Collection of Ideas for Elite 4

[DraQ]

Now, the autocensor here is a bit overzealous, the moderating crew, on the other hand is level headed and won't go bethstapo on your backend.

Of course, since this is not The Codex (for unenlightened - a curious hybrid of gutter and hall of wisdom populated by some of the most twisted and cynical people on the net), profanity, racial slurs and the like are ill advised, but feel free to bypass the autocensor and then complain to the admin/moderator if autocensor goes asterisky on a perfectly normal word.

 

[DrBaggy]

Indeed Welcome!

It's odd that the landing on planets thing has not been cracked. I don't pretend to understand the mechanics of it but surely someone has seen fit to try? It gets me that FE2 and FFE are the only ones that seem to have done it well. I guess now we expect a bit more from the experience and keeping some constancy with the visuals and scenery is one of the greatest challenges.

It's one of the things that makes FE2 and FFE so great. I used to hate the cut scenes in X series, Freelancer and even good old Privateer 2 with Clive Owen (whatever happened to him...)
It's understandable that it would be difficult to make it Hi-res, but surely terrains could be procedurally generated, or if the worst came to the worst have it only "seen" through scanners like the early computer games used to pretend their wire frame monochrome graphics were!
I seem to remember it's one of the promises for E4. Personally I'm not worried about getting out on the planet and walking around, but skimming over alien jungles and getting a real sense of discovery would be wonderful.

 

[turwhitt]

Clive Owen (whatever happened to him...)

Seriously?

 

[DrBaggy]

Seriously?

Um.....no

In fact, it's the only time I can think of someone going fron computer game to stardom rather than vice-versa (eg Mark Hammill)
Unless anyone out there knows better....

 

[Steve O B Have]

It's one of the things that makes FE2 and FFE so great. I used to hate the cut scenes in X series, Freelancer and even good old Privateer 2 with Clive Owen (whatever happened to him...)
It's understandable that it would be difficult to make it Hi-res, but surely terrains could be procedurally generated, or if the worst came to the worst have it only "seen" through scanners like the early computer games used to pretend their wire frame monochrome graphics were!
I seem to remember it's one of the promises for E4. Personally I'm not worried about getting out on the planet and walking around, but skimming over alien jungles and getting a real sense of discovery would be wonderful.

In that generation wouldn't it mean that the landscape would be different every time? I think it would be nice if there were clearly recognisable landmasses and geographical landmarks.

I can't say I am particularily moved by the idea of walking around on the planet but certianly landing anywhere you like and perhapse if there is a specific mission target or something to be gained from getting out in a vehicle or similar would be nice. Especially if you are able to deposit a mining robot on the surface or something like that.

 

[DrBaggy]

In that generation wouldn't it mean that the landscape would be different every time? I think it would be nice if there were clearly recognisable landmasses and geographical landmarks.

Agreed. On the Vega Strike forums where they were discussing this, the suggestion was that it would be procedurally generated initially, but once visited the data would be stored so it would be the same. I have no IT skills, so don't know how feasible it would be. However, given David's skills on doing this in 1.44Mb, presumably he is the right man to come up with the visual equivalent of edible poets?
It would be good to have planets consistent, but also nice (to me) to feel they were generated by underlying rules in a semi-random way rather than planned out down to every last detail?

With smars not having come back to as promised, we're back to speculation, hopes and wishes for E4....

 

[turwhitt]

Um.....no

In fact, it's the only time I can think of someone going fron computer game to stardom rather than vice-versa (eg Mark Hammill)
Unless anyone out there knows better....

He was a film/screen actor before The Darkening. Note than John Hurt (a very well respected film actor for long before TD) was also in it.

 

[DraQ]

In that generation wouldn't it mean that the landscape would be different every time?

No. Frontier's galaxy is procedurally generated, but it's always the same. If you use constant seed for your pseudo-random procedural algorithm, you get constant output.

 

[Stefan Mars]

With smars not having come back to as promised, we're back to speculation, hopes and wishes for E4....

Yes, sorry about that. There are some internal discussions going on and I was hoping to get those cleared up first.

The only thing I can say right now is that David B was misquoted and the game has not been announced. There may or may not be a "sticky" coming with some more answers, but don't hold your breath.

 

[Stefan Mars]

Agreed. On the Vega Strike forums where they were discussing this, the suggestion was that it would be procedurally generated initially, but once visited the data would be stored so it would be the same.

It doesn't quite work that way.. or rather it could work that way but that would be a lot of wasted space in the save-file when you have to persist everything that you have generated.

In general when we generate something procedurally there are no real random numbers involved and so we can generate the same data over and over again as many times as we like.

Not commenting on how Elite IV works, but in its most extreme form you could procedurally generate the entire universe starting from a single number of your own choice. Whether that is a good idea is a different matter.

 

[DrBaggy]

Yes, sorry about that. There are some internal discussions going on and I was hoping to get those cleared up first.

The only thing I can say right now is that David B was misquoted and the game has not been announced. There may or may not be a "sticky" coming with some more answers, but don't hold your breath.

Thanks We all appreciate your involvement in the forums, and your openness, as much as other forces allow.

It's ok, we're a patient bunch here. But just for a moment, I thought.....

 

[Steve O B Have]

It doesn't quite work that way.. or rather it could work that way but that would be a lot of wasted space in the save-file when you have to persist everything that you have generated.

In general when we generate something procedurally there are no real random numbers involved and so we can generate the same data over and over again as many times as we like.

Not commenting on how Elite IV works, but in its most extreme form you could procedurally generate the entire universe starting from a single number of your own choice. Whether that is a good idea is a different matter.

I think my tenuous grasp on how procedural generation works has finally given up. Would the generation occur at the point of the game being created and then any storylines and/or maps and the like subsequently generated? Further to this if planet landscape is procedurally generated would it also be done at the design stage or would it be done on the fly? I would guess that there is a limit on the amount of information that you would want to have to jam onto a DVD and having several thousand planets each individually mapped stored would surely be prohibitive. I guess the other option is to use a combination of pre-generated stars and systems and then leave the on the fly procedural generation for mapping textures and the like.

When it comes to planets like Earth and Mars, and the various other celestial objects that are well known to us, there are surely some predefined landmarks (like Olympus on Mars, the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon and the Himalayas on Earth) that would be mapped and modeled closer to reality.

 

[Stefan Mars]

Hmm.. big subject, but I'll try to put together a quick answer. For more information Google and Wikipedia would be thy friend I guess.

Procedural generation actually only means that the content has been generated according to some set of (mathematical) rules - and commonly implied that it has been generated by a machine (since otherwise content generated by an artist would qualify whenever the artist is bound by a set of rules for the content).

The procedural generation can occur when we compile the game, which saves runtime performance but costs us space on disk (as we have to save what we generated) or it can occur during runtime which saves us disk-space but also means that we have to do more work in a limited environment (which is bad because a pc and a console only has so much processing power). Typically when someone is talking about procedural content it is the latter they mean - runtime generation of the data.

So, with the usual comments about not being Elite IV specific we can of course still use galaxies and planets as an example.

In the case of the Milky Way it contains 200-400 billion stars, so even if we were to just store a single bit per star (8 bits per byte) that is still roughly 25-50GB of data which is way more than we can store on a DVD and way more than we would want to install on a harddrive. So runtime procedural generation it would have to be.

Whenever you want procedural generation that you can repeat over and over again and still obtain the same result you use pseudo-random number generators. All you have to do is to give it a seed-value and it would generate a sequence of "random" numbers - those numbers have a meaning depending on the algorithm that use them, so to use your example let us say that the seed 17 gives the sequence "1 5 13" and that this is enough to generate a planet. A seed of 324 generates the sequence "98 6 12" which is a planet with a very different look. All we then have to do is to store one seed for each planet at design-time and we will know precisly what the planet looks like (because the same sequence of numbers is generated every single time).

How different will they look? That depends entirely on how clever your planet-generation algorithm is, but you could for example say that the first number controls the amount of liquid, the second the amount of land and the third is the composition of the atmosphere.

Even this is to much data though. How many planets are there in the milky way? We do not really know, but let us say that half of the stars have a planet. Storing a seed of two bytes (to allow for seeds in the range [0:16535]) we would then have to store 200-400GB of data. Of course the seed can also be procedurally generated. Let us say that we store a seed 985 for the galaxy and that this generates "34 756 23 9 56 17 32 324 16". As long as we use these as planetary seeds and as long as we generate all the planets in the same order we will now know what each planet looks like, using a single-number for them all (985). A pseduo-random number will eventually repeat btw, but as long as the sequence of numbers that the seed generates is large enough you will be unlikely to encounter the same planet twice - let alone recognise it.

Finally what you would need is a way to say that "for planet at position X,Y ignore the seed and use this data instead" which allows you to tweak well known places like Mars etc to your liking.

So to go back to your original question procedural content allows us to know everything at design-time, yet get rid of the cost of having to store it all on the disk while taking a runtime performance hit when we have to do the actual generation.

 

[Steve O B Have]

Excellent - that was exactly what I was after. It's all quite intriguing isn't it.

Thanks for that Stefan.

 

[The Space Pirate]

Agreed. On the Vega Strike forums where they were discussing this, the suggestion was that it would be procedurally generated initially, but once visited the data would be stored so it would be the same. I have no IT skills, so don't know how feasible it would be. However, given David's skills on doing this in 1.44Mb, presumably he is the right man to come up with the visual equivalent of edible poets?
It would be good to have planets consistent, but also nice (to me) to feel they were generated by underlying rules in a semi-random way rather than planned out down to every last detail?

With smars not having come back to as promised, we're back to speculation, hopes and wishes for E4....

As long as planets like Earth look how they do in real life, I'm not really that bothered.

 

[The Space Pirate]

I think I should welcome fellow Codexer.

Anyway, yes, realistic space with realistic objects pwns all the flashy crap typical 'spacesims' try to feed us.

Not to mention the fact that all those unnecessary effects slow the game down.

 

[The Space Pirate]

I think it's rediculous that the question would be raised by a forum that has nothing but speculative commentry from people so far from the source. I also think it's rediculous that anyone would think that Frontier would resurrect old code and present it as new to just 'get the game out'. I think the comment is made in ignorance and it's unfair to lay that on Frontier at this early stage.

Early? Yep, only ten years into the development, I suppose you can call that early.

 

[The Space Pirate]

I would love it to be hard work just to get going.

Why? Games are not about hard work, we get enough of that in real life.

 

[GazNewt]

Hmm.. big subject, but I'll try to put together a quick answer. For more information Google and Wikipedia would be thy friend I guess.

Procedural generation actually only means that the content has been generated according to some set of (mathematical) rules - and commonly implied that it has been generated by a machine (since otherwise content generated by an artist would qualify whenever the artist is bound by a set of rules for the content).

The procedural generation can occur when we compile the game, which saves runtime performance but costs us space on disk (as we have to save what we generated) or it can occur during runtime which saves us disk-space but also means that we have to do more work in a limited environment (which is bad because a pc and a console only has so much processing power). Typically when someone is talking about procedural content it is the latter they mean - runtime generation of the data.

So, with the usual comments about not being Elite IV specific we can of course still use galaxies and planets as an example.

In the case of the Milky Way it contains 200-400 billion stars, so even if we were to just store a single bit per star (8 bits per byte) that is still roughly 25-50GB of data which is way more than we can store on a DVD and way more than we would want to install on a harddrive. So runtime procedural generation it would have to be.

Whenever you want procedural generation that you can repeat over and over again and still obtain the same result you use pseudo-random number generators. All you have to do is to give it a seed-value and it would generate a sequence of "random" numbers - those numbers have a meaning depending on the algorithm that use them, so to use your example let us say that the seed 17 gives the sequence "1 5 13" and that this is enough to generate a planet. A seed of 324 generates the sequence "98 6 12" which is a planet with a very different look. All we then have to do is to store one seed for each planet at design-time and we will know precisly what the planet looks like (because the same sequence of numbers is generated every single time).

How different will they look? That depends entirely on how clever your planet-generation algorithm is, but you could for example say that the first number controls the amount of liquid, the second the amount of land and the third is the composition of the atmosphere.

Even this is to much data though. How many planets are there in the milky way? We do not really know, but let us say that half of the stars have a planet. Storing a seed of two bytes (to allow for seeds in the range [0:16535]) we would then have to store 200-400GB of data. Of course the seed can also be procedurally generated. Let us say that we store a seed 985 for the galaxy and that this generates "34 756 23 9 56 17 32 324 16". As long as we use these as planetary seeds and as long as we generate all the planets in the same order we will now know what each planet looks like, using a single-number for them all (985). A pseduo-random number will eventually repeat btw, but as long as the sequence of numbers that the seed generates is large enough you will be unlikely to encounter the same planet twice - let alone recognise it.

Finally what you would need is a way to say that "for planet at position X,Y ignore the seed and use this data instead" which allows you to tweak well known places like Mars etc to your liking.

So to go back to your original question procedural content allows us to know everything at design-time, yet get rid of the cost of having to store it all on the disk while taking a runtime performance hit when we have to do the actual generation.

I was just about to say that

 

[fierfly]

Why? Games are not about hard work, we get enough of that in real life.

but thats is what make FFE so good you really thought you had achived someing when you got through thats system or distroyed that imperal explore
if elite 4 doesn't follow in the footsteps of FFE with a hard game i will be a little disiponted. i have always prefired realistic and hard to mindless action games they more fun to play and realy make you feel part of the action. like operation flash point one of the hardest games i've ever played but because of that you found that when you stuck your head out from behind a wall knowing that there was an enemy soilder behind it ready to kill you realy feel part of the game. i also fellt this in FFE when outnumbered and out gunned is a pirate infested system you felt realy joy as the last ship meet your lazer and was vaporized leaving you to land and sell your ship load of narcotics. i realy hope elite 4 can reproduce this.