The Technology Behind Seamless Planetary Exploration

[Martian Successor]

The technology behind seamlessly exploring all kinds of planets while flying around a galaxy is amazing in how possible it has become.

[video=youtube;h-kifCYToAU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-kifCYToAU[/video]

I am genuinely fascinated to see what the equally talented folks at FD come up with for our very own atmospheric planetary landings in ED.

P.S. Not looking to provoke a NMS vs ED debate. I just want this thread to celebrate the possibilities and speculate about how wondrous, colourful and 'atmospheric' atmospheric planets might possibly be in ED.

 

[Kaybe]

Many people, including no doubt the FD devs, are eager to check NMS when it launches. But comparing this to ED is very apples and oranges. ED is obsessed with realism and physics and making planets and stars as they should normally look and orbit. NMS favors theme, a stylized look over realism, and some navigational shortcuts ... which is perfectly fine for the game it is, but not something you can use as a reference point for the ED devs to look at.

 

[Martian Successor]

Many people, including no doubt the FD devs, are eager to check NMS when it launches. But comparing this to ED is very apples and oranges. ED is obsessed with realism and physics and making planets and stars as they should normally look and orbit. NMS favors theme, a stylized look over realism, and some navigational shortcuts ... which is perfectly fine for the game it is, but not something you can use as a reference point for the ED devs to look at.

The alien environments and animals are cool though in terms of the landscape and architecture with caves and mountains, wildlife and discoverable crashed ships, etc. all of which is procedurally generated yet the landscape of each planet stays as a constant. So you can find the same cave on the same planet provided you have a way of noting coordinates. Most important (if NMS pull it off) is that it would show this can be done by a dev team roughly the same size as FD.

The more realistic approach that ED employs is probably why we will have to wait longer for these kinds of things to happen.

 

[lysan]

ED haas a long way to catch up with NMS. It is nearly six months since ED Planetary Landings was released and still they planetary approach is not seamless. It has an unsightly pause.

Any news on whether this will be fixed in 2.1?

Where is it not seamless? because you can go seamless from station to planet, only jumping is a different process. However if you got the time you can travel to a star seamlessly.

What I think most people are confused with is the transition where you're placed in an instance, however as NMS is not a MP game they don't have to deal with these kind of issues.

 

[Caramel Clown]

ED haas a long way to catch up with NMS. It is nearly six months since ED Planetary Landings was released and still they planetary approach is not seamless. It has an unsightly pause.

Any news on whether this will be fixed in 2.1?

As far as I understand pause is there for network reasons. Engine is totally capable of having no transitions whatsoever. This has been tested. People flew between two very close stations in normal flight. Also same was done to go from planetary surface to low orbiting station. I wish I could find a thread where the first experiment with two stations was done.

 

[Rhaedas]

ED haas a long way to catch up with NMS. It is nearly six months since ED Planetary Landings was released and still they planetary approach is not seamless. It has an unsightly pause.

Any news on whether this will be fixed in 2.1?

It does vary from system to system. I'm actually surprised that some still have issues, as I'm running it on a older build with a GPU that's probably near the bottom of the supported list, and yet I play in open and have no problems usually with it hanging on approach.

Not to be anti about NMS, but I won't get it, as it doesn't feel real to me. It's a next gen Spore. No matter how seamless it seems.

 

[lysan]

ED will also have weather, and that is going to be interesting, because today it possible to simulate or "build" weather systems like in flight sims.

[video=youtube;MEcx4EX_Be8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEcx4EX_Be8[/video]

 

[Rhaedas]

That should scale up, because while our ships are a lot more powerful than a little prop plane, some of the weather we're likely to see, especially in a gas giant, are going to be fierce as well, so we should get the same feeling of on the edge of losing control.

 

[lysan]

That should scale up, because while our ships are a lot more powerful than a little prop plane, some of the weather we're likely to see, especially in a gas giant, are going to be fierce as well, so we should get the same feeling of on the edge of losing control.

Scaling up is not an issue, creating the background mechanics is.

 

[Koen]

However if you got the time you can travel to a star seamlessly.

I remember somebody did that during Beta or Gamma in 2014. The destination system was not present, as it was the hyperjump which told the Cobra Engine to display the star and everything around it. I have not seen any patch note in which FDEV addresses this (but I have not read all patch notes, so I might have missed it).

Edit: a video by somebody trying in January 2015.

 

[Caramel Clown]

I remember somebody did that during Beta or Gamma in 2014. The destination system was not present, as it was the hyperjump which told the Cobra Engine to display the star and everything around it. I have not seen any patch note in which FDEV addresses this (but I have not read all patch notes, so I might have missed it).

Unfortunately you can't travel from star to star in SC. Well, you can cover the distance. But new system won't load. You need to make a jump.
But you can travel within solar system to any body or object in normal flight without using SC. But who has the time

 

[Fendalton]

NMS has dedicated servers, ED only has dedicated LOGIN servers.

 

[Henri]

I remember somebody did that during Beta or Gamma in 2014. The destination system was not present, as it was the hyperjump which told the Cobra Engine to display the star and everything around it. I have not seen any patch note in which FDEV addresses this (but I have not read all patch notes, so I might have missed it).

Edit: a video by somebody trying in January 2015.

but it was not a skybox

 

[Wylie28]

The transition from surface to space in ED IS seamless. Its the transition from instance to instance that isn't seamless. What do you think the planet you see in orbital cruise is?

 

[Fendalton]

The transition from surface to space in ED IS seamless. Its the transition from instance to instance that isn't seamless. What do you think the planet you see in orbital cruise is?

Rendered textures, they're not seamless if your internet is not fantastic

 

[Bacalao]

First, I'm a little disappointed at the claims of the dev in the video that they are the first to do this kind of thing, I mean, I just imagine DB in the back politely raising his hand and coughing...

That aside, I like NMS, I like the art style, it isn't like Elite but it is interesting. I can appreciate Rembrandt and Van Gogh despite their artistically divergent styles (one more true to life and one more interpretive). I think what their team has done is exciting and is good for procedural generation tech and space games. I only wish Elite could have gotten this kind of publicity.

A couple of things I took away from the video. Elite is extremely impressive because not only does it attempt to take on the same challenge of NMS (procedurally generating everything), it attempts to do so with graphical output similar to AAA teams with 800 people, the majority of whom just make the games pretty. While I appreciate both art styles, the one is certainly more taxing and difficult to produce than the other.

Second, I agree with his statement about procedural generation becoming supplemental to the game industry (or something to that effect). After playing Elite it's hard to find other games big enough for me, they all just feel so small. I think as PG gets smarter and has more teams incorporating and refining it we'll really see it take off. What started in 1984 with Elite will likely end up changing the way the entire industry builds worlds, levels, enemies, creatures and everything else.

I'll add my voice to the other posters that have explained seamless vs not. Transitions across systems are seamless, transitions between instances are not. So when you change instances (supercruise to normal space, normal space to supercruise and hyperspace) you end up with what is for most players a very brief, very well masked pause. For me it is sometimes instantaneous (you also have to understand that each system on the gal map has to be generated as its own instance so you cannot get a seamless generation from one to the other necessitating hyperspace and I would guess NMS will use a similar mechanism for systems to system travel). If you drop out at a nav beacon and lock a target you can fly all the way to it without ever having any transition, but you have to stay in normal space. That's probably not feasible because you'd take a very long time to get there at a meager 200-300m/s but you can drop out 100km from a station and fly to it in a few minutes, approaching the station will be 100% seamless.

In the end space is big and FDev decided not to compress the distance to make the game "like a scifi book cover" so instance changes became a necessity, but I think we'll see it continue to be optimized and improved, it is really close to seamless as it is.

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

Where is it not seamless? because you can go seamless from station to planet, only jumping is a different process. However if you got the time you can travel to a star seamlessly.

The last part I presume you meant travel from system to system manually. If so then you can't - it was attempted during Release-Alpha/Beta before fuel was introduced.

You can travel the correct distance and on the map it shows you have arrived but there is no star there until you hyperspace.

 

[Wylie28]

Are you talking about texture LODs? You realize texture quality changes in all video games depending on distance right? The only reason you dont notice is because you don't fly straight down in other games.

 

[Bounder]

In NMS, Space Engine, Noctis etc. the whole universe exists at once, albeit at very low LoD.

In Elite, the only system that exists at any one time is the one you're currently in - the stars in the sky are a skybox, only representing the actual stars.. they're not the star systems themselves.

In a seamless gameworld, you can 'scroll' through it without loading whole new set pieces, whereas in Elite, when you hit hyperspace (or whatever they call it now) the curtains drop, the stagehands reshuffle the set, then the curtains rise and presto! You've "hyperspaced". But really you haven't gone anywhere - the universe hyperspaced around you.


Elite's always suffered this limitation, and many of us had hoped E4 would finally go the whole hog, as the other titles mentioned have demonstrated is possible. But ED simply isn't designed this way, instead relying on the same basic mechanic it always has, of rendering only one system at a time.

I'm certainly looking forward to trying NMS - it looks more self-consistent than ED, and it'll be interesting to see what kind of flight models they employ. I find ED's focus on accurate astrophysics, while eschewing basic mechanics, a rather jarring inconsistency.

 

[Miko_Stargazer]

As far as I understand pause is there for network reasons. Engine is totally capable of having no transitions whatsoever. This has been tested. People flew between two very close stations in normal flight. Also same was done to go from planetary surface to low orbiting station. I wish I could find a thread where the first experiment with two stations was done.

I've taken off from one moon and landed on another moon all in normal space. I was quite happy when I discovered it was possible.

I'm honestly a little perplexed at the anger towards the jump mechanic Elite is using. It's obvious they 'could' make supercruise travel possible, but they don't have any realistic reason to. I thought it was awesome I could travel between two moons without FSD, but I don't plan to make that trip too often.

You can even hear in the youtube video linked, NMS has elected to have planets and systems be much closer together. They like the seamless transition but sacrificed scale because travelling seamlessly between two stars is boring; travelling seamlessly between Sol and Alpha Centauri is like making the Hutton Orbital run.