Can the Cobra engine handle detailed populated planets with cities?

[Nilt]

Am i the only one who noticed GG7's statement that he is running DSR x 4 ... which puts his resolution at about 7680x4320 or 8k, and then does super sampling in game which then puts it up to something... x2 higher then scales back again. Either that or GG7... you are so obsessed with typing high numbers and specs that you either are not telling the whole truth, or you don't understand what the settings are doing.

No, I noted that as well. The issue, really, is someone expecting a game to perform consistently despite changing variables like instancing, new models being drawn, and so forth. And, yeah, adding the excessive load of SUpersampling certainly won't help that aspect of things. That may well be a portion of the problem, but my gut feeling is GG7 has tinkered with Windows settings, etc, in an attempt to fine tune the performance of the system. I used to have a URL for this, which was kind of humorous, but the basic rules of how to optimize Windows have been the same for quite some time now, barring something truly unique.

1. Install Windows.
2. Install drivers.
3. Install software.
4. Configure software settings as desired (note this doesn't mean Windows settings).
5. Stop tinkering and play games or use the system!

The old site basically had Step 1 then Step 2 said, "There is no step 2". Which, honestly, was a little misleading but poetic license for the joke made it reasonable.

Edited to fix fat fingering. It's 2:30 AM here, so I'm off to bed. Night, all!

Edit 2: I know, I actually got dressed for bed. I wanted to make this point and remembered I hadn't. It is important to note that GG7's reported symptoms are entirely possible to have, including the exact hardware reported as well as the fact that only Elite is having any issues whatsoever. This doesn't mean the assertion about Elite's "optimization" is accurate, but we should remember that they may well be telling the truth as they understand it. We have no way to know for certain either way and it's important to remember that.

 

[CapuchinSeven]

Am i the only one who noticed GG7's statement that he is running DSR x 4 ... which puts his resolution at about 7680x4320 or 8k, and then does super sampling in game which then puts it up to something... x2 higher then scales back again. Either that or GG7... you are so obsessed with typing high numbers and specs that you either are not telling the whole truth, or you don't understand what the settings are doing.

No I mentioned it as an alarm went off in my head as well. He's trying to push his resolution up to a crazy high level with DSR and SS AND SMAA on.
If anything it's actually a credit to the engine that it's running at all.

 

[xondk]

It would make sense to use domes, because most planets don't have breathable atmospheres.

It's possible to have a GTAV sized city like Los Santos, but not hundreds of thousands of unique looking hand-crafted cities. Because it's too much work. So I don't expect such highly interactive cities as GTAV, but hope they use procedural generation for metropolises. If cities have the same grid and buildings, that would be boring.

The only way Frontier could add large cities and each one looks unique (to some degree) is by using procedural generation. Such as having different pieces of a city grid and buildings mix and match to create different looking cities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlR2geuzPXI

While very cool, this is just one step of procedural generation, roughly this is how you'd generate a city with interiors.

generate terrain from whatever settings you have.
once terrain is generated all terrain that qualifies (set by parameters) for cities, are set to generate that.
You then begin generating the overall city environment, in short square blocks and such of where what should be until you have the grid and shape you want.
then you generate the textures and exterior details of said city, fountains, brick, actual buildings, road, what have you
Then you have the volume of the various individual houses, this volume and shape is known, and the procedural generation will then fit in rooms of various shape sizes and such, again, parameters define this.
Until you have an interior.
Then you detail that interior, textures, doors what have you, internal stuff, furniture.

Then you are done, but yes that one shows a very good example of just one of the steps. where it turns a square into a building.

Edit - my mistake, people already caught the DSR and supersampling

No mistake really, other then not knowing Nvidia's odd numbering of DSR, nvidia...for...some reason, does not use numbers as quantifiers 2x does not mean 2x the x - y resolution, rather it means 2x the pixel count, so yeah, it means 4x reaches only 4k, but then you add super sampling (which does use the right idea) so 2x supersampling is 8k, and then SMAA on that, so the SMAA is probably trying 16k, so yeah, no wonder it is having problems.

 

[Eros]

Aye, I scrolled back through the thread and saw a few comments about it

It is kinda interesting since before I moved and left my old old PC behind I had a core2quad at 2.83GHz, i bought a standard GTX 980 so i could play horizons. Back when 2.0 went into beta, I could play it, slilky smooth with DSR x 2 it was amazing, I thought wow! so cool, it looks so awesome its unbelievable.

Then I did a driver update aaaaand DSR x 2 would give me terrible frame drops near the surface. But oddly enough Supersampling in game set to 2 would be fine again. What this basically said to me was that there was a horrible Bottleneck in my system and getting the CPU and GPU load just right was important haha. There was a few releases that seemed to hurt performance but these got cleaned up. After 2.2 the game settled down and I got generally good performance regardless of graphic settings. For a laugh I made a few 4k recordings using shadow play and was honestly astounded that my computer could do this, and give me exactly the same frame rates in all circumstances as when i was running at 1080p.

Tells me that optimization is somewhat of a black art and not every PC will run the game in a comparative way (reading how so many people complain of huge performance loss using shadowplay for example) It is also the case that, gaming is filled with young people obsessed with their system spec, that it is all about the tall tale and the boast... that and adults who have not grown out of that mentality. I tend to use lots of caution when people instantly throw specs at you, since typically they do not tell the whole story.

 

[Cosmo]

While very cool, this is just one step of procedural generation, roughly this is how you'd generate a city with interiors.

generate terrain from whatever settings you have.
once terrain is generated all terrain that qualifies (set by parameters) for cities, are set to generate that.
You then begin generating the overall city environment, in short square blocks and such of where what should be until you have the grid and shape you want.
then you generate the textures and exterior details of said city, fountains, brick, actual buildings, road, what have you
Then you have the volume of the various individual houses, this volume and shape is known, and the procedural generation will then fit in rooms of various shape sizes and such, again, parameters define this.
Until you have an interior.
Then you detail that interior, textures, doors what have you, internal stuff, furniture.

Yes, most buildings won't be accessible though. It's primarily procedural generation of building exteriors so the cities look unique.

 

[Jex =TE=]

It's amazing how widespread in-depth technical knowledge of the Cobra engine has become.

LMAO

 

[Jex =TE=]

Funny I have a 970 GTX and it's running smooth as silk...

My 770 never had any issues either and I'm pretty sure I was on ultra.

 

[Cheapchips]

Yes, most buildings won't be accessible though. It's mostly procedural generation of building exteriors so it looks like a city.

That would feel like a missed opportunity for the game and big budget proc gen. Like scale planets, you don't need it for gameplay as such, but it adds to the feel of the world. It would make bounty hunting in a city potentially more meaningful. In my head it's an update of Liberation or Hunter.

They have to do interiors first anyway for ships/outposts/stations. It needs to be proc gen given that stations are city sized. Ground buildings will 'just' need additional art.

Here's a demo from 2007. You could do so much more these days.

[video=youtube_share;AtC0lpKKE38]https://youtu.be/AtC0lpKKE38[/video]

 

[Jex =TE=]

I guess the question is can the engine handle an amusement park on a procedurally generated planet?

I think a city with a little traffic would be easier to handle than an amusement park with hundreds of people.

Everyone needs to step back a little and ask themselves, "to what point should we have people on cities" - it's fine imagining how great things can be but in reality, it all needs coding - it needs gameplay.

Think of GTA gameplay - is that good enough? Remember that took 3-4-5 years to develop. Do we want FDev sepnding that long just for that gameplay? And this btw was Rockstar with a massive budget and team working on it.

So we need to discuss expectations and we need to look at planets. So before anything, we need...

PG generated planets WITH atmosphere - requires new PG model with tectonic plates, larger in scales of magnitude than current planets and requires atmospheric flight model. It also requires polar regions, tropical zone, deserts, tundra, etc, etc, etc

Oh and I forgot different atmospheres where you'll need breathing gear.

That's before they need to add....

Flora PG engine. They only need a million or so variations so they don't pull a NMS. This has to be coded, vegetation that's different on every planet that supports life and integrated into the planet so it grows in the right regions. Once you have that, we can move onto....

Fauna - animals! You think the plant life was complex? Welcome to the brand new god AI animal engine. AI needed for each of the trillion or so species that would populate the galaxy. PG generater so complex as to give far better animals than NMS's awful mechanic.

We haven't even got to the PG city generator with it's cars and people!

On top of all this - you need to add in some gameplay. How are you going to acheive all of this in less than a decade?

OK so let's look at cutting back - we cut back on fauna - then all planets will feel the same. If the same plants are on one planet and another, then it won't be long before people post (planets are boring). If we cut back on animals, you'll get the same. Cut back on people, same - make cities all look the same, same again.

We're talking a massive undertaking to pull it off - look at Evochron Legacy. Same game as ED pretty much but has more. It has PG planets and....they're boring. Nothing on them so pointless really.

I think that people imagine what planets in ED "could" be like but they won't be anything like they're hoping. Not because ED couldn't pull it off it's just they don't have 3 decades to code it all.

 

[Simon Darkstep]

I was assuming that inhabited atmospheric worlds will have a space traffic control system that will guide you down from orbit "on rails" to a reasonably playable and renderable limited part of a starport, where you can walk around and do stuff.

And similarly, assuming that uninhabited atmospheric worlds will work like the airless rocks, except with air turbulence.

 

[Jex =TE=]

I was assuming that inhabited atmospheric worlds will have a space traffic control system that will guide you down from orbit "on rails" to a reasonably playable and renderable limited part of a starport, where you can walk around and do stuff.

And similarly, assuming that uninhabited atmospheric worlds will work like the airless rocks, except with air turbulence.

"On rails" with ED won't cut it. DB already went too far when he blurted out "We should go big game hunting on planets" - I think people are expecting wayyyy too much from FD here with all this GTA like gameplay (not saying the gameplay will be like GTA but the cites, as big, as populated).

It's more likely to be as you stated, cities you can see in the distance or they have to render every planet that has people on it.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Personally, when I picture "Space Legs," I see it as another way of getting missions and commodities that don't involve the station services menu. I really don't care about my credits per hour. What I care about is the experience of life as a member of the Pilot's Federation in the early 34th century. To do the thing I imagined doing in Frontier: Elite 2, just as FE2 allowed me to visit the surface of planets, as I imagined in the original Elite.

I want to walk into a shady bar, in the underdeveloped parts of a space station, to meet with my contact with the underground resistance movement, to discuss where on planet I should bring the battle weapons I smuggled into the system. I want to skip the middleman, and land outside a farm to buy 200 heads of cattle to bring to a developing colony world.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I was assuming that inhabited atmospheric worlds will have a space traffic control system that will guide you down from orbit "on rails" to a reasonably playable and renderable limited part of a starport, where you can walk around and do stuff.

And similarly, assuming that uninhabited atmospheric worlds will work like the airless rocks, except with air turbulence.

They have already mentioned that most cities would be in Domes due to the idea that most of the terraformed planets would need to be domed cities to keep the toxic atmosphere out. Even the ones without a toxic atmosphere, you would likely have domes at first due to air bourne viruses that humans would have no defence against. I can see us landing at the edges of these huge cities and then going places via train, turbo lift or use some other vehicle when we can move around on foot.

My guess is that they will be using the moon as a test bed for these city ideas to see how the tech works, and then expand on to other non-atmospheric planets, and then on to atmospheric planets further down the line.

But it is an interesting problem FDev have with how to implement it all.

 

[DaveB]

Personally, when I picture "Space Legs," I see it as another way of getting missions and commodities that don't involve the station services menu. I really don't care about my credits per hour. What I care about is the experience of life as a member of the Pilot's Federation in the early 34th century. To do the thing I imagined doing in Frontier: Elite 2, just as FE2 allowed me to visit the surface of planets, as I imagined in the original Elite.

I want to walk into a shady bar, in the underdeveloped parts of a space station, to meet with my contact with the underground resistance movement, to discuss where on planet I should bring the battle weapons I smuggled into the system. I want to skip the middleman, and land outside a farm to buy 200 heads of cattle to bring to a developing colony world.

yes! and if theres a store on the station where I can buy a nice stylish brown duster to wear over my flight suit it will be just perfect

 

[ArchEmperor]

That would feel like a missed opportunity for the game and big budget process gen. Like scale planets, you don't need it for gameplay as such, but it adds to the feel of the world. It would make bounty hunting in a city potentially more meaningful. In my head it's an update of Liberation or Hunter.

They have to do interiors first anyway for ships/outposts/stations. It needs to be proc gen given that stations are city sized. Ground buildings will 'just' need additional art.

Here's a demo from 2007. You could do so much more these days.

https://youtu.be/AtC0lpKKE38

With todays hardware and available API's, these engine addons should be mandatory for every game. It does need some tweaking to fit procedural city scapes in Elite, because orbital stations ( where we land our ships; we call them space stations but they are really cities in space ) require some fiddling to maintain the rotational and sometimes spherical structuring.

But beside that obstacle, this tech has been around for a loooooong time.

Everything, from the interior of our Federal Corvettes to the interiors of some cave on a moon surface, could be procedurally generated using these already available API's.

 

[Jacobus Franconium]

Can the Cobra engine handle detailed populated planets with cities?

Everything feels uninhabited (except the large stations). Any ideas about how to make the galaxy feel like there are other people too?

I think it would be cool to see a few people in eva suits doing repairs outside stations. A few people walking around in eva suits on planet stations. Think of people as tiny spaceships.

What do you think?

I think it will as planet coaster uses the same engine and has masive amounts of people and detail in that game. every person is different , each bolt on the coasters are unique . So i would say cobra enginge would run that just fine.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Old Post. Ignore.

 

[Noddie]

I don't think it should be asked to do too much in the way of rendering planets. It's a space sim, at the end of the day. It shouldn't become No Man's Sky.

Some cities would be nice, maybe forests and so on. But the idea of having massively uniquely detailed content produced by procedural maths on anything like currently accessible hardware is too much to ask for. Better not to try it, than to try it and look like a pillock because it's unavoidable dreadful.