Elite Dangerous and procedural generation : What about cities ?

[Dsign]

Lately I've been watching videos and reading articles on Braben and his interest in procedural generation.


I highly recommend these videos if you haven't seen them before :

[video=youtube_share;GEVutbSqBI0]https://youtu.be/GEVutbSqBI0[/video]

and

[video=youtube;iTBvpd3_Vqk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTBvpd3_Vqk[/video]

And this article is worth a bit of your time.

Now, since I now know how important procedural generation is to Mr Braben, both in a technical and philosophical way, I can't help but ask : why aren't most of the cities/structures built using this method ? We know it's possible, I won't mention the prime example I currently have in mind since you probably know it yourself.

*cough* SC *cough*

It can be done, and for someone with such a background in this particular field, I would've thought that this is how things would've been done. He was among the first to apply this idea to the videogame industry, at least on such a large scale as seen in Elite. That's something !

I'm not saying that what we have ingame now is bad, not at all. The artists are doing a fantastic job on everything ! But let's think past the artistic side of thing for a minute. How could a team, even a very large one, create a full city from scratch relying on manual creation only ?
Maybe I'm totally unaware of something, maybe it's been said that FDev are working on such a thing (please let me know if that's the case), but why not do it from the get go. They did create an entire galaxy based on mathematical rules, I bet they could create something wonderful regarding structures and cities.

 

[RamirezKurita]

This is something that has confused me quite a lot, DB has always posited ED as the great poster child for procedural generation. Elite was to be a living and breathing galaxy that was created procedurally, adapts and evolves procedurally over time, yet beyond the initial stellar forge pretty much every extra game feature has just been handcrafted tokens sprinkled around. Somewhere along the lines the development ethos has basically done a 180 degree turn.

 

[Archvillain]

There isn't no procedural generation in the existing structures, there's still a mix even if the mix relies on a lot of core stuff being hand-crafted
I think if we get to larger cities in atmo planets, you'll see a lot more proc-gen, though probably not directly in areas with heavy player interaction (landing pads etc)

I'm currently working on a proc-gen game, and I gotta say, for things like the current Elite stations and cities, I would limit my use of proc-gen too - it can get you into a lot of trouble where it becomes more time-consuming to track down and fix rare unexpected problematic edge-cases, than it is to hand-design a wide variety of great layouts that you know are good and then use proc-gen cosmetically to enhance them. Hand-crafted means that it is possible to know when it's finished; there's not an unknown quantity of fringe cases lurking out of sight that won't be discovered until much later and then need fixing (and fixing without changing the algorithm so that all the other stations don't suddenly change too...)
We've seen that even as Stellar Forge reliably produced billions of great systems, it also produced fringe results, requiring ongoing manual editing to fix - and required manual discovery in the first place to find that the unexpected generation was possible. Same with outpost layouts, etc.

It might not be coincidence that IIRC the Outposts (early days of Elite) are very proc-gen, while more recent structures are more rigidly crafted, it might be increasing experience in which mix works best where. Until the game is introducing structures that are very large and sprawling and don't need to interact with players in complex ways, hand-crafted has a lot of advantages too

I guess that part of the issue with proc-gen is that the deeper and more complex you make it, the less you are able to ensure that there will not be unforeseen unwanted outputs, but this is in direct conflict with the goal of making interesting and unpredictable output; if humans can predict the output, it can become boring for players. But if humans can't predict the output, it can become dangerous for devs who are trying to avoid bugs. So you generally take a fraught middle-ground between crafted and generated, and enjoy the best of both worlds

(proc-gen can also make a lot of normally-basic dev work more time-consuming, because basic nuts-and-bolts stuff doesn't work out of the box any more because it doesn't know the thing it will have to interact with, because the thing doesn't exist until it's generated during runtime, so even basic stuff often has to extra code to be able to figure things out on the fly once things have been generated.)

 

[Arioch]

The proc-gen city generator created by Introversion for an unreleased game always springs to my mind in how I hope FDev will implement population centres:

[video=youtube_share;FR9xI0GgrBY]https://youtu.be/FR9xI0GgrBY[/video]

Those cities mixed with the Aircar VR demo assets? Yuss plizz!

 

[Dsign]

There isn't no procedural generation in the existing structures, there's still a mix even if the mix relies on a lot of core stuff being hand-crafted
I think if we get to larger cities in atmo planets, you'll see a lot more proc-gen, though probably not directly in areas with heavy player interaction (landing pads etc)

I'm currently working on a proc-gen game, and I gotta say, for things like the current Elite stations and cities, I would limit my use of proc-gen too - it can get you into a lot of trouble where it becomes more time-consuming to track down and fix rare unexpected problematic edge-cases, than it is to hand-design a wide variety of great layouts that you know are good and then use proc-gen cosmetically to enhance them. Hand-crafted means that it is possible to know when it's finished; there's not an unknown quantity of fringe cases lurking out of sight that won't be discovered until much later and then need fixing (and fixing without changing the algorithm so that all the other stations don't suddenly change too...)
We've seen that even as Stellar Forge reliably produced billions of great systems, it also produced fringe results, requiring ongoing manual editing to fix - and required manual discovery in the first place to find that the unexpected generation was possible. Same with outpost layouts, etc.

It might not be coincidence that IIRC the Outposts (early days of Elite) are very proc-gen, while more recent structures are more rigidly crafted, it might be increasing experience in which mix works best where. Until the game is introducing structures that are very large and don't need to interact with players in complex ways, hand-crafted has a lot of advantages too

I guess that part of the issue with proc-gen is that the deeper and more complex you make it, the less you are able to ensure that there will not be unforeseen unwanted outputs, but this is in direct conflict with the goal of making interesting and unpredictable output; if humans can predict the output, it can become boring for players. But if humans can't predict the output, it can become dangerous for devs who are trying to avoid bugs. So you generally take a fraught middle-ground between crafted and generated, and enjoy the best of both worlds

(proc-gen can also make a lot of normally-basic dev work more time-consuming, because basic nuts-and-bolts stuff doesn't actually know about the thing it will have to interact with, because the thing doesn't exist until it's generated during runtime, so even basic stuff instead often has to be able to figure things out on the fly once things have been generated.)

Good points. But I fail to see the procedural in the current outposts/structures, even though I know it's there. I mean, I guess you could say that their placement is indeed procedural. But that's about it. After 50 hours ingame you recognise the pattern quite easily.
While I agree that the method, on such a large scale, can cause more trouble than good, I also believe that there is no way around it. Once you have the core programming done there's only fixing left to do, adjusting and tweaking values. I'm pretty sure FDev are capable of doing this.
If they want to see it, no matter how far down the road, they gotta start thinking about it now... more than that, they have to create something now. Not for us, but for them, for testing purposes. How to do it is not the issue, it's how long it's gonna take for it to be reliable enough to make it into the game.

 

[Dsign]

The proc-gen city generator created by Introversion for an unreleased game always springs to my mind in how I hope FDev will implement population centres:



Those cities mixed with the Aircar VR demo assets? Yuss plizz!

This is awesome ! Did not know of this game, shame they had to put the game on hold...

 

[Dsign]

This is something that has confused me quite a lot, DB has always posited ED as the great poster child for procedural generation. Elite was to be a living and breathing galaxy that was created procedurally, adapts and evolves procedurally over time, yet beyond the initial stellar forge pretty much every extra game feature has just been handcrafted tokens sprinkled around. Somewhere along the lines the development ethos has basically done a 180 degree turn.

That's the most frustrating thing ! We know how cool proc-gen can be but we have not idea if they plan on using it for other things.

 

[Icky]

Aircar blew me away. flying around at night in that city with RAIN is so cool. i would just sit there, stare out the canopy, and listen to the rain drops. i wish so hard for atmo worlds in elite to have something similar someday.

 

[Dsign]

Aircar blew me away. flying around at night in that city with RAIN is so cool. i would just sit there, stare out the canopy, and listen to the rain drops. i wish so hard for atmo worlds in elite to have something similar someday.

Same here. I don't know what it is about the sound of rain on the canopy, makes me feel calm and safe ! I'd like rain in ED, even acidic rain, give me anything

 

[Dsign]

The Almight procedural generation gave us 12 Israels. It is truly capable of miracles, but it could be more so an issue of streamlineing in order to make flying through cities something that all computers can handle. Turn on FPS and fly through a station and you'll understand what I mean. Even Dwarf Fortress, Armok be praised, hollowed be thy name [haha], which is the pinnacle of procedural generation has issues with some of the larger scale worlds/longer histories.

IDK but this made sense to me.

Yes, it would probably be a bit demanding on the hardware. But nothing more crazy than what we can see in recent/upcoming games. Technology is evolving and so is the hardware, people have to adapt, there's no way around it. Keep in mind that ED is not that young anymore, there's nothing really crazy on the visual side of it. Yes it's a pretty game, because artists there know what they're doing, but it's not like ED is a crazy tech demo, most computers can handle it. And the engine behind it is made by FDev themselves, so they have full control on what they're creating. Optimisation is on point, and so would it be with such content.
And you always have the option to finetune the settings to match your computer's capability (talking about PC, ofc)

 

[IndigoWyrd]

Considering the current version of Elite does things like:

And

With procedurally places rocks and planet surfaces, could you imagine this with sky-scrapers and roadways?

 

[VR Morgan Grimes]

Those cities mixed with the Aircar VR demo assets? Yuss plizz!

Count me in too

 

[Dsign]

With procedurally places rocks and planet surfaces, could you imagine this with sky-scrapers and roadways?

I actually think it'd be easier to make the SRV function properly on concrete roads rather than random terrain. It's been a long time since I last had this occur to me though, maybe I'm just lucky

 

[Red River]

Considering the current version of Elite does things like:



And



With procedurally places rocks and planet surfaces, could you imagine this with sky-scrapers and roadways?

I've never experienced this. must be something to do with how your rig handles terrain.... do you get this all the time?

 

[Dsign]

I've never experienced this. must be something to do with how your rig handles terrain.... do you get this all the time?

I don't think it has to do with anything on the user side of things, I had this happened to me aswell long ago. Probably the terrain generation, they surely did tweak it well enough for it to never happen to me again.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

I actually think it'd be easier to make the SRV function properly on concrete roads rather than random terrain. It's been a long time since I last had this occur to me though, maybe I'm just lucky

Thing is, there's not really any difference between procedurally generate roads and proedurally generated terrain. PG is PG is PG.

I've never experienced this. must be something to do with how your rig handles terrain.... do you get this all the time?

No, I don't get it all the time. I can go days or weeks without this. It is a Known Issue, and a quick relog will fix it. Of course, they always want to blame your graphics drivers or something in your DXDiag first, but it's never once been the case when it happens to me, so reports go into the Known Issue pile.

It doesn't break the game in any way, just throws the visuals way out of whack.

 

[nexxo]

Aircar blew me away. flying around at night in that city with RAIN is so cool. i would just sit there, stare out the canopy, and listen to the rain drops. i wish so hard for atmo worlds in elite to have something similar someday.

Thing is, the larger planet-based outposts look very similar in terms of architecture, but lack in the same visual depth and richness because Fdev gets the lighting and colour palette all wrong. With very few changes the cities in ED could look like that. It's immensely frustrating; it's like the art director doesn't really look at what they are doing. It's like he doesn't understand ambience.