The Star Citizen Thread v5
- Thread starter Brett C
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Given that the Earth is roughly 500 million square KILOmeters... um... nope
That's a whole lot of people hours, I don't think even SC's budget is up to that
Thanks!
The past week has gone precisely as I predicted back at GamesCom and then again at CitizenCon. I clearly (you can check all my scoops) warned them that this was all lies, lip service etc. Some listened and went straight for the refund button. Meanwhile the Usual Suspects just stepped up their attacks.
Here we are.
The fact is, contrary to popular belief by those guys, I'm not sympathetic to ANY of these current dissenters anymore. I hope they lose all their money, curl up and cry at night when the final inevitable collapse comes. It's not like they didn't see the signs, nor needed me to be raising the alarm. Had they pushed for accountability, stopped buying JPEGs etc, we wouldn't be here. All they did was give croberts license to print money.
As I mentioned over there:
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It sure felt like it
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dsmart... dsmart... dsmart... No, doesn't ring a bell. Who are you again?
Oh wait, now I remember, you're the guy who makes Star Citizen, right? Or is that just the impression I get from the fans of that game, since they seem to know every single word you said, but can't remember the stuff Chris Roberts said three weeks ago
You know, that's a fantastic point made. Thing is that, it's not so much that they can't remember; it's that they selectively choose to forget.
If they're that confused, maybe you should sell some jpeg ships for $1000 each. You never know, you might get lucky.
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That's Derek Smart ARE Toto.
Yes, that's much better.
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What did Genuine Roberts say a few weeks ago? Something to do with Star Marine coming in a few weeks or something
Nah, that can't be it. I'm sure he said that a few years ago.
Nah, that can't be it. I'm sure he said that a few years ago.
That can't be it either! Weeks, not months, and certainly not years
Of course! it's already in the game!!
Buy an Idris!
Surely than hand brushing is in effect changing the seed to it could be a work backwards to generate a new seed.
So if we had a seed of 123456
And that made a scene of Grass tree rock tree rock tree
And then the artist looks at it and thinks "hmm maybe it would look more organic as grass tree tree tree rock tree "
As uses the tool to hand touch it, then the system works backward and figures out the seed for that is 123446
And thus they keep the procedural generation memory foot print but also the benefit of the artists eye fine tuning the outcome.
Isn't that what Frontier used to fine tune their PG.
PG generates the planet, then the artists worked on the results, then that was take back into the PG formulae, and integrated on.
That was my take up from the Season 2.0 preview videos but that might be my laymans misunderstanding of this well over my head
No, i don't think its possible to use PG like that.
Oh .. but it is! The challenge then becomes defining an encoding scheme for all the objects you want in your 'scene'.
Err, no, that's not possible. If you were dealing with something like a 10x10 grid then you could, but only because you could work out seeds for every possible combination of terrain you might want and then select which one you liked: To generate the possible seeds for a 1 km² Crysis map (with 10cm resolution) would probably tie up a supercomputer for a year, and on a planetary scale it's unthinkable.
What you *can* do - and what I think they were doing in the demo - is say "Generate planet number 48. Now make this bit water, and put a rock here, and a tree here, etc: But you're piling up the data pretty quick, especially if all they're proc-genning is a height map (which is all they showed us on the design demo).
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Perhaps i should have said realistic rather than possible.
Yay, Derek's back
Hope you had a nice holiday - from the sounds of things, it seems like you did.
Anyway, glad to have you back, this thread is a much better place for it.
Hope you had a nice holiday - from the sounds of things, it seems like you did.
Anyway, glad to have you back, this thread is a much better place for it.
Did you hear the latest? SC didn't actually fully start development until 2015, so we're just in the first year of full-development. No I'm not making that up, that's straight from a SC backer.
I think it was Asp Explorer here in the forums who said something to the tune of Elite Dangerous having been in development since ca. 1890, which is the reason why it's released already, so any comparison is not fair.
(BTW just because it was mentioned that ED was on KS a year after Star Citizen, that's not true either. ED KS started on November 6th 2012 with only the basic engine existing at that time , SC KS started October 18 2012 after a year of pre-KS production)
Yeah, I think there was a PG programmer talking about NMS in this blog who had a really great metaphor for PG, and likened it to pouring bowls of oatmeal.
So yeah assuming every possible variable is consistent, once the computer has poured a bowl of oatmeal you can get it to pour exactly the same bowl using the original settings. But if you craft a nice shape out of the oatmeal (like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encouters, only with oatmeal instead of mash) you'd never have enough computing power to figure out exactly what the settings need to be to pour a bowl of oatmeal that looks like the mountain from Close Encouters.
What we've currently seen of SC's PG tech is a zoomed in area on the size of one carefully carved bowl of Oatmeal. OK, so we did see another planet vary briefly in one of the videos, but still it's not available for us to scrutinise. Until they have more bowls of oatmeal to compare the PG is actually fairly ambiguous.
If ED are ever going to provide the ability to land on the very small number of planets we have height data for (Earth, Moon, Mars etc.) they will need include that data in the game too. I think that the data will probably be fairly low resolution and the detail will be PG. So the data provides areas like the Pennines or the Rocky Mountains but it'll only be an approximation. If Star Citizen is going to provide us with level data comprised of entire planets and the location of every tree and feature then 1) They probably won't ever finish the first planet, 2) Even if they could, they probably won't be able to compress it to anything sensible 3) We'll probably never be able to download it,.. and 4) I seriously doubt it'll fit onto a hard drive. It will be interesting to see how they do it, but common sense is telling me they'll just end up with something like ED anyway.
I'll have to remember the oatmeal thing.
I think you're right about approximations - I note that in ED, Earth is post-global warming and Mars is terraformed which I suspect is an excuse to allow them to cheat shamelessly.
Probably not a bad idea - Outerra (which is based on real DEM data with PG on top) is a 500MB download for the engine, and a 15GB one for the DEM dataset - and that must be compressed and low res - the full download of the SRTM data for Earth, at 30 meters resolution and excluding oceans, is 876GB. :O
Stuff that.
I guess one thing in CIG's favour is they're using little Noddy planets, so there's a lot less data needed.
Edit to add: the 1km resolution SRTM data comes out at 15GB, so I'm guessing Outerra ran with that.
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Relative to real planets yes. But even if they are the size of a small country in our real world, that's a huge amount of data for a crafted level.
I was doing some rough sums (in this thread) after the citizencon demo trying to work out a rough approximation of the area they quickly "crafted" within 5 minutes in the demo then figuring out how long it would take them to 'craft' an area the size of the UK 243,610 km² and it wasn't practical. There are some really large game maps out there, but there is certainly a point where you go past what is possible even with as many artists and developers and budget you can get.
So it's almost a certainty that planets (even very small ones) will be filled with PG content. The real question is how they will provide that PG content to clients and I have a sneaking suspicion that the 'map' seen in the non-playable demos was pre-baked and stored as height data, and didn't include the rest of the planet. I wonder if they have put much thought into how this is going to work in a consumer application? My best guess is that they intend to provide crafted areas of the map and use seeded stuff in-between, I really hope they aren't thinking of just stuffing (even small scale) planetary 'maps' onto our hard drives.
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Oh, who knows what they're thinking... But it's PG or bust, frankly.
Slightly out of date, but may still be interesting: The 10 biggest (non PG) video game worlds. On this list, the record is Guild Wars Nightfall, at 15,000 sq miles / 38,850 sq km. Although if it's anything like the original GW, there'll be lots of areas in there filled with unclimable mountains.
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Oh, who knows what they're thinking... But it's PG or bust, frankly.
Slightly out of date, but may still be interesting: The 10 biggest (non PG) video game worlds. On this list, the record is Guild Wars Nightfall, at 15,000 sq miles / 38,850 sq km. Although if it's anything like the original GW, there'll be lots of areas in there filled with unclimable mountains.
Interesting list, I doubt very much - even in those examples, the map designers placed every individual tree by hand (in fact I think I may have worked with some of the people on Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising that were still around from my days at the studio)
So CIG are kind of expecting us to believe that they are going to produce planetary data for 100 systems of planets, each (presumably) larger than the largest crafted maps in video games. I say they are "kind of" expecting us to believe that, because that's what they implied in the two demos recently, they had a very nicely crafted game area on a big planet they flew down to. CR talked extensively about the "fidelities" they hope to achieve by re-working the PG landscape, and they showed us demonstrations where they hand selected the areas they wanted to PG, then went in and tweaked them.
It won't happen. Even if they fully believe this is how it's going to work, it won't. They won't have enough people, enough time or even enough memory. Presuming they manage to get it working, they'll tweak some areas sure - but the majority of it will be PG oatmeal which is FINE, but the implication is they are going to tweak bits of that oatmeal and somehow serve it to us with tweaks in. That's going to be very interesting. I really hope they didn't just work out all of this stuff for some trade show demos otherwise they are fast developing themselves into some real corners.
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