simulation with a coin flip with each iteration. It is simply a combination of different noises using a different seed. The landscape shaders are on each player's local computer, and each planet has its own unique seed. So the same planet will look the same to two different players. Landscape is not transferred between players, it is rendered at each one personally, according to a shader (rule). The shader receives the seed of the planet and draws the landscape. The same thing, but a bit more complicated, can be done with weather.
These will be looped versions of different animated noises or more detailed and complex shaders. Noise for wind, noise for clouds, noise for rivers, separate noise for hurricanes, etc, etc, etc. I.e. arriving on the planet player will receive seed for landscape and seed for weather, in the second case will also be added animation state value.
All players will see the same weather with absolute accuracy, and synchronization will require literally a couple of lines of data.
Of course such weather will not compare with simulations, it will be more like an "pseudo-realistic" analog of NMS. But a different solution would require significant investment and innovation, so it may not be expected.
As a result, today and with the capabilities that fdev has, there is no problem of weather synchronization between players.
Oh yes there will be barren planets, that's why I think one of the first types of planets released with thicker atmosphere will be icy, I mean frigid, close to -100k, no chance of life but still warm enough for nitrogen and methane seas and rain, storms etc, so it will probably be a small release of thicker atmospheres when it happens, but maybe not yet, I agree with you about NMS, that's why it needs to be done properly. There are a few who want it even flawed, but I think that would be a disaster for FDEV. Do it gradually, but do it good. I mean they could also do really hot planets, lava and sulphuric acid rain and etc and storms, that would be nice as well.
People keep saying that, if it was very simple it would be already done!
Speaking of... I wonder if it would be outright ridiculous to wonder whether the agreement between Asobo and Frontier for the Planet Zoo animal models and animations (EDIT: ...which are going into the latest MS Flight Simulator), could involve any sharing back, along with the sharing forth... like a shader or two, or something...
I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand your sentence.Also, from Prometheus:
Everybody is an idiot.
I showed with screenshots that weather conditions can be simply made in the current Elite world without changing anything on the planet. Just by adding. As you can see from the footage in the movie.
It seemed to me that some people think that adding weather must necessarily affect the current state of the planets.
He means there was an exobiologist that was deathly afraid of a hologram of some alien giants, so scared that he wanted to immediately flee (with a caving geologist that somehow managed to get lost in a cave like structure) suddenly deciding to play pet the snake with an alien worm.
It is a comment on the characters in the movie who at times show a remarkable lack of common sense.
Yes but the movie makers cheated and just used edited footage of an Earthlike world rather than creating the footage from scratch in code like FDev do.
It has to as the current state of landable planets would not support the sorts of weather being asked for.
The best of which is how to run from a giant wheel going your way: in a straight line, right along it's axis.
"Just turn 50 meters left or right and you'll be safe!!
-Nah, don't mansplain my driving!"
The Prometheus School Of Running Away From Things
The Prometheus School Of Running Away From Things is a catchphrase commonly used in memes referring to a trope in which people, animals or fictional charac
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So FDEV should make the weather using CGI footage and we should just sit there and watch it? Sounds good, count me in, oh no sorry it's a movie, you know they didn't make a planet to shoot the movie right? It's all fake and made up!
I highly recommend watching Agent 9’s fan edit of Prometheus for anyone interested (and owns the source material for copyright reasons of course!) - it chops out all the stupid actions, inserts many deleted scenes to make the characters un-stupid and also completes unfinished sfx in those scenes, colour corrects hundreds of scenes, and generally makes it a much better film. No running away from the big rolling spaceship any more, for starters!
@SergMx - I agree that adding clouds to the sort of barren worlds in Elite Dangerous would look fantastic. Volumetric clouds in the flight simulators I play (in VR of course) look awesome and getting water droplets on the canopy as you fly through them never gets old
It would also (hopefully) mean getting to visit Sirocco Station on Merlin, which is something I’ve hoped would make it into the game since backing the Kickstarter.
@SergMx - I agree that adding clouds to the sort of barren worlds in Elite Dangerous would look fantastic. Volumetric clouds in the flight simulators I play (in VR of course) look awesome and getting water droplets on the canopy as you fly through them never gets old
It would also (hopefully) mean getting to visit Sirocco Station on Merlin, which is something I’ve hoped would make it into the game since backing the Kickstarter.
Producing a single static weather system is certainly - if not "simple" in terms of implementation - likely well within the level of things Frontier has already done elsewhere.
But procedural generation isn't magic and certainly isn't easy. The Elite series is renowned for its use of procedural generation not because it was the first to do it or even the first computer game to make good use it, but because each release they managed to do it far better than any contemporary competitor was. Claiming that to be simple massively understates their achievements - if it was that simple, everyone would be doing it.
"But a bit more complicated" is doing a lot of work here.
The landscape, crucially, doesn't change over time. Nor do planetary ring systems (yes, they rotate, but their contents are fixed relative to the internal reference frame) or most of the other examples of procedural generation in Elite Dangerous. The procedural algorithm for weather needs to be consistent in time and space.
The only thing which does that so far is planetary orbits - where there is an extremely simple calculation to go from "state of system at Time 0" to "state of system now" without having to simulate the intermediate steps at all. (Achieved by simplifying the orbital mechanics in a way that's very rarely noticeable to non-experts; but we have more personal experience of weather than of orbital mechanics, and weather changes much faster than planets orbit)
Can one of those be found for planetary weather - a much more complex appearing system than planetary orbits - so that given a planet and a timestamp the weather can be immediately determined at any point (without, as you say, having to incrementally simulate), in such a way that gives smooth transitions between weather conditions, and weather which looks reasonably realistic?
It's not just a case of saying "well, procedurally generate it, it's simple!" - an actual algorithm needs to be found which given a basic fixed input can efficiently extrapolate the entire planetary weather system across both time and space at multiple levels of detail. I don't know how difficult that is exactly, but I would guess from the fact that Odyssey didn't come with it that it's somewhere between "extremely difficult" and "almost impossible".
NMS solves the problem by having a much simpler problem to solve.
- planets only have one terrain type each, so the weather doesn't have to be terrain-specific
- planets only have one weather type each, and it's global across the entire planet, so synchronising in time and space is easy
- it doesn't even try to make the clouds seen from space match the ones seen from the ground (even the terrain seen from space doesn't exactly match the ground)
- they have an all-purpose get-out clause for "that looks a bit weird" in the concept for the setting; quite a few weirder things are deliberately there.
That works fine, for NMS. A solution at that level wouldn't work for Elite Dangerous - it'd be massively out of line with the levels of detail shown elsewhere in the planetary generation.
(In the same way that implementing ELWs at the level of detail they had in FFE - the existing Odyssey planets, but with a flat blue texture replacing the terrain at "sea level" - isn't going to be an acceptable solution)
Hi 
Ahh!...That iconic station...and one of the starting points in FE2.
"Count two bodies from the star, Ross 154. this is Aster. now click on the planet below it and information on Merlin will come up" (from the game manual).
"Major exports are animal meat (this is fish on Merlin)".
One thing that puzzles me about this system in the present game. Why can't we land on Merlin?...I mean, in the original game there's the domed buildings and stuff (as well as that eerie wind noise) so all the ingredients are there. I presume that Frontier Development had at some point some sort of plan for this planet, similar in a way for example, the plans (if they're still developing them) for the Earth, Mars, Triton and Col 70 systems etc.
Anyhow, I wish they'd get cracking and get these planets landable so's I can get my fish'n chip shop business started.......I've just got to find a system now where the main export is spuds as well....
Jack
Ahh!...That iconic station
...and one of the starting points in FE2."Count two bodies from the star, Ross 154. this is Aster. now click on the planet below it and information on Merlin will come up" (from the game manual).
"Major exports are animal meat (this is fish on Merlin)".
One thing that puzzles me about this system in the present game. Why can't we land on Merlin?...I mean, in the original game there's the domed buildings and stuff (as well as that eerie wind noise) so all the ingredients are there. I presume that Frontier Development had at some point some sort of plan for this planet, similar in a way for example, the plans (if they're still developing them) for the Earth, Mars, Triton and Col 70 systems etc.
Anyhow, I wish they'd get cracking and get these planets landable so's I can get my fish'n chip shop business started....
...I've just got to find a system now where the main export is spuds as well....Jack
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People should also lower their expectations for ELW in ED. ED lacks global illumination and proper anti-aliasing. There's a list of graphics features that Unreal Engine 5 has which looks amazing yet are absent in ED. For example:
- UE 5.5 Megalights
- Nanite tech for super geometric detail with millions of polygons
- Lumen real time global lighting system
- Proper anti-aliasing
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