I have a conspiracy theory that Planet Zoo is actually a secret ED project, to practice for alien animals on atmospheric planets.

CMDR Yates

C
Obviously having artists etc. experienced in animal animation will be a feather in their cap, but Planet Zoo and Jurassic World don't prepare them for the real trick involved in doing atmospheric worlds with life: procedural animals and ecosystems.

It's been done before in games, but only in veeeery broad, cartoonish, and comedy-glitch-prone fashion (see Spore and NMS), nothing that would sit well in ED's realistic galaxy. That's going to take a major breakthrough to pull off convincingly, and with enough variety across different planets and biomes to be believable.

My crystal ball tells me that procedural life, along with NPC vehicle (pathfinding on varied terrain and gravity), are the two biggest technological obstacles in Elite's future.

Edit: they've had a vacancy for an AI Vehicle Programmer on their website, with a rolling deadline, for about a year now.
 
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[VR] M4st0d0n

[VR] M4st0d0n
Sapyx said:
I'd be rather disappointed if all the life on alien worlds looked exactly like Earth life, or Earth-life dressed up in "Star Trek" make-up. I'm hoping for proc-genned critters.
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I'm still having nightmares from Picard's Rabbit/Unicorn, a.k.a. the Rabbicorn...

rabicorn.JPG
 

Winterwalker

Winterwalker
CMDR Yates said:
Obviously having artists etc. experienced in animal animation will be a feather in their cap, but Planet Zoo and Jurassic World don't prepare them for the real trick involved in doing atmospheric worlds with life: procedural animals and ecosystems. It's been done before in games, but only in veeeery broad, cartoonish, and comedy-glitch-prone fashion (see Spore and NMS), nothing that would sit well in ED's realistic galaxy. That's going to take a major breakthrough to pull off convincingly, and with enough variety across different planets and biomes to be believable.
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HUGE numbers of procedurally generated alien creatures may not be the best approach anyway, for a believable universe?

The Rare Earth Theory basically says that microscopic life might be relatively common in the universe/galaxy (it appeared only 500 million years after the Earth formed) but complex life, the Cambrian Explosion on Earth, took a further three BILLION years to even begin, everything else has played out in only a further 500 million years, to now. Complex life might never happened had several aspects of Earth (being usually large for a rocky planet, with a massive moon compared to naturally occuring moons, both linked to Thea) not allowed Earth to keep atmosphere and fertilise the ocean. The Thea collision is really where Earth lucked out. Had that not have happened chances of complex life become even more unlikely and get offest only when you look at billions of galaxies, as opposed to 'only' billions of star systems. With humans, thargoid and guardians, the galaxy is already doing pretty well in reality. Insect (like creatures) might be common-ish but Terror Tigers? Less so.

With that being said I haven't seen Planet Zoo up close but the dinosaurs and animations in JWE are epic. Algorythms that create visitor characters especially - particularly the way they interact with each other and stream around the environment - are quite something. I love the idea that if/when we can get out in a station there might be areas that have massive numbers of people milling about, not just a solitary stranger, who always turns out to be a mission giver, by chance!! I'd love it if sprite people morphed into mission givers, when you interact with them, that you could interact with any of many, and from what I've seen of JWE a walk in the park for Frontier's coders.
 
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Lightspeed

Lightspeed
CMDR Fnool said:
How deluded am i, or do you think, 'Yes, there can be no other explanation'. (I love planet zoo btw, it's an awesome game :) )
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It's about as good a theory as we've had in the forum .... you could say among the top 1% of theories out there !

Now, where does Jurassic Park fit in ? :unsure:
 

Dagwit

Dagwit
Of course, cross-fertilization can work both ways. No doubt it's all the SRV racing in Elite Dangerous that has inspired Frontier to go out and get the F1 franchise.
 

Deleted member 38366

D
Could be, this guy managed to take things "to the next level" - and it certainly looks like an FDev production :D

(btw. that's one of the most hilarious things I've seen in a while, worth watching ;) )
 
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Linnunrata

Linnunrata
Winterwalker said:
The Rare Earth Theory basically says that microscopic life might be relatively common in the universe/galaxy (it appeared only 500 million years after the Earth formed) but complex life, the Cambrian Explosion on Earth, took a further three BILLION years to even begin, everything else has played out in only a further 500 million years, to now.
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While Rare Earth Theory is one of the hypotheses (we have pretty poor number of data points for life in the galaxy - one), I'm pretty sure that it won't be the basis for procedural life in ED if they ever get that far.

The ED universe already teems with life - in a fact I'd say ED lore points to the direction that life might not be as picky as RET suggests, considering all the life bearing gas giants and a number of vacuum adapted life forms (!). Having millions and millions of life supporting landable earth-like worlds have either just microbial life would be a huge disappointment to the explorers. It would also mean a lot of single-celled algae all over the galaxy considering that ELWs appear to have green growth on continents...unless they are actually forests of multicelled plants (rather complex marine animals like trilobites predate multicelled land plants).

One choice of course would be following the brain tree path and have a handful of nearly identical life forms on all of them, but that on the other hand wouldn't sit very well with Rare Earth Theory either. :)
 
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CMDR Karrde Sun

CMDR Karrde Sun
Well outside of earth, all those animals are aliens.

Oh crap i told a dad joke.

Frontier seem to take their animal anatomy very seriously, see all the work they did for the dinosaurs in jwe (there's no real reference for those). But definitely the base building will come from planet zoo coaster or jwe / zoo tycoon later arcade edition. Also if you have an excuse to pick up that zoo tycoon game it shows the prototype for space legs too. Built from the cobra engine. Released in 2013.
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
CMDR Yates said:
My crystal ball tells me that procedural life, along with NPC vehicle (pathfinding on varied terrain and gravity), are the two biggest technological obstacles in Elite's future.

Edit: they've had a vacancy for an AI Vehicle Programmer on their website, with a rolling deadline, for about a year now.
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Yep, I think the proc gen surfaces are a bigger stumbling block than people realise on the park tech front.

On fauna, unless they all float like skimmers, they’ll come up against the same problem as NPC SRVs. No bespoke anchors for pathing around obstacles etc being the key issue I believe. (There was a great non-FDev dev post on this on Reddit once, but I’ve never been able to re-find it :/)

And possibly aspects like limb animation having to be all inverse kinematic or what have you, responding to the ground irregularities (although maybe they do that anyway?)

The fact that the very specific SRV AI role keeps getting relisted does suggest it’s not getting filled, and that they’re likely no closer to resolving the pathing aspects at any rate :/

And dialling up proc gen animals that look, move and sound pseudo-scientific, not like giant constipated turkeys? Yeah, that’s a challenge alright! (And that was no shade on NMS btw, I think they’ve done and tried some great stuff on that front. But the comedy valley is wide and steep with proc gen, and many a pratfall awaits... ;))

Linnunrata said:
While Rare Earth Theory is one of the hypotheses (we have pretty poor number of data points for life in the galaxy - one), I'm pretty sure that it won't be the basis for procedural life in ED if they ever get that far.

The ED universe already teems with life - in a fact I'd say ED lore points to the direction that life might not be as picky as RET suggests, considering all the life bearing gas giants and a number of vacuum adapted life forms (!). Having millions and millions of life supporting landable earth-like worlds have either just microbial life would be a huge disappointment to the explorers. It would also mean a lot of single-celled algae all over the galaxy considering that ELWs appear to have green growth on continents...unless they are actually forests of multicelled plants (rather complex marine animals like trilobites predate multicelled land plants).

One choice of course would be following the brain tree path and have a handful of nearly identical life forms on all of them, but that on the other hand wouldn't sit very well with Rare Earth Theory either. :)
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Braben seems to favour ‘intelligent life’ being rare, and microbial life common. These are some notes I took from his old Lave Radio interview:

On Alien life in the galaxy:

-On 'big game hunting' etc, was just an example of possible gameplay.

-Expects basic life to be very common throughout the galaxy but intelligent life to be rare. In the right temperature bands likely to see slime moulds, maybe 'wriggly things', and occasionally animals riding around that we might slightly recognise as they fit a familiar niche, or not recognise at all if they're swimming around in giant great gaseous clouds or whatever [seems to thump table in excitement and frustration here ;)]. Very complicated though hence its pushed back to make sure they can do it well. So much work to create the variation, beyond just colour changes etc.

-Called out hunting because you can just imagine trade goods based on iridescent eyelashes or whatever. Hunting something that's big enough to hunt from an SRV or ship, but highlighting the ludicrousness of taking away something as small as a rhino horn etc, while also creating a new trade item.
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Alien life in the galaxy [01:46:50 +]
 
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Lightspeed

Lightspeed
Golgot said:
Yep, I think the proc gen surfaces are a bigger stumbling block than people realise on the park tech front.

On fauna, unless they all float like skimmers, they’ll come up against the same problem as NPC SRVs. No bespoke anchors for pathing around obstacles etc being the key issue I believe. (There was a great non-FDev dev post on this on Reddit once, but I’ve never been able to re-find it :/)

The fact that the very specific SRV AI role keeps getting relisted does suggest it’s not getting filled, and that they’re likely no closer to resolving this issue :/




Braben seems to favour ‘intelligent life’ being rare, and microbial life common. These are some notes I took from his old Lave Radio interview:



Alien life in the galaxy [01:46:50 +]
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All good responses here.

Yes, it looks as though vehicle AI is very much a stumbling block. Not even the F1 game will have simulated car racing (probably), even though they are restricted to tracks, because it is touted as a management game. That's not very exciting and a missed opportunity if it takes that direction: people want to race cars ... and that's been done well elsewhere. I played it on the Atari decades ago !
 

askavir

askavir
Nope, Planet Zoo is a great game on it's own. Most likely FD's most polished, best work so far. It's a virtual builder's wet dream, just look at the incredible things people have built and shared. If it was as great from a park/animal management side as it is from the building side, I'd be all over it.
 

Leadfoot

Leadfoot
shreddog said:
And they will make 8 more before we get Earth-like landings in Elite ;)
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And when we do they'll have parks and zoos and dinosaurs and lions and tigers and bears and cities and, most importantly, lots of bars and discos. With dancing bears. Oh, and people.
 
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