Planetary Tech Improvements: 24hr stream
- Thread starter Barking_Mad
- Start date
Ah damn, thought I remembered reading that the lighting update was also Q1
Sorry im not too sure how or what they do, bar making the game look better, but I use them..was just wondering if this made any difference to what they made it look like.
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I expect the worst, end of March, and hope for something by end of January (beta, or detailed info).
I expect beta to be mid-end Feb, and then release at the end of March. Might as well give them as much time as possible to get as much work done on it as they can.
You won't be seeing cliffs or overhangs in Elite Dangerous. The Stellar Forge uses height maps to create the planet surfaces, meaning every pixel of land has a vertical only "Z" dimension to it which gives it's height value, but the pixels next to it also have their own "Z" values. So each point of surface can be any height but can never go over top of or underneath the points next to it, so overhangs or cliffs are impossible to generate, even truly vertical surfaces are impossible to do.
Now that said, by using hand crafted or inserted assets Frontier could "fake" overhangs or cliffs, but seamlessly integrating them into the height maps would be difficult to make look good. This is why caves are technically impossible to do in ED, but by using placed assets they can be faked, like how they were done in the Thargoid bases. Caves as "buildings" is essentially how they did it.
Of course the other option is to rewrite the entire surface generation engine to use something like voxels instead of height maps, thereby allowing horizontal deformations as well. At this point in the game though that is a huge undertaking and probably not feasible. I fear it's too late.
It may be too late. But from what I can gather, planet coaster and jurassic world use voxels. Maybe there is a way to have a hybrid system. Not sure whether it is possible though.
Almost certain to be March I'd say.
I spoke to a graphics dev about this some time ago. His take was to cut holes in the planetary height map via a series of created shapes, but don't render the surface. Then procedurally generate cave system shapes and then attach them to holes. He was quite matter of fact about how it wasn't that technically hard, but he is ridiculously clever and it's obviously hard to get right given all the variables about positioning them, adding them to existing planets etc.
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Seems to me that they're planning on getting creative with Q4 update and potentially using the scatter rock system to introduce modest overhangs and more interesting topography.
But full on caves? No, other than hand placed assets(like the thargoid stuff), I don't think we'll ever see those.
There is a way to do them, but to make them not look artificial is what will be tough.
can hear everyone saying ( looks good but there's nothing to do on them )
Around the FD Expo, .. when Frontier showed vis FX concept art - goal for planet surfaces - hoped to be achieved by the end of the Beyond season, I could swear I heard the word caves. Could have been just a hoped for thing but I do have a feeling I heard it mentioned. It might have been DB, thinking back on it. Can't imagine front ilne devs being so foolhardy as to mention such an impossibly impossible PG impossibility. And I could be wrong ofc.
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DB did give a quote of "Wouldn't that be nice" before 2.4 dropped when asked about caves. He might have been talking about Thargoid bases, but who knows....
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To be honest, how are these different from the horizons launch ramp up, when they were showing of planetary tech, icy and rock planets with different underlayers.
I think the big change is the first one was basic art assets applied to a few variables from stellarforge, now the material composition (as mentioned) is what's driving the colour-scheme instead.
But do not expect up-close details until Q4.
Using the rock scattering to spawn in assets (that aren't just rocks), more than likely interlocking in some grid system so trenches, hills and overhangs group together.
I think the big change is the first one was basic art assets applied to a few variables from stellarforge, now the material composition (as mentioned) is what's driving the colour-scheme instead.
But do not expect up-close details until Q4.
Using the rock scattering to spawn in assets (that aren't just rocks), more than likely interlocking in some grid system so trenches, hills and overhangs group together.
It's not impossible to generate, though the current engine and the need to allow a 'surface' for ships to land and srv's to traverse without disappearing into the terrain might add complications that make it so in ED's case. It is possible to add horizontal displacements to the procedural heightfield calculation allowing overhangs, whether the needed extra calculations can be done and still give a high enough framerate with their current engine only FD know the answer.
eg's below rendered in Mojoworld, they are spherical worlds completely procedural and this is 13 year old tech. probably took overnight to render with the computing power available at the time, would be pretty neat if today's improved hardware and software optimisation would allow this for realtime rendering in ED.
This is looking good 
So looking forward to getting this. I fear that every exploration trip is going to be dragged out months now.
With the limited knowledge I have of procedural systems, I'd say this was a challenge. Knowing how damn good our programmers are... well, I'm sure this is a possibility. It might not be something that is aimed for straight away, but as with all things we're continually improving the technology that powers our games. Iterative changes to code, procedural generation code, texturing, mapping, etc.
It's of course possible, but more of what we're working on will come in the near future (yes, I sound like a broken record... just go with it!)