The Star Citizen Thread v5

[Stigbob]

I have a layman's Star Citizen PG explanation :

Originally other (now complete) games that used PG were criticized as being less fidelitious than star citizens handcrafted bonsai-star cluster was promised to be at a point in what was the future at the time but is now long past.

Recently a known source of hugely unreliable information has burbled incoherently about PG in a complete turn around of earlier burbles, some people have mistakenly taken this second burble seriously and a silly row has ensued.

Buy an Idris.

 

[FuriousMeow]

Buy an Idris.

I'm convinced, done!

 

[Osmanthus]

So let me see if I understand this. What CIG says they want to do (CR's wording, and CIG's examples notwithstanding) is this:

- An artist designates an area on a planet as, say, a mountainous region

- there is an algorithm for generating heightmaps, trees etc in mountainous regions

- this algorithm is applied to the designated area and it is automatically 'populated' (I don't know if that's the right word) with features according to the algorithm

- The artist decides to 'paint' a neighbouring region as wooded, and a different algorithm is applied to populate that area. And so on

- How all this content is delivered to the player is irrelevant. Procedural generation helps the designer design, not the player play (directly).

Is this correct?

 

[FuriousMeow]

If you figure out what CIG wants to do, you win a Nobel... at one point they were going to monitor blood oxygenation levels and yet here we are walking around in space undies.

Edit: Never mind. They want to do everything, what they will do... TBD.

 

[Osmanthus]

If you figure out what CIG wants to do, you win a Nobel... at one point they were going to monitor blood oxygenation levels and yet here we are walking around in space undies.

don't forget the nipple jets

 

[tooterfish]

I suppose you just don't get software ..

*ch-chhhs*

Neither does someone who when describing a software algorithm or model uses the phrase "it's not based only on math".

Prey tell, what else is it based on? Prayer? Orange Juice? A feeling of ennui?

 

[Asp Explorer]

I'm convinced, done!

Make sure you strip down to your undies first - you get a discount

 

[Tippis]

So let me see if I understand this. What CIG says they want to do (CR's wording notwithstanding) is this:

- An artist designates an area on a planet as, say, a mountainous region
- there is an algorithm for generating heightmaps, trees etc in mountaineous regions
- this algorithm is applied to the designated area and it is automatically 'populated' (I don't know if that's the right word) with features according to the algorithm
- The artist decides to 'paint' a neighbouring region as wooded, and a different algorithm is applied to populate that area.
- How all this content is delivered to the player is irrelevant. Procedural generation helps the designer design, not the player play (directly).

Is this correct?

Close enough, except for the last point. It helps the designer in that they don't need to create every last detail, but above all, it helps delivering the world to the player at a detail that wouldn't otherwise be possible. If all it did was provide a canvas for the artist, then the most powerful part of the tech would be completely wasted and we'd be back to needing utterly uselessly large assets.

 

[Marak]

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.

Ah. Ok - Listening to Chris he said that they would have proceduraly generated planets, then artists would go in and "tweak" them, adding in forests, lakes and stuff, making it more artist rendered. But your explaination makes more sense.

 

[tooterfish]

Make sure you strip down to your undies first - you get a discount

Only if you're freshly shorn.

 

[Osmanthus]

Close enough, except for the last point. It helps the designer in that they don't need to create every last detail, but above all, it helps delivering the world to the player at a detail that wouldn't otherwise be possible. If all it did was provide a canvas for the artist, then the most powerful part of the tech would be completely wasted and we'd be back to needing utterly uselessly large assets.

I understand, though to me what you said really translates as it helps creating a world at a detail that wouldn't otherwise be possible, whose effect​ is that the player is experiencing the world at that detail. Is this a half-a-dozen-of-one-and-six-of-another thing, or am I missing a larger point?

 

[lysan]

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.

OMG!

please read this, just to set some wrongs right here.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ind-it-architecture-and-going-outside-the-box

 

[1500]

I understand, though to me what you said really translates as it helps creating a world at a detail that wouldn't otherwise be possible, whose effect​ is that the player is experiencing the world at that detail. Is this a half-a-dozen-of-one-and-six-of-another thing, or am I missing a larger point?

Should help some understand the general idea of PG and why its used.
[video=youtube;TgbuWfGeG2o]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgbuWfGeG2o[/video]

The reason that ED's PG is so impressive is because of the crazy complected rules that govern its PG, coupled with how the PG generates the worlds from the base up.

 

[darkoff]

[video=youtube_share;Y0s7vd07ago]https://youtu.be/Y0s7vd07ago[/video]
my favorite bug of all time

i have no idea how that is even possible.
do note that nakedness seems to protect from the effects of explosion going around him

 

[Tippis]

Ah. Ok - Listening to Chris he said that they would have proceduraly generated planets, then artists would go in and "tweak" them, adding in forests, lakes and stuff, making it more artist rendered. But your explaination makes more sense.

That's just it: he's probably not wrong. He's just… ehrm… not very good at communicating what they're doing. Most likely, what the artists are doing is simply tweaking the parameters for a couple of given areas, maybe even setting up very specific and particularly dense sets of data points to really detail out how that particular area is supposed to look. So the artists can add in all those forests and lakes on top of — or perhaps more accurately in place of — the terrain that would be there if the algorithm was left to its own devices.

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I understand, though to me what you said really translates as it helps creating a world at a detail that wouldn't otherwise be possible, whose effect​ is that the player is experiencing the world at that detail. Is this a half-a-dozen-of-one-and-six-of-another thing, or am I missing a larger point?

Hmm. I think the point I'm really trying to make, and which is maybe not entirely clear, is that it's not just a creative technique, but also a delivery method and that it's actually in the delivery role that the real magic happens.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

It really looks like a pretty game, but it seems like it still has a way to go. Maybe in a year or two it might come back into my sights again. I've never been big on the whole early-adopter/play-while-we-build concept. I'd rather dive in to a finished project, even if it is one where additional content is still being added than something incomplete. It just sullies the experience for me.

 

[darkoff]

also i think elite is procedurally generated. but the variables on the algorithm try to mimic real life as close as possible. I think thats brabens vision and dream on elite and i fully support it.
just think how dwarf fortress generates worlds its similar to that. First you have seed then various effects run across the world like erosion and asteroid hits. Theres also variables that are calculated based on planets distance from the star. etc.

Now that i think about it pretty much all of our models on what has happened in earth in history is procedurally generated (computer models/animations), because we lack the data. we are only doing the algorithm that calculates towards end result that is our current earth

 

[1500]

also i think elite is procedurally generated. but the variables on the algorithm try to mimic real life as close as possible. I think thats brabens vision and dream on elite and i fully support it.
just think how dwarf fortress generates worlds its similar to that. First you have seed then various effects run across the world like erosion and asteroid hits. Theres also variables that are calculated based on planets distance from the star. etc.

Now that i think about it pretty much all of our models on what has happened in earth in history is procedurally generated (computer models/animations), because we lack the data. we are only doing the algorithm that calculates towards end result that is our current earth

I would love to see DF's Empire historical PG used in something like ED. Make the minor factions have an actual history and personality.

 

[Osmanthus]

Hmm. I think the point I'm really trying to make, and which is maybe not entirely clear, is that it's not just a creative technique, but also a delivery method and that it's actually in the delivery role that the real magic happens.

Ok, thanks. I'll have a think about this

 

[AlPilg]

i have no idea how that is even possible.
do note that nakedness seems to protect from the effects of explosion going around him

It's probably one of the weirdest games ever made, you have to give them that at least. :S