Planetary landings
- Thread starter NeilF
- Start date
I know planetary landings won't be a part of the game until later, as an expansion, but it is still one aspect that excites me the most.
Do we know any details about the technology they will use? I see there are several great procedural planet engines out there already, like Infinity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO7XhaTGDYg
Amazing for a four year old engine, made by only one person. This game was discontinued though, but they still license out the planet rendering technology.
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Then there are others, like Outerra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNgWwvSaTZ0
Notice the amazing detailed vegetation here, you can really go out on the ground and enjoy walking around with plenty of details everywhere.
I know Frontier Development will use their own engine, but I wonder how the planetary visuals in Elite will compare...
Do we know any details about the technology they will use? I see there are several great procedural planet engines out there already, like Infinity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO7XhaTGDYg
Amazing for a four year old engine, made by only one person. This game was discontinued though, but they still license out the planet rendering technology.
EDIT:
Then there are others, like Outerra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNgWwvSaTZ0
Notice the amazing detailed vegetation here, you can really go out on the ground and enjoy walking around with plenty of details everywhere.
I know Frontier Development will use their own engine, but I wonder how the planetary visuals in Elite will compare...
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Philip Coutts
Volunteer Moderator
Frontier have their own "Cobra" Engine.
I wonder how the planetary visuals in Elite will compare...
Well, you kind of answered your own question.
All these tech demos and programs like Space Engine have been made by very small teams, sometimes only one person, and often pretty much on their spare time.
So just imagine what about 100 professional devs in a mature gamestudio that's been around for 20 years can do when working full time.
I have a feeling Elite will blow everything else completely out of the water.
Ah, good ol' Ysaneya
The biggest problem will probably be to make things interesting. AFAIK FD stated in the past that they could make planetary landings possible right now, just there wasn't much to see or do down there.
A moderately "interesting" planet like Earth can be put on the order of some tens of gigabytes of data (judging from flight simulations like FSX or X-Plane, with most of the data being a heightmap and the rest infrastructure and information about land use) which has to come from somewhere, be it prefabs or procedural generation.
The biggest problem will probably be to make things interesting. AFAIK FD stated in the past that they could make planetary landings possible right now, just there wasn't much to see or do down there.
A moderately "interesting" planet like Earth can be put on the order of some tens of gigabytes of data (judging from flight simulations like FSX or X-Plane, with most of the data being a heightmap and the rest infrastructure and information about land use) which has to come from somewhere, be it prefabs or procedural generation.
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Well, you kind of answered your own question.
All these tech demos and programs like Space Engine have been made by very small teams, sometimes only one person, and often pretty much on their spare time.
So just imagine what about 100 professional devs in a mature gamestudio that's been around for 20 years can do when working full time.
I have a feeling Elite will blow everything else completely out of the water.
Wow man, hadn´t realized those other engines where done by single individuals in spare time etc
Put it like that it indeed sounds like it would be a winner here. Is there any statement by FDEV devs suggesting their models will be comparable or even more detailed than those?
Wonder if someone in FDEV has met with any of those other PG engine creators so to learn or exchange knowledge with them?
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By the way, the Infinity game uses the I-Novae engine. They are both made by the same developer:
https://www.inovaestudios.com/
https://www.inovaestudios.com/
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Height data for Earth would be in a file texture format for those sims, rather than procedural, and same goes for the colour maps. Perhaps an Elite Earth would still go that route, but most planets would be combining various fractals and noises for the most part, and they'd take up considerably less disk space.
The planet landing/exploration is my most looked forward to feature. Just to be able to fly out of deep space and drill down to the surface of an unknown planet, moving through all those relative scales, down from solar system scale, to planetary, to individual bits and pieces at ground level. There's your sense of freedom, right there.
Ah, nice catch. I edited the post and used another example.
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Been following infinity: quest for earth a long time.. and yes their engine is impressive, but i doubt it will be anything compared to what FD can come up with utilizing their knowhow and resources.
Was sad to hear that infinity: quest for earth never got finished, so i gave up in the end and stopped following it.. looked promising though.
Was sad to hear that infinity: quest for earth never got finished, so i gave up in the end and stopped following it.. looked promising though.
amazing, needs more atmospheric scattering, DoF effects, and flora and fauna/buildings and rivers/waterfalls maybe.
I remember playing with a Terrain generation engine called "Vista" years ago, it could make some pretty realistic scenes from fractal procedural geometry, also a newer tool called Bryce was also good.
I remember playing with a Terrain generation engine called "Vista" years ago, it could make some pretty realistic scenes from fractal procedural geometry, also a newer tool called Bryce was also good.
i have been following infinity for as long as it exists, being an elite clone, and too bad it did not go for crowd funding 4 years back when the community was really active.. now i wish them all the luck, but as tinman says imagine what a 100 ppl team can do if they set their mind to it, and one more thing, DB has been creating elite last 30 years, he practically invented procedural generation and this is his space. He done planetary landing years back, and he knows how to do it.
He just waits for the right time to do it, same as for ED. No mans sky, i think that is just a glimpse of what FD will bring out with planetary landing, hopefully with less colors
He just waits for the right time to do it, same as for ED. No mans sky, i think that is just a glimpse of what FD will bring out with planetary landing, hopefully with less colors
Well...in case you haven't noticed FD isn't really big on thumping their chest and claiming superiority.
The closest you are probably going to get is this answer David gave in the Reddit AMA they did during the KS:
I love Space Engine for example, but let's face it. The planets ARE basically just a colored heightmap with some nice atmospheric effects.
At a bare minimum I'm expecting something at least at the same level of detail as in Just Cause 2 (which also used procedural generation to populate a lot of the world), but most likely even better.
I have a funny feeling that this will the best part of elite, added with a great mission manager, would make this game one of the best.
Missions that would have you tracking pirates down to the planet and following them to their hidden base. And other missions for drop bombing the surface or protecting the bombers.
The possibilities would be endless.
It would open this game up and it would feel even bigger than it already is.
Can’t wait
Missions that would have you tracking pirates down to the planet and following them to their hidden base. And other missions for drop bombing the surface or protecting the bombers.
The possibilities would be endless.
It would open this game up and it would feel even bigger than it already is.
Can’t wait
wolverine2710
Tutorial & Guide Writer
Another good example of what is possible atm no mans sky. Everything you see is PG. IIrc that team is also rather small 9 ppl according to their website. I was sceptical at first about planetary landings but after seeing your examples and no mans sky I think FD with all their PG experience and a much larger team can pull this off.
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Well...in case you haven't noticed FD isn't really big on thumping their chest and claiming superiority.
The closest you are probably going to get is this answer David gave in the Reddit AMA they did during the KS:
I love Space Engine for example, but let's face it. The planets ARE basically just a colored heightmap with some nice atmospheric effects.
At a bare minimum I'm expecting something at least at the same level of detail as in Just Cause 2 (which also used procedural generation to populate a lot of the world), but most likely even better.
Wow. If that hapens to be what FDEV is aiming for then I cant imagine what all this can be when they develop the content for us to actually have something meaningful to do down there... ref the occasions where DB has mentioned that planetary landings etc they could do now but that there is still nothing for us to do there yet...
I wasn't talking disk space. Even if you go full PD, you still need to have the data by the time a player visits the area, and you need to do so consistently and quickly. For the few known planets, my guess would be a low-resolution terrain map with maybe a kilometre-scale resolution (putting it into the tens of megabytes range instead of tens of gigabytes), and then filling in the gaps on the fly so it doesn't look too bad.
It is hard to imagine before we see some screenshots, but I am assuming the planets today are rendered using the same technology they will use for surface landings. I noticed some visible detail popping even when looking at the planet from afar, meaning when going gradually closer it will suddenly change dramatically as a more detailed version of the planet is shown.
Detail popping is what these kind of procedural engines often suffers from, and they have to be finely tuned to ensure immersion is not broken because a big mountain suddenly deforms in front of you to a more detailed model. Outerra and Infinity does a great job in this respect, details are revealed smoothly as you close in.
But, it is way too early to compare. The graphics in the game today is so different from what a stroll on the planet surface would look like.
Another aspect is vegetation, water, different types of rocks, snow, lava, atmospheric effects, procedural cities... The list goes on and on. It might take more efforts to generate and render a good looking diverse planet than to make the entire rest of the game. It is easy to ignore a lot of this and just do some simple rock formations and throw in an atmospheric shader, so I am curious about their level of ambition.
I do hope they have some super talents like Ysaneya on their team though. Team size and experience is one thing, but procedural planet rendering is a pretty advanced topic and needs highly specialized talents.