Procgen for settled surfaces, colonization and future earth like worlds

[Fizzatron]

I saw this interesting post about auto generated procgen cities with traffic etc.. For those thinking about how Frontier could liven up settled surfaces and future earth-likes:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1856035539406786862

Might also be a good way to aid construction of settlements in relation to the upcoming colonization feature as well? I would suggest that we need definitely don't need settlements to be built Minecraft style, but after seeing some of the tools Planet Coaster 2 folks are getting, I'm very curious to see how much flexibility/customization we are likely to get, if any?

 

[Leadfoot]

Considering the millions and millions of possible earth-like worlds out there in a galaxy with 400 billion stars, it would take people working millions of man hours just to do a quarter of that.

This will probably be something that frontier might consider on the next generation of elite dangerous.

 

[Fizzatron]

Considering the millions and millions of possible earth-like worlds out there in a galaxy with 400 billion stars, it would take people working millions of man hours just to do a quarter of that.

This will probably be something that frontier might consider on the next generation of elite dangerous.

It's all procedurally generated so for earthlikes the time is going to be to compute it. But the tools would be good for colonization IMO.

 

[MUTILADOR]

I saw this interesting post about auto generated procgen cities with traffic etc.. For those thinking about how Frontier could liven up settled surfaces and future earth-likes:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1856035539406786862

View attachment 408322

Might also be a good way to aid construction of settlements in relation to the upcoming colonization feature as well? I would suggest that we need definitely don't need settlements to be built Minecraft style, but after seeing some of the tools Planet Coaster 2 folks are getting, I'm very curious to see how much flexibility/customization we are likely to get, if any?

This technology is not new, in fact Hello Games uses a similar system for NMS. I think the problem Frontier has is not resources, nor technical impossibility, nor the incapacity of their plant, or that they didn't think of it before. The problem is their cobra engine. You also have to understand that the cobra engine is too old for today's games. Although if they used current open source artificial intelligence, I certainly believe that AI would be able to grant all our imagined wishes, even with the cobra engine. For example, the other day I created just because I was bored a complete news wall, with story, images, sound and reading in less than 10 minutes. ChatGpT can now do all that in seconds... In fact, I have a personal project with GPT to make a ship with interiors floating in a space with my avatar and another NPC that is connected to GPT so that he can answer me with his voice inside my minigame. I think the era where we had to depend on companies to play games is ending... but now I'm getting off topic xD

 

[Fizzatron]

This technology is not new, in fact Hello Games uses a similar system for NMS. I think the problem Frontier has is not resources, nor technical impossibility, nor the incapacity of their plant, or that they didn't think of it before. The problem is their cobra engine. You also have to understand that the cobra engine is too old for today's games. Although if they used current open source artificial intelligence, I certainly believe that AI would be able to grant all our imagined wishes, even with the cobra engine. For example, the other day I created just because I was bored a complete news wall, with story, images, sound and reading in less than 10 minutes. ChatGpT can now do all that in seconds... In fact, I have a personal project with GPT to make a ship with interiors floating in a space with my avatar and another NPC that is connected to GPT so that he can answer me with his voice inside my minigame. I think the era where we had to depend on companies to play games is ending... but now I'm getting off topic xD

I understand that the process isn't new but what I think is important is that the resources needed are becoming more plentiful and up to the challenge of implementing cities/settled planets in ways that work in a modern video game context, given the scale of what would be needed, and I agree that AI is helping to power that. For example, as much as I was enamored by the planetary features of Frontier Elite II on the Amiga, and the starports in Elite Dangerous work relatively well too, for an earth-like the scale jumps up considerably when thinking about how we would want them to look and interact.

Looking at the tools in the video where they're just literally adjusting dimensions by dragging points, and the building is being sized to fit with many different templates, I find myself wondering how all of that could be applied to Elite. Where I think AI could really shine in relation to procedurally generated cities would be to personify the appearances of them, add historicity and contextualize the look and feel of them in a way that allows them to make relative sense in the context of the game, both physically in regards to terrain/climate/etc and also politically/socially - something way beyond any capacity to handcraft for the amount of settled planets that would have to be fashioned.