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.
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.
I have seen a lot of theory-crafting by backers and others who simply have
no idea how any of this actually works. I actually
wrote a bit about this when the furor first started.
They're not going to be modeling "entire planets". They can't. Why? Because they need
full blown procedural terrain generation for that. They simply
CANNOT do it with handcrafted terrain and texture assets. It's just impossible to even consider that they
can or
would. Especially given the fact that the FrankenEngine that they're stuck with, whether 50% or 75% modified from CE3.x or not, simply
CANNOT handle it. Like, at all.
The fact that they're going to be hand-crafting the terrain mesh itself pretty much says that they're only going to have small "areas of interest" on the planet where players can land and do stuff. Just like was shown in the Homestead demo. They're simply not going to create an entire planet whereby a player - in space - can just pick any location and land on it.
All the assets (rocks, plant life etc) which they are going to plonk on it, can be procedural
placed using a variety of tools. And they can do this either in the editor (which means manual labor), or at runtime (which would be hilarious to me; all things considered).
The biggest problem they're going to have with this is the same problem they have now in space: the planet locations have to be big enough to host the massive capital ships. Well guess what happens when several of those show up. This is not Elite Dangerous whereby the universe is so massive, that it feels empty and you aren't likely to even run into many of the larger ships.
See these ships?
. Well ask yourself how they're going to handle these on a planet surface that's probably going to be inside of 8 sq km - at best. And right now, the Starfarer being the largest ship in the game, has serious issues even when
one is in the scene.
Even with all the cheating (which is acceptable for a PoC tech-demo) that went on in the CitizenCon Homestead demo, there is no way on this God's Earth whereby that single-player experience would have been constructed or replicated in a multiplayer environment based on the game's engine suite. Remember that even the GamesCom tech demo which was minimal multiplayer, also had its own share of cheating and hand waving going on.
If (that's a BIG if) they eventually get planetary access in 3.0 as promised (LOL!!), and backers see what I'm talking about after they end up with a small patch of barren land with specific landing zones, horrid performance, no place to park your Starfarer chariot, then everyone will see just how messed up this whole thing is.
It's all
pure rubbish. And the shocking part, as per the
funding chart:
They got $1m (at the $20m stretch goal mark) for this:
First person combat on select lawless planets. Don’t just battle on space stations and platforms… take the fight to the ground!
And another $1m (at the $41m stretch goal mark) for this:
Procedural Generation R&D Team – This stretch goal will allocate funding for Cloud Imperium to develop procedural generation technology for future iterations of Star Citizen. Advanced procedural generation will be necessary for creating entire planets worth of exploration and development content. A special strike team of procedural generation-oriented developers will be assembled to make this technology a reality.
That's
TWO MILLION dollars. Not even close to the budget for games such as Dual Universe and Battlescape Infinity which
are doing bona-fide procedural generation of planets.
Guess how much of that $2m has been wasted on R&D for this crap. But who's counting, right? The backers will never know.
Then Chris went on stage and claimed they were doing procedural planetary generation. Which backers, as well as the CIG/RSI devs and community reps started parroting. Then post-CitizenCon, they all started walking it back, even as they use semantics and nonsensical arguments to "clarify" what Chris said.
Right here in this forum, we have that example.....
Ben (who clearly has zero experience working on procedural planet generation - of
any kind)
commentary here is part of that.
I know I'm the last person you'd trust to tell you you're wrong, I mean I would, wouldn't I, but it's not as simple as you describe. If you look at ED's procgen, there are clearly distinct layers of generation all of them are procedural besides the very lowest level of detail (eg models of geysers etc). SC also does procedural gen on some of those layers, but the very high levels (systems, continent layouts) and low-ish levels (small assets, but also local height fields and placement patterns) are hand-authored. I had personal reservations about how much of the low-level stuff relies on hand-work, but that's a question of whether the results come out good, not whether it's "cheating".
Edit: I guess if you wanted to go full lawyer, you could say it's "a planet with procedural generation" instead of "a procedurally generated planet", but I feel that's splitting hairs and only really relevant when you're comparing games for the sake of bragging.
And that sort of thing makes me so very - very - angry because that's the sort of nonplus, off-the-cuff, obfuscation that some backers (who have no clue) latch on to, then spread. That in turn gets other like-minded backers to latch on to, harp, and spread the same nonsense. The end result is misplaced expectations, needless hype etc.
What is going on is precisely what goes on with people looking to bankers, investors etc for funding. They lie and say anything to get the funding. In the case of Star Citizen, backers are at the top of that pyramid.
