I love cartoons, and cartoon physics.
Why can we only Land on Barren Planets after almost 5 years?
- Thread starter Cosmo
- Start date
I love cartoons, and cartoon physics.
Nothing wrong with it, but some people are offended by the term and you really don't want to discuss with them. They are like me.
What is a FDEV apologist?
There's a few reasons for that.
Firstly, until you run the whole life simulation, how do you know if a planet would or wouldn't have life? You need to include the life from the beginning, unless you want them to simply retcon life into otherwise lifeless rocks at a later date.
Secondly, the description I gave was for basic microbial life forms, if you wanted macroscopic life forms that have different body structures and forms of locomotion, then it adds entire layers of additional code to procedurally generate these body structures and the layouts/functions of body organs and limbs. Even microbial life is difficult. There's also the assumption that a planet has a single LUCA, while it is possible for a planet to have multiple competing biological systems (particularly if the planet has highly varied environmental conditions in different locales).
Thirdly, the moment you get a weather cycle for a planet it makes the world generation computationally expensive as you have weathering due to both wind as well as precipitation/liquid flows. Liquids would also have an effect on crust composition, as the additional pressure added by oceans does significantly affect mineral formation underneath them. Weathering would also have the significant effect of revealing mineral layers and surfaces, so even cosmetically they would have to simulate far more than simply the top layer as cliffs and mountains could reveal full mineral strata. This is also without going into how fluid weathering can also create cave systems, which then form their own elaborate chemical subsystems within them as well as they would require a different way of mapping the worlds as they are currently mostly just a heightmap (they might need to adopt a voxel based system, or at very least a fully 3d vertex based geometry). Even without life, it's not easy to simulate an entire planet's weathering within a reasonable loading time.
There's also the issues surrounding the expertise required; this isn't just a game design and coding issues as they'll be needing to bring specialists for these additions in order to properly simulate the chemistry behind things under these diverse conditions. I haven't heard of FD recruiting astrophysicists or organic chemists for this kind of project. This isn't just looking for an oxygen-water planet with a bit of carbon around and dropping in life to taste, but instead giving a team a periodic table and asking them to figure out every single possible chemical combination that can form organic molecules and the conditions that are required for those molecules to be stable then creating an efficient script that turns these basic environmental conditions into applicable organic chemistries.
And to reiterate a point made a couple of times earlier in this post - they need these simulations to be efficient. At the moment, the planets are generated as required from a seed, so whatever simulations are required need to be completable in a matter of seconds by normal hardware. Currently, it takes a few seconds to make the basic composition for a planet when you enter a system and a few more seconds when you enter glide mode to generate the height maps. How long are people willing to wait at a loading screen to get to a new planet? 10 seconds? 30 seconds? A minute? 10 minutes? Either FD need to make some miracle-grade code to simulate millions of years of atmospheric weathering of a planet in a matter of seconds or they need to wait several more years when using a 32 core processor and 128 gig of memory becomes the norm rather than the exception.
That's a star, isn't it?
For those saying "just wait for them to get atmos planets right", what makes you think FD are planning to develop them and if they did would get it right?
On what evidence are you basing that? After the launch of the base game (which was great) everything else has been pretty poor with the exception of planetary landings but even that, technically impressive as it was lacks any engaging gameplay, I mean shooting rocks...come on.
Engineers was so bad it took nearly 18 months and an almost complete rewrite to get it to where it is now, which is still somewhat broken. Multicrew? CQC? Powerplay? All poorly thought out and poorly delivered. FD do not have a great record on delivering updates, they said so themselves and spent a whole year in Beyond trying to make amends (kudos to them for that).
So I'm not sure I share your confidence, in fact I don't share it. I'm happy to play what is there and moan about the stuff that doesn't work but my expectations on updates is zero. I just want them to fix some bugs but I have no faith in them to do that either.
On what evidence are you basing that? After the launch of the base game (which was great) everything else has been pretty poor with the exception of planetary landings but even that, technically impressive as it was lacks any engaging gameplay, I mean shooting rocks...come on.
Engineers was so bad it took nearly 18 months and an almost complete rewrite to get it to where it is now, which is still somewhat broken. Multicrew? CQC? Powerplay? All poorly thought out and poorly delivered. FD do not have a great record on delivering updates, they said so themselves and spent a whole year in Beyond trying to make amends (kudos to them for that).
So I'm not sure I share your confidence, in fact I don't share it. I'm happy to play what is there and moan about the stuff that doesn't work but my expectations on updates is zero. I just want them to fix some bugs but I have no faith in them to do that either.
That's what I was wondering.
Also, FD usually simulates everything natural in this game as precisely as possible within reason. The main issue facing them might be how to simulate liquids and the effects of them. There are cascading issues from introducing liquids: Vapour behaviour, cloud formation and precipitation are some. Others include introducing sedimentary ground features and the behaviour of bodies of water. Tides may need simulating too. For dry bodies that is not an issue: While there are tides (moon+sun system lifts the earths crust about 0.5 m), their effect is not very visible when there is only one very rigid body type to pull at. But add liquids (and gasses!) of any kind to the system and everything literally and figuratively turns into a mess really fast.
After a shaky descent through the islands of ephemeral atmosphere surrounding their volcanic vents, I would like to stand on the "shores" of some of the close icy moon couplets in tight orbit around their parent gas giants and watch the methane tides roll in and out though. Come-on FD, you can do it!
S
After a shaky descent through the islands of ephemeral atmosphere surrounding their volcanic vents, I would like to stand on the "shores" of some of the close icy moon couplets in tight orbit around their parent gas giants and watch the methane tides roll in and out though. Come-on FD, you can do it!
SThose guys that think frontier can't win for trying no matter who they try to please.
Everyone's an entitled expert these days of course who's opinion is golden and must be attended to by FD or else!!!
It's like Ken Hamm-fisted.
Meld Planet Zoo and Jurrasic World into Elite, after Elitefying the assets. No Gomers from Coaster please.Also, FD usually simulates everything natural in this game as precisely as possible within reason. The main issue facing them might be how to simulate liquids and the effects of them. There are cascading issues from introducing liquids: Vapour behaviour, cloud formation and precipitation are some. Others include introducing sedimentary ground features and the behaviour of bodies of water. Tides may need simulating too. For dry bodies that is not an issue: While there are tides (moon+sun system lifts the earths crust about 0.5 m), their effect is not very visible when there is only one very rigid body type to pull at. But add liquids (and gasses!) of any kind to the system and everything literally and figuratively turns into a mess really fast.
After a shaky descent through the islands of ephemeral atmosphere surrounding their volcanic vents, I would like to stand on the "shores" of some of the close icy moon couplets in tight orbit around their parent gas giants and watch the methane tides roll in and out though. Come-on FD, you can do it!
Oh. I didn't notice any reference to the other games and I read "need to" as something that's in the future tense rather in past tense. My understanding is that they don't need to do it since they've already done it. shrugs
It's not a lame cartoon game. It's a really rad and fun cartoon game that I put a few dozen hours into without barely blinking the first time I sat down at Survival mode, and then even more hours after I picked up a bag of weed and started getting high and building big dumb space bases.
Star Citizen is a lot more focused of a game, with a plan for hundreds of bespoke crafted worlds rather than fully procgen galaxy, but has it's good parts too. The procedural city algorithm they are working on is actually really good and cool and looks great. My only problem with them is their hard-sell-preorder pay-to-win funding model. Though thinking about it... if that cuts out the middlemen of account grinders and gold farmers, maybe that's really a win-win in the end...
but you do not know this do you? Nothing as of yet has been confirmed.
Nope.
ED without atmospheric planet is like a one-legged.
A lame duck.
Hope that the new era brings us oxygen and life.
A lame duck.
Hope that the new era brings us oxygen and life.
All the classics in one handy post.
You don't actually believe that.