Cave exploration

Gorrister

Gorrister
Dear FD,

please implement also cave exploring for On-Foot.
You could make the caves Geo-POI's and fill them with fauna, flora, minerals...whatever you like.

I really liked the Thargoid Caves, but there are just them. Nothing else.

The sampler is now set to sampling mode, you could add a surveying mode, where the ping adds map data of the cave, that you can sell to Universal Cartographics.

What also would be great, is to use real existing cave systems.
Me and maybe other cavers around would surely share real exploration data of existing caves with you to create your systems.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWDOlNS6zi0


Best regards,
Gorrister
 

varonica

varonica
The planetary generation tech doesn't support caves, any underground areas have to be manually created and inserted into the game, which means you would just end up with a few caves in the bubble probably but then none anywhere else in the galaxy, so better none than a strange inserted cave in one or two places.
 

Gorrister

Gorrister
How many different models would be needed to support the game? 1000?
You could make them really rare. One in the bubble and the rest across the galaxy. We got quite some system data, that might be interesting.
But maybe you are right. If it is not automatically generated, it is most probably not a good idea.
On the other hand, why should we be limited by the existing tech, or decide for FD if it possible or not.

The only thing I can say is, I would it find extremely cool to explore alien caves and then finding strange objects, that turn out to be eggs or hostile creatures, and make me run and fight or die trying.
 

JTFireblaze

J
The problem with caves is the terrain generated is essentially a height map. It's a 2d plane (wrapped around a sphere) with varying heights.

Now would I love caves? Hell yeah.

Are they possible? Under the current tech probably not. In the future? Who knows. Hopefully.
 

Gorrister

Gorrister
And why you can't insert negative height?
Can't we glitch into the sphere?

Also you don't need to scratch the sphere nessecarily. Caves are mostly in the mountains (maybe not in Britan) because of volcanic, seismic activity or erosion.

You can do that on high mountains above the sphere. Make an entrance somewhere and put a cave model inside the mountain.

The cave should just not glitch out of the mountain surface.
 

JTFireblaze

J
Gorrister said:
And why you can't insert negative height?
Can't we glitch into the sphere?

Also you don't need to scratch the sphere nessecarily. Caves are mostly in the mountains (maybe not in Britan) because of volcanic, seismic activity or erosion.

You can do that on high mountains above the sphere. Make an entrance somewhere and put a cave model inside the mountain.

The cave should just not glitch out of the mountain surface.
Click to expand...

Negative height is a thing. That's what the impact craters, ravines, europa lines are. A cave would be underneath existing terrain and would be a 3d shape rather than the current 2d shape.

Now are there ways of doing it? Probably. You could define caves separately to the terrain and have entry points on the terrain. Hopefully it is something that Frontier could look at. Large caves that you could drive into with the SRV, with smaller tunnels offshooting that require on foot traversal? Please.
 

Gorrister

Gorrister
Oh yes, please. I think a game like Subnautica would be far less interesting without the cave systems.
Adding such a terrain would surely be a huge benefit for the game.
 

[VR] Bulbulunufus

[VR] Bulbulunufus
I'm pretty sure I've seen rock overhangs in some of the Odyssey scatter rocks on youtube. Feels like you could link scatter and small scale ravining in the topography to procedurally create occasional ravines with (broken) rock rooves if that's the case? Some work to avoid weird structures maybe but arguably doable.
 

CMDR Yates

C
JTFireblaze said:
The problem with caves is the terrain generated is essentially a height map. It's a 2d plane (wrapped around a sphere) with varying heights.

Now would I love caves? Hell yeah.
Click to expand...

Caves could still be done a number of ways.

Gouge out a chunk of planet and cap it with a mesh/model of the "surface" above (so the surface of the heightmap is the cave floor, not the ceiling). This is basically how Thargoid caves work.

Or a flag that marks a small section of surface as invisible and non-clipping, and a polygonal cave environment positioned beneath with its entryway aligned to the non-clipping surface section. I believe surface starport hangars already work this way (although the ground is not always invisible and sometimes we enter the hangar through strange textures and floating boulders).

But yeah... the hard part to get right for both would be blending it seamlessly with the surface, and doing it on a vast and varied scale.
 

TheDragon2001

T
I agree that caves would be cool.
I know nothing about the programming angle but I do know something about the Astro-Geologic angle.
To create a cave you need weathering/erosion or vulcanism. Many worlds don't have fluids to weather and erode or vulcanism and so would not have caves.
I'm not sure about the weathering/erosion capabilities of things besides liquid water, but that could also present a barrier to cave formation, since not a lot of worlds have liquid water.
That leaves vulcanism for cave formation. Though vulcanism does create caves they are more often cracks in the ground and tubes formed when lava flows over the surface then cools quickly enough to leave channels. On a lot of worlds, it would either be too cold (so the lava wouldn't get far), or it would be too hot (so the lava doesn't cool fast enough).

That said there is also the artificial cave option, which I think is the most promising. There are at least three spacefaring races that do/have existed in the galaxy in the ED universe. Aside from the established sites, it would make sense for there to be many abandoned Human/Thargoid/Guardian mining outposts.
 

Gorrister

Gorrister
I don't know how mountains are created, seismic or tectonic pushing together of the crust? Well caves are very often just big cracks in the mountains. Wait, I look for an example
 

Gorrister

Gorrister
Hopefully it works. You can see how the cave is orientated from north east to south west. These are the fault lines. The mountain just got ripped open. Except the lower planes there is no erosion that created the cave. It mostly looks like that. A big crack. Large blocks , huge halls. You get the impression.
 

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Gorrister

Gorrister
And no nobody says you can't put something spectacular into the cave.
There is always the beginning of The Dig, that jumps my mind.
 

Gorrister

Gorrister
So there would be a limited number. No problem with that. One more reason to get out into the black.
Besides, I guess there would be an enormous amount of possibilities to put caves into it.
 
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Gorrister

Gorrister
I found it btw:
Does the planetary tech upgrade allow for new land features such as caves in the future?
Caves aren't currently part of the plan for Odyssey, the focus instead is on planet-wide improvement.

The statement of Kay Ross concerning caves
 

Gorrister

Gorrister
Please reconsider.
If automatically generated objects can be created and placed on the landscape, it could be also mountains with caves.
 

varonica

varonica
Gorrister said:
Please reconsider.
If automatically generated objects can be created and placed on the landscape, it could be also mountains with caves.
Click to expand...

And then we'll get the endless complaints about the same mountains with the same caves appearing all over the galaxy. It's fine for limited one off or small use, the hand crafted asteroid bases for instance, but people are already complaining about the lack of variety in surface outposts. If we are going to have caves they need to be proceduraly generated and unique instances of caves, not the same small group everywhere.
 
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