Frontier's Cobra engine has been upgraded to support volumetric water for Planet Zoo. Perhaps a step towards water-worlds in Elite.

znôrt

znôrt
you have already seen that volumetric rendering in elite's asteroid rings. applying that to water bodies just requires rendering the surface and simulating waves. waves can be very complex but that's just modelling and animating one dynamic surface (or even just a shader trick). i highly doubt we'll see full liquid mass simulations in real time with current generation of computers.
 

SlouchMonster

SlouchMonster
I've been giving some thought to rivers in ED. Oceans you can bodge by putting a second 'water' sphere in a planet and have its radius greater than the lowest point of the planet but less than the highest point, make it pulse my a few meters and boom wave lapping at a shore (over simplified of course).

But rivers would be tricky, so here's my solution/algorithm for building them, (I'd love feedback btw).
1) Seed a number of start points 100-1000, for the sake of argument.
2) Find a 'near-by' ocean, height map hash search or something.
3) Plot a route to the ocean, basic a* path finding or the like but for every unit of measure (10 meters say) 'randomly' (according to a given seed) change direction, by affecting the weight of a given direction, so that a straight line isn't viewed as optimal.

At this point this is all what you can see from orbit. So we can stop here unless you get closer.

4) All ground/surface points along the route are decreased in height by 1-10 meters (again, sake of argument) and 'filled' with water. Bingo you've got a river.
5) Any point that has a mayor course change in the z-axis is given a 'waterfall' render.

This is just pure speculation and mostly a thought exersize for me. What are your thoughts. Do you think this is feasible, good, bad, ugly?

Edit: Maybe the AI path finding job FD were looking for wasn't just for NPCs in SRVs, could have been for rivers.
 
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RamirezKurita

R
While this is a definite step towards liquid-based planets, simulating a single chemical compound in liquid form is only a single step towards simulating planetary chemistry, following though into full weather patterns and ending up with a comprehensive solution for liquids on worlds.

However, every process is made up of small steps.

Alternatively, this could be a step towards ice worlds, providing a reasonable basis for volumetric ice (or other transparent volatile, such as frozen methane or nitrogen) by simply the water mechanics static.
 

Jools

Jools
Why do we have to go through this every time frontier releases something... Even FD said themselves very clearly (in response to similar hopes when PC launched) that the fact that PC has something does not mean it is tranferrable to ED.

First it was the outsider.... oh look space legs just around the corner, they already have all the tech...
Than PC... oh look at this crowd tech, given the pre rendered trailer we will surely see stations populated with people, and even people on planets soon after PC lounch.
Than JWE... oh look dinosaurs, big game huntinng is surely comming...

and now this... come on people... damaged frontal lobe or something?
 

RamirezKurita

R
SlouchMonster said:
I've been giving some thought to rivers in ED. Oceans you can bodge by putting a second 'water' sphere in a planet and have its radius greater than the lowest point of the planet but less than the highest point, make it pulse my a few meters and boom wave lapping at a shore (over simplified of course).

But rivers would be tricky, so here's my solution/algorithm for building them, (I'd love feedback btw).
1) Seed a number of start points 100-1000, for the sake of argument.
2) Find a 'near-by' ocean, height map hash search or something.
3) Plot a route to the ocean, basic a* path finding or the like but for every unit of measure (10 meters say) 'randomly' (according to a given seed) change direction, by affecting the weight of a given direction, so that a straight line isn't viewed as optimal.

At this point this is all what you can see from orbit. So we can stop here unless you get closer.

4) All ground/surface points along the route are decreased in height by 1-10 meters (again, sake of argument) and 'filled' with water. Bingo you've got a river.
5) Any point that has a mayor course change in the z-axis is given a 'waterfall' render.

This is just pure speculation and mostly a thought exersize for me. What are your thoughts. Do you think this is feasible, good, bad, ugly?

Edit: Maybe the AI path finding job FD were looking for wasn't just for NPCs in SRVs, could have been for rivers.
Click to expand...

While code optimisation is always a good thing, I feel that Elite could achieve a much greater degree of accuracy and realism than simply throwing RNG at the surface (which is pretty much what NMS does, as well as almost every other non-Dwarf Fortress game) if they were smart about it. A "top-down" approach will never produce decent results beyond some fancy eye candy, instead it needs a much more "bottom-up" approach that looks at the geology and plate tectonics, coupled with calculating regions of evaporation and precipitation, then going through to calculating river basins and paths.

This would all require additional calculations to be performed and the results stored, but this would be quite possible with some smarter streaming technology. At the moment, Elite tries to calculate almost everything at the last second, causing long loading times whenever we try to change instance. If they implemented some algorithms that predicted what our likely course is (using information such as what missions the player has, their currently locked in destination, what cargo they have, their ship's loadout etc), then begun planetary generation for applicable planets the moment we enter the system (or possibly even before) then it gives a full few minutes to generate the world before we are within visual distance. This is quite possible with modern tech, as even the consoles have large core counts and reasonable memory that can be dedicated to planetary generation without interrupting the main gameplay that we perceive.
 

Bob McBobblehead

Bob McBobblehead
Hopefully we move on to a more modern multi-threaded graphic API like Vulkan or DX12. Vulkan being my preferred choice, as you're not locked into a Windows only platform.
 

-VR- Max Factor

-VR- Max Factor
Jools said:
Why do we have to go through this every time frontier releases something... Even FD said themselves very clearly (in response to similar hopes when PC launched) that the fact that PC has something does not mean it is tranferrable to ED.

First it was the outsider.... oh look space legs just around the corner, they already have all the tech...
Than PC... oh look at this crowd tech, given the pre rendered trailer we will surely see stations populated with people, and even people on planets soon after PC lounch.
Than JWE... oh look dinosaurs, big game huntinng is surely comming...

and now this... come on people... damaged frontal lobe or something?
Click to expand...
Most of the time its about people saying the cobra engine can't do certain stuff, when it already has.

I doubt anyone expects FDev to directly rip parts from planet coaster/planet zoo/Jurassic Park/the outsider and plonk then into the game. That would be stupid. But what it does show is what the Cobra engine is capable of.

Also some of the tech may be transferable. Only Fdev know that though.
 
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