Planetary landings

[Ruskodisco]

Planetary Landings and cities.

i have a suggestion and i was wondering who would agree with me.
i was hoping when they make the cities(expansion) they would'nt make it like skyrim or fallout 3. i was hoping they would make it detailed and full of quality with people walking around doing activities and interacting with each other with a very immersive enviroment. because i would rather have them be on par with watchdogs or GTA 5 kind of city where you can spend days in it lost. even if there are only 1-3 of them.
so my question is do you guys agree that there should concentrate on quality and not quantity?
because a city that is boring is just modeled boxes clumped together.

 

[SAB380]

i have a suggestion and i was wondering who would agree with me.
i was hoping when they make the cities(expansion) they would'nt make it like skyrim or fallout 3. i was hoping they would make it detailed and full of quality with people walking around doing activities and interacting with each other with a very immersive enviroment. because i would rather have them be on par with watchdogs or GTA 5 kind of city where you can spend days in it lost. even if there are only 1-3 of them.
so my question is do you guys agree that there should concentrate on quality and not quantity?
because a city that is boring is just modeled boxes clumped together.

I'm not really sure what you mean. To me the cities in Skyrim or Fallout 3 are much, much more detailed and the AI routines are much more advanced.

In Watchdogs/GTA, the cities are more wallpaper where nothing is actually functional and its pretty to look at from a distance but its more like a movie set where nothing is actually happening off camera.

....but yes, I think Elite's cities and people will look much more like GTA's as the point of the game isn't to wander through peoples houses individually but to see everything at a distance as we take off and land in our spaceships, and eventually walk around specific space port areas.

 

[Machival]

I don't think you have to worry about super-tiny settlements. That's more of a concern for the players of star citizen than elite dangerous. Since ED will be using procedural generation, the real deciding factors for planetary cities are going to be design aesthetic, rendering costs, and availability of accompanying game features such as land vehicles. (A gta style city is simply impractical for players who can only navigate via walking, but everything's golden if we're given cars)

IT should also be noted that while Falkreath might have been rendered as a small village in Skyrim, settlements in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall were rendered like this: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/2011/11/daggerfall31.jpg

And this was the map for the city of Daggerfall: http://i1191.photobucket.com/albums... Scrolls - Daggerfall/daggerfall_city_map.jpg (each of those colored rectangles is a full-sized building)

If Bethesda could do large cities in the 90s with procedural generation, ED can do it now with procedural generation.

 

[Rog]

I would *much* rather FD took as long as needed to make the planetary landings/cities as real and lifelike as possible. Take a year (or two), just get it right. Such high hopes for this aspect of the game.

 

[ykza5]

I would like them more a la Mass Effect with intances and you get a transport between them. To make then more of a usefull thing. If you want to explore the planet by all means but I can bet cities will be more like stations, a place to buy, sell, socialize maybe but I wouldnt think a place to behold and wonder around. This is a space game, wonder in space

 

[Daeron]

They should at least take the time to make a huge park with trees and fountains. Would like a walk in something like that on Achenar. Then watch as a group of procedural birds take flight, when getting too close.

Caution: This mental picture does not contain flashy deeds, stomping dinosaurs, or action heroes. Just a moment of peace and quiet, and satisfaction, absolutely doing wonders for the blood pressure.

 

[sinsro]

TL;DR

This is how I would do it:
1) Get a fairly high resolution height map of Earth - there are free ones available.
2) Zone off limits areas for special items.
3) Pick certain points as the seeds for cities (London, Tokyo, etc.)
3) Use procedural generation to build the cities.

Job done.

Why is everybody getting their knickers in a twist about it?

Uhm, notice how Elite has more than just one planet?

This list is like explaining how easy it is to make a time machine, like :

1. Get funding
2. Build time machine

Proves how easy it is?

Go read the Infinity blog to truly appreciate the huge amount of work and detail that goes into such an amazing achievement as real time procedural planet generation. It is very hard to get it right, and needs top talents to achieve it..

 

[Ruskodisco]

I would like them more a la Mass Effect with intances and you get a transport between them. To make then more of a usefull thing. If you want to explore the planet by all means but I can bet cities will be more like stations, a place to buy, sell, socialize maybe but I wouldnt think a place to behold and wonder around. This is a space game, wonder in space

i hope not, and the developer was talking about wildlife and other things he said he wanted people to explore cities. cause if what you say is the case (god hope not) that would mean it would be like star citizen....

They should at least take the time to make a huge park with trees and fountains. Would like a walk in something like that on Achenar. Then watch as a group of procedural birds take flight, when getting too close.

Caution: This mental picture does not contain flashy deeds, stomping dinosaurs, or action heroes. Just a moment of peace and quiet, and satisfaction, absolutely doing wonders for the blood pressure.

YES PLEASE!! they were talking about wildlife. in the game for expansion. i really do hope they build that and also cities to explore. i hope the game is not just all hectic like it has been with only jobs of assassin, pirate, trader, bounty hunter(assassin).

I would *much* rather FD took as long as needed to make the planetary landings/cities as real and lifelike as possible. Take a year (or two), just get it right. Such high hopes for this aspect of the game.

and i would gladly pay $80+ for this kind of expansion. cause i would spend literally days in cities just exploring them. cause these guys are amazing game developers

I don't think you have to worry about super-tiny settlements. That's more of a concern for the players of star citizen than elite dangerous. Since ED will be using procedural generation, the real deciding factors for planetary cities are going to be design aesthetic, rendering costs, and availability of accompanying game features such as land vehicles. (A gta style city is simply impractical for players who can only navigate via walking, but everything's golden if we're given cars)

IT should also be noted that while Falkreath might have been rendered as a small village in Skyrim, settlements in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall were rendered like this: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/2011/11/daggerfall31.jpg

And this was the map for the city of Daggerfall: http://i1191.photobucket.com/albums... Scrolls - Daggerfall/daggerfall_city_map.jpg (each of those colored rectangles is a full-sized building)

If Bethesda could do large cities in the 90s with procedural generation, ED can do it now with procedural generation.

i hope they only use procedural generation cities for other planets that are'nt "important(yet)" and they actually make a living breathing beautiful futuristic city. i don't care if they charge us 100$ i would gladly spend on something like that. knowing me i would be in there for thousands of hours

I'm not really sure what you mean. To me the cities in Skyrim or Fallout 3 are much, much more detailed and the AI routines are much more advanced.

In Watchdogs/GTA, the cities are more wallpaper where nothing is actually functional and its pretty to look at from a distance but its more like a movie set where nothing is actually happening off camera.

....but yes, I think Elite's cities and people will look much more like GTA's as the point of the game isn't to wander through peoples houses individually but to see everything at a distance as we take off and land in our spaceships, and eventually walk around specific space port areas.

GTA 5 took 5 years to make and 150 million dollars. the city has detail like no other. the city is alive and full of people. one thing i do with watchdogs is simply walk down different streets and watch the people. there is so much things going on that it is very hard to find someone doing the same thing. the city is beautiful both of them are.

about fallout 3 and skyrim. yes there is plenty of detail. and lots of places to "explore" but i never once felt the urge to actually just walk around towns and cities looking at people and discovering different places and just enjoying the view. the people all look the same and there is no life to the place other then generic animations. i only played those games to accomplish quests not to explore.

and gta 5 doesnt have you walking around indivdual houses but you can walk down streets and see houses up close if thats what you mean. (exception due to some houses being open) but that is EXACTLY what i want. i don't just want a space sim. i want to ride into a city with my bitchin spaceship, land on somewhere in a city and just play for hours in it without even feeling the need to want to go to space.
i would spend 100$ on that.

 

[graham.reeds]

Go read the Infinity blog to truly appreciate the huge amount of work and detail that goes into such an amazing achievement as real time procedural planet generation. It is very hard to get it right, and needs top talents to achieve it..

People got fixated on recreating Earth.

Again, if you look at academic literature there is huge amounts of work out there.

Okay since a few points is rather light. How about a few more.

1. Generate solar systems from work of Dole and later Fogg.
2. For the rocky type I planets upon which landings will take place generate a ellipsoid.
3. Upon the ellipsoid distribute a large number of points via poission distribution. Join these up to make a voronai map.
4. Divide the voronai into families randomly based on neighbours to make tectonic plates.
5. Give random motion to the plates and act accordingly after playing for several million simulated years.
6. From this you can now generate weather patterns, location of deserts and most importantly rivers.
7. Distribute seeds for planetary population, heuristic for the different types (agricultural vs industrial, etc).

While this looks a lot it only takes a few seconds to calculate and doesn't need to be done all at once. Also it is embarrassingly parallel.

 

[Hooplah]

Elite never was an accurate display of Earth nor should it be. In a thousand years just the earthquakes alone probably flattened all the hills in San Francisco!

Just take 10 major cities spaced around the world as in London, New York, San Francisco, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Sydney, Moscow, Paris and Calcutta. Make them all generic cities with a few slight building differences to tell Moscow from New York, etc. Then concentrate on what the player CAN DO in the cities versus making them look like the real ones.

The rest of the planet you can land on but won't have any specific terrain. Keeps the memory usage down and the framerates good. Still there might be game opportunities say to build your own hanger in the boonies? Hmm...

I'm more about great game play opportunities versus seeing the Tower of London.

Update: OK getting weird!...I mention earthquakes and San Francisco. 23 hours later a 6.1 earthquake hits Napa north of San Francisco across the Bay.
Hope it wasn't my fault!

 

[Mucka]

I think the best way for them to approach it would be to have a combination of procedurally generated surface and the odd more detailed interactive location upon those worlds.
I feel the same about outer space, procedurally generated systems and planets but with the occasional more detailed interactive feature/phenomena out there as well.

In this way you could fly over the surface of planets and explore from the air to your hearts content and have specified landing locations where you can get out of your ship and walk around - much like space stations in space.
From there you could have expeditions that take you to special places of interest (Space cities, alien ruins, whatever to explore via shuttle/walking/cut scene whatever)
You could still land anywhere on a hard surface but you would be confined to your ship except where you have unique locations that are difficult to discover by making them only detectable by exploring the planet from low altitude some way. That would make low flying over alien planet surfaces quite fun and for truly rare artifacts or unique items to the ED universe you could just give clues on the bulletin board. It is rumored there is ancient lost alien artefact somewhere on the surface of one of Planet Gantarlon's moons. It could be a long time before they are discovered if there were no means of detecting them other than via eye-balling from the air.

Sure it would nice to be able to just land anywhere on a planet and be able to explore and interact with the surface and surroundings in various ways but the only way to be able to achieve that is through procedural generation and you are never going to get the type of detail and scope for interaction you are hoping for via that method or on that scale.
Detailed, interactive, isolated small locations or less detailed less interactive large environments? It is either one or the other or a compromise between the two IMO.

It will certainly be very interesting to see which way they go and how the game engine handles it and this being a huge element of an open world space game it could be the deciding factor for some people when choosing between which of the three current viable options they buy into.

 

[Ruskodisco]

I think the best way for them to approach it would be to have a combination of procedurally generated surface and the odd more detailed interactive location upon those worlds.
I feel the same about outer space, procedurally generated systems and planets but with the occasional more detailed interactive feature/phenomena out there as well.

In this way you could fly over the surface of planets and explore from the air to your hearts content and have specified landing locations where you can get out of your ship and walk around - much like space stations in space.
From there you could have expeditions that take you to special places of interest (Space cities, alien ruins, whatever to explore via cut scene)

Sure it would nice to be able to just land anywhere on a planet and be able to explore and interact with the surface and surroundings in various ways but the only way to be able to achieve that is through procedural generation and you are never going to get the type of detail and scope for interaction you are hoping for via that method or on that scale.
Detailed, interactive, isolated small locations or less detailed less interactive large environments? It is either one or the other or a compromise between the two IMO.

It will certainly be very interesting to see which way they go and how the game engine handles it and this being a huge element of an open world space
game it could be the deciding factor for some people when choosing between which of the three current viable options they buy into.

that is exactly what i hope for. i hope they have like 1 or 2 main HUGE cities to walk around in and interact like as if your play gta 5 and these cities will allow you to spend hours in them. then other procedural generated planets. but these guys are excellent programmers and know what they are doing so i totally trust them with pulling that combination down.
because honestly they really have a chance to be the first of there kind and produce a space flight with planet landings and cities it will literally be the first "space gta"

 

[Armour]

This is the bit that worries me, to be honest.

The galactic level stuff we've seen so far was all done in Frontier, and the only bit that really needed extra thought on a conceptual/design level is the multiplayer aspect. And we still don't know how scalable that is right now.

But the really tricky bit is yet to come, in my view. How do you reconcile (potentially billions of) populated worlds with the multiplayer aspect in a consistent fashion?

If two players are standing in a crowded square in the same city, do they both see the same NPCs milling around in the same places? Do the NPCs follow strictly procedural behaviour on rails, or do they all have some form of AI mixed in? Do they have relationships, or is each one an island? Can they be communicated with to any meaningful level beyond "Hello Sir! May I interest you in some fruit/an insurance plan/almighty Zarquon?", with no other topics of conversation beyond that? Do NPCs have memory? If Player A kills the partner of a fruit vendor, is that NPC now dead in Player B's game? If Player A then leaves the planet and immediately returns pack to the same square, is the fruit vendor still there? Does the NPC have any idea they ever had a partner, and that Player A killed them? There are a lot of bases to cover in order to have a living city, let alone a living planet, let alone millions/billions of them. I fear that there isn't enough storage space on the planet to cover that lot, let alone in my PC.

 

[donavanbadboy]

I hope the planets are highly detailed procedurally generated, nature is not too hard to emulate with fractal algorithms. However, interacting with (modifying) the environments will probably be limited to instanced areas or dev built structures, otherwise there would be too much data to synchronize.

Any procedurally generated life will have no long term memory I don't expect, apart from special instanced actor NPCs who are part of stories or missions and probably limited to instanced/built areas.

Given that, I would still love to fly down river valleys and inspect the local wildlife on distant planets, even if the environments are mostly non-interactive/non-deformable.

I've never seen procedurally generated rivers implemented well, I wonder if they can pull that off? Edit: found something about procedurally generated terrain using hydrology on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCsj0v-wmIM

 

[Apollo Cochrane]

I'm no programmer, but what I think is realistically possible in a procedurally-generated multiplayer game of this scale, is something that while being as large as a city with suburbs, really just has as its "active" region a main "downtown" area with interactive NPCs and of course a spaceport with shops or merchants. I'm personally not expecting more than that, other than lots of awesome scenery that you can walk/fly around in and explore, perhaps with alien creatures roaming around that may or may not be friendly to your avatar. I'd be perfectly happy to pay $50 for that. I think if you start talking about a gta-type city, that's like a whole 'nother game, not an expansion, and is beyond the scope of what we can realistically expect. But hey, maybe they'll prove me wrong?

On the other hand, perhaps it will be a combination of the two, where we have what I've just described for most of the systems, with one or two "proper" detailed cities in the 2 most player-populated systems? That would be cool too!

 

[Tinman]

I've never seen procedurally generated rivers implemented well, I wonder if they can pull that off? Edit: found something about procedurally generated terrain using hydrology on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCsj0v-wmIM

Add water.

Spoiler

 

[ykza5]

So which comes first? Planetary landing or walking on stations and ships? I think they both should go toguether don't you agree?

 

[Apollo Cochrane]

I'm thinking they'll do ships, then stations (I hope we can walk through the greenery in the giant Orbis rings!), then planets, because each one is up a level in scale, and they'll probably learn a lot from doing each one before moving on to the next.

 

[Tinman]

So which comes first? Planetary landing or walking on stations and ships? I think they both should go toguether don't you agree?

Keep in mind that it isn't really just two expansions we are talking about here.

Planetary landings have been clarified to be split into several parts.

• Planets without atmosphere, but still outposts, mining...maybe the possibility to drive some land based (pressurized) vehicle and who knows what more...
• Planets with atmosphere. This will probably also include flying into the clouds of gas giants.
• Planets with atmosphere/life and cities with everything that might entail.

Avatar gameplay will also probably be split up into different parts.

• Spaceship interiors and space walking.
• Flying ships together with friends.
• Boarding other ships, both currently used ones and abandoned ones.
• Controlling capital ships.
• Moving around stations
• Walking/driving around planets with everything that could potentially mean.

This is of course just examples of how they could break these things down to manageable parts in terms of development. The point is that doing everything in a focused way to ensure high quality for each game element is something that David Braben has pointed out as a really important part in how they want to develop this game.

Having said that. I guess either landing on planets without atmosphere or an expansion with gameplay around spaceship interiors will come first. Hard to say which since both have their pros and cons. Spaceship interiors on one hand might be partly done since they already blocked them out to some degree, but on the other hand this would require a lot of gameplay development around first person gameplay in a zero G environment. Landing on planets without atmospheres might therefore be "easier" to get out faster since the outposts could be built with the same mechanics as the stations and the surfaces themselves being PG and lifeless.

 

[sinsro]

People got fixated on recreating Earth.

Again, if you look at academic literature there is huge amounts of work out there.

Okay since a few points is rather light. How about a few more.

1. Generate solar systems from work of Dole and later Fogg.
2. For the rocky type I planets upon which landings will take place generate a ellipsoid.
3. Upon the ellipsoid distribute a large number of points via poission distribution. Join these up to make a voronai map.
4. Divide the voronai into families randomly based on neighbours to make tectonic plates.
5. Give random motion to the plates and act accordingly after playing for several million simulated years.
6. From this you can now generate weather patterns, location of deserts and most importantly rivers.
7. Distribute seeds for planetary population, heuristic for the different types (agricultural vs industrial, etc).

While this looks a lot it only takes a few seconds to calculate and doesn't need to be done all at once. Also it is embarrassingly parallel.

I am a game developer and I have actually written a 3D engine for real time procedural planet generation. Unfortunately it is not this simple. The complex landscape evolution you are describing above are not suitable for real time generation, you have ridiculously short time available for generating the detail you need for each frame redraw.

The simulation could possibly run in the background, populating the area around the camera with more and more details as time passes, but due to the potentially huge view distance this is not as simple as it seems.