The Star Citizen Thread v5

[CMDR_Orlando]

Here are the rest of the pictures from that article:

http://imgur.com/a/dpW3Z & http://imgur.com/a/whwyC

The planets will be hand-crafted in the editor, ofc they will use tiles and pre-made assets to make them as cosmetic appealing as they can for their suited needs in terms of lore, quests, gameplay etc. It's up to the artist to make the best and most believable planet possible and then it will be PGenerated on the fly when you are playing. That's what I understood of it. They said that Citizencon would showcase more about their PG tech so it's possible that we will see a more complex planet since Terra has been hinted to be shown there.

 

[FuriousMeow]

Here are the rest of the pictures from that article:

http://imgur.com/a/dpW3Z & http://imgur.com/a/whwyC

The planets will be hand-crafted in the editor, ofc they will use tiles and pre-made assets to make them as cosmetic appealing as they can for their suited needs in terms of lore, quests, gameplay etc. It's up to the artist to make the best and most believable planet possible and then it will be PGenerated on the fly when you are playing. That's what I understood of it. They said that Citizencon would showcase more about their PG tech so it's possible that we will see a more complex planet since Terra has been hinted to be shown there.

No, that's not how PG works. Not at all.

 

[Tippis]

The planets will be hand-crafted in the editor, ofc they will use tiles and pre-made assets to make them as cosmetic appealing as they can for their suited needs in terms of lore, quests, gameplay etc. It's up to the artist to make the best and most believable planet possible and then it will be PGenerated on the fly when you are playing. That's what I understood of it.

Other way around. They're generated on the fly, and then specific assets are being dropped in where needed. Same as everywhere else. The difference is that, if their images and Chris' comments are anything to go by, it will be far more repetitive than what everyone else is offering.

 

[Soliluna]

Here are the rest of the pictures from that article:

http://imgur.com/a/dpW3Z & http://imgur.com/a/whwyC

The planets will be hand-crafted in the editor, ofc they will use tiles and pre-made assets to make them as cosmetic appealing as they can for their suited needs in terms of lore, quests, gameplay etc. It's up to the artist to make the best and most believable planet possible and then it will be PGenerated on the fly when you are playing. That's what I understood of it. They said that Citizencon would showcase more about their PG tech so it's possible that we will see a more complex planet since Terra has been hinted to be shown there.

The Onion Knight! I've been looking forward to seeing how he is represented in game.

Spoiler

 

[CMDR_Orlando]

No, that's not how PG works. Not at all.

It seems to be for Star Citizen: http://www.redbull.com/en/games/stories/1331814041509/making-star-citizens-planets-believable

"We are using the procedural generation to create the undulation in the terrain or determine the distribution of trees or rocks and we are using that to fill out large areas, but the areas are specified by an artist,” says Roberts. “The way that works is that the artist can create biomes, which are templates for different areas. So you can have a template for woodland forests, or a temple for jungle, or grass land, or mountains and even within in those you can have several variations. Then you paint the big area, you basically say ‘this area is mountainous, this is woodland, and this is where the ocean is’, and then the procedural code takes that and uses that as a guide to place the biomes correctly and alter the height map. In two hours they can generate a planet and then they can spend time tweaking areas by hand.”

Other way around. They're generated on the fly, and then specific assets are being dropped in where needed. Same as everywhere else. The difference is that, if their images and Chris' comments are anything to go by, it will be far more repetitive than what everyone else is offering.

Yes come to think of it it makes more sense that way, the planet isgenerated by some pre-defined parameters and then the artist comes in and spices it up with whatever they need.

The german dude talks about it in this interview:
<em>[video=youtube;6RwBFv0eae4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RwBFv0eae4[/video]

 

[AJW]

It seems to be for Star Citizen: http://www.redbull.com/en/games/stories/1331814041509/making-star-citizens-planets-believable

"We are using the procedural generation to create the undulation in the terrain or determine the distribution of trees or rocks and we are using that to fill out large areas, but the areas are specified by an artist,” says Roberts. “The way that works is that the artist can create biomes, which are templates for different areas. So you can have a template for woodland forests, or a temple for jungle, or grass land, or mountains and even within in those you can have several variations. Then you paint the big area, you basically say ‘this area is mountainous, this is woodland, and this is where the ocean is’, and then the procedural code takes that and uses that as a guide to place the biomes correctly and alter the height map. In two hours they can generate a planet and then they can spend time tweaking areas by hand.”

Which is the opposite of what you wrote earlier. PG first, then add artistic tweaks.

 

[FuriousMeow]

It seems to be for Star Citizen: http://www.redbull.com/en/games/stories/1331814041509/making-star-citizens-planets-believable

"We are using the procedural generation to create the undulation in the terrain or determine the distribution of trees or rocks and we are using that to fill out large areas, but the areas are specified by an artist,” says Roberts. “The way that works is that the artist can create biomes, which are templates for different areas. So you can have a template for woodland forests, or a temple for jungle, or grass land, or mountains and even within in those you can have several variations. Then you paint the big area, you basically say ‘this area is mountainous, this is woodland, and this is where the ocean is’, and then the procedural code takes that and uses that as a guide to place the biomes correctly and alter the height map. In two hours they can generate a planet and then they can spend time tweaking areas by hand.”

Since I don't believe a single word coming out of CR's mouth these days... let's replace biomes with textures.

What the artist is doing is designing a textured area. That textured area is a seed. So he creates a wood texture, a concrete texture, a grass texture, etc. All of these textures are seeds. Using a bit of math and an algorithm that will reproduce this in shockingly random but incredibly similar patterns - voila - an entire textured planet of concrete, wood, grass is made. Except instead of one, hundreds can be done using the same formula. So now all of these planets are pre-made and now artists can go behind and hand place certain things like bases or what not. Then it is all saved. The PG stuff is "regenerated" each time, but exactly the same. The hand place stuff is loaded from saved assets. There is no "on the fly" generation in terms of it being different or unique, it is always the same. Procedural Generation is simply a way of using a quick mathematical formula to create hundreds or thousands or trillions of the same sort of thing with variation based on seeds designed by either math or artists. But no, the artists are not creating the planet and then it is being Procedurally Generated each time.

 

[CMDR_Orlando]

Since I don't believe a single word coming out of CR's mouth these days... let's replace biomes with textures.

What the artist is doing is designing a textured area. That textured area is a seed. So he creates a wood texture, a concrete texture, a grass texture, etc. All of these textures are seeds. Using a bit of math and an algorithm that will reproduce this in shockingly random but incredibly similar patterns - voila - an entire textured planet of concrete, wood, grass is made. Except instead of one, hundreds can be done using the same formula. So now all of these planets are pre-made and now artists can go behind and hand place certain things like bases or what not. Then it is all saved. The PG stuff is "regenerated" each time, but exactly the same. The hand place stuff is loaded from saved assets. There is no "on the fly" generation in terms of it being different or unique, it is always the same. Procedural Generation is simply a way of using a quick mathematical formula to create hundreds or thousands or trillions of the same sort of thing with variation based on seeds designed by either math or artists. But no, the artists are not creating the planet and then it is being Procedurally Generated each time.

Yes every planet and location will be the same for everyone, I would assume that it would be allways be predetermined procedurally generated on the fly because a planet wouldn't fit in the memory.

 

[FuriousMeow]

Yes every planet and location will be the same for everyone, I would assume that it would be allways be predetermined procedurally generated on the fly because a planet wouldn't fit in the memory.

Now that is something else entirely. Procedural Generation is not streaming data. The planet has to be present, and details of it loaded as you come across them while on the surface using LODs and other methods, but that isn't Procedural Generation at all.

In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually. In computer graphics, it is also called random generation and is commonly used to create textures and 3D models. In video games it is used to automatically create large amounts of content in a game. Advantages of procedural generation include smaller file sizes, larger amounts of content, and randomness for less predictable gameplay.

 

[Tippis]

All Chris is really (clumsily) describing is a UI for parametrisation.

 

[ghcannon]

Since I don't believe a single word coming out of CR's mouth these days... let's replace biomes with textures.

What the artist is doing is designing a textured area. That textured area is a seed. So he creates a wood texture, a concrete texture, a grass texture, etc. All of these textures are seeds. Using a bit of math and an algorithm that will reproduce this in shockingly random but incredibly similar patterns - voila - an entire textured planet of concrete, wood, grass is made. Except instead of one, hundreds can be done using the same formula. So now all of these planets are pre-made and now artists can go behind and hand place certain things like bases or what not. Then it is all saved. The PG stuff is "regenerated" each time, but exactly the same. The hand place stuff is loaded from saved assets. There is no "on the fly" generation in terms of it being different or unique, it is always the same. Procedural Generation is simply a way of using a quick mathematical formula to create hundreds or thousands or trillions of the same sort of thing with variation based on seeds designed by either math or artists. But no, the artists are not creating the planet and then it is being Procedurally Generated each time.

What delightful nonsense! Apart from a few things, pretty much all of that was dead wrong on the technical side.
And that was in a, supposedly, technical post.

 

[Asp Explorer]

This is CIG. Technicalities are being technically refactored

 

[FuriousMeow]

What delightful nonsense! Apart from a few things, pretty much all of that was dead wrong on the technical side.
And that was in a, supposedly, technical post.

How? That is exactly what PG is. Procedural Generation uses an algorithm to recreate things based on the math, using seeds that define certain aspects of it. That's exactly what I wrote.

Also, that was far from a technical post. A technical post would have the actual breakdown of how the math works and what all of the varying equations that come together to form whatever the desired output is while also incorporating the seed elements as well to produce a variable but recurring result. For example - always a planet but with varying textures and attributes. Hmmm, that's what PG is. So, nonsense indeed.

 

[eqinox]

Other way around. They're generated on the fly, and then specific assets are being dropped in where needed. Same as everywhere else. The difference is that, if their images and Chris' comments are anything to go by, it will be far more repetitive than what everyone else is offering.

Most likely this is how it is, I agree. But on the other hand, there are PG methods which can use actual handcrafted assets and synthesize the resulting terrain from them without resorting to simple tiling. This is an somewhat older article, but I think the results are impressive:

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/my_papers/terrain_synth_tvcg.pdf

How SC does it, who knows before we can actually see more of it.

 

[ghcannon]

How? That is exactly what PG is. Procedural Generation uses an algorithm to recreate things based on the math, using seeds that define certain aspects of it. That's exactly what I wrote.

Here's the right part of this quote: "Procedural Generation uses an algorithm to recreate things"

It's not based only on math at all, they model planetary concepts in software, where math plays certainly a role, but it not necessarily a central one. It all depends on the design.

Actually the quote from CR was correct up there .. He said "biomes" even though his software mind wanted to say something more like 'clusters'. Which can then be containing features. which can contain any number of recursive sub-systems. Those are modeled in software and have dependencies of each other.

Hard to imagine ? Well usually people spend years getting to terms with sofware, so unless you study/work this or are some extreme hobbyist, the explanations you can give will come from forum posts and little else.

Seeds encode all your PG input set. Artists don't even create the textures (at least in Elite they don't), and seeds have no more to do with them than determining the planet type (hence color map palette).

And 'on the fly' means generated geometry by your GPU at run-time. It doesn't mean .. whatever definition you're thinking of really.

 

[Marak]

I may be being a bit thick here, but I'm not getting this SC procedural generation thing. I thought the idea of PG was so you could load a massive amount of assets as needed and they would each be different, yet each asset the same for each player.

If CIG are handcrafting each of these (initially PG generated) assets, then the speed of generation is lost - they have to load the modified assets each time. They may as well have stuck to random heightmaps and have artists modify them - they could have saved all the money on PG research.

(By the way - I admit I know nothing of game development).

 

[FuriousMeow]

Here's the right part of this quote: "Procedural Generation uses an algorithm to recreate things"

It's not based only on math at all, they model planetary concepts in software, where math plays certainly a role, but it not necessarily a central one. It all depends on the design.

Actually the quote from CR was correct up there .. He said "biomes" even though his software mind wanted to say something more like 'clusters'. Which can then be containing features. which can contain any number of recursive sub-systems. Those are modeled in software and have dependencies of each other.

Hard to imagine ? Well usually people spend years getting to terms with sofware, so unless you study/work this or are some extreme hobbyist, the explanations you can give will come from forum posts and little else.

Seeds encode all your PG input set. Artists don't even create the textures (at least in Elite they don't), and seeds have no more to do with them than determining the planet type (hence color map palette).

And 'on the fly' means generated geometry by your GPU at run-time. It doesn't mean .. whatever definition you're thinking of really.

This thread is about SC, but I am going to respond to this because you took a very layman's explanation - which was the attempt to explain it to someone in simple terms - and went full neckbeard. The "textures" was a replacement for his "biomes" which is a replacement for whatever random elements that are redesigned or predetermined to act as the base elements that the algorithm will build. It is based on math and algorithms, but again - you are going neckbeard here and trying to make things more convoluted than they need to be because again - it was a very basic layman's explanation because there is no sense in going full exposition.

And no, CR meant biomes as in "here is a forest biome" "here is a snow biome" "here is a desert biome" he meant exactly that.

You totally whiffed with the 'on the fly' retort. Just.. stop.

 

[Osmanthus]

Here's the right part of this quote: "Procedural Generation uses an algorithm to recreate things"

It's not based only on math at all, they model planetary concepts in software, where math plays certainly a role, but it not necessarily a central one. It all depends on the design.

Actually the quote from CR was correct up there .. He said "biomes" even though his software mind wanted to say something more like 'clusters'. Which can then be containing features. which can contain any number of recursive sub-systems. Those are modeled in software and have dependencies of each other.

Hard to imagine ? Well usually people spend years getting to terms with sofware, so unless you study/work this or are some extreme hobbyist, the explanations you can give will come from forum posts and little else.

Seeds encode all your PG input set. Artists don't even create the textures (at least in Elite they don't), and seeds have no more to do with them than determining the planet type (hence color map palette).

And 'on the fly' means generated geometry by your GPU at run-time. It doesn't mean .. whatever definition you're thinking of really.

Yeah I'm gonna be honest, I don't really see how what you said is different from what he said in principle. Then again I don't work in PG software...

 

[ghcannon]

I suppose you just don't get software ..

*ch-chhhs*

 

[Tippis]

I may be being a bit thick here, but I'm not getting this SC procedural generation thing. I thought the idea of PG was so you could load a massive amount of assets as needed and they would each be different, yet each asset the same for each player.

If CIG are handcrafting each of these (initially PG generated) assets, then the speed of generation is lost - they have to load the modified assets each time. They may as well have stuck to random heightmaps and have artists modify them - they could have saved all the money on PG research.

(By the way - I admit I know nothing of game development).

Weeeell… kind of.

The key word in procedural generation is the generation part. It's not that you load assets as needed — that's more a matter of streaming content — it's that the assets in question don't even exist before they're needed, but are rather… well… generated on the fly. Before then, they're just a bunch of parameters (commonly including your current position because after all, that's where you are) and an algorithm that takes those parameters and have it spit out the data you need.

This commonly means things like terrain shape, texture choice, placement of prefab assets, maybe even various lighting and visual effects (atmospherics, weather etc). You could conceivably go nuts and generate all those assets as well — this is what some of the previously discussed examples like .kkrieger do — but it's costly and you quickly reach a point where it makes more sense to just build a bunch of well-made models and textures that the PG can sprinkle out as decorations.

Above all, it means you don't have to have an 800GB heightmap to define just the terrain of a tiny planet (and which still has pretty poor close-up detail), but rather a collection of nodes or parameter points that in just a few kb define their local area, and then you can just ask “I'm at {x,y,z}, what's around here?” and the answer is generated at the detail level needed for that position, based on where you are in relation to those points and how the algorithm interpolates between them.

What Chris is talking about is how they set up those parameter nodes, and hinting about how they use prefabricated templates to add in a bit more detail for certain aspects.