Planetary Tech Improvements: 24hr stream

Old Duck

Old Duck
shadow133 said:
Oh yes, this looks good. A lot better than the boring beige rocks we have today. I’m excited for what 2018 may bring. I hope this doesn’t mean I need a new gpu, money is tight.
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It's got to work on a standard PS4 and XBox, so I can't imagine this being the case.
 

IndigoWyrd

IndigoWyrd
Mengy said:
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.
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I hate to be the one who does this but...

There is this other Procedurally Generated game that includes not only cliffs, ledges and overhangs, but caves and deformable terrain...

It looks a good bit like this:

20160812155315_1.jpg


Just saying, there's a great deal that CAN be done with Procedural Generation. I have little doubt Stellar Forge could be further fine-tuned to generate caves, lava tubes, overhangs, and all that fun stuff that makes planets even more interesting. Pastel colors optional.
 

Mengy

Mengy
IndigoWyrd said:
I hate to be the one who does this but...

There is this other Procedurally Generated game that includes not only cliffs, ledges and overhangs, but caves and deformable terrain...

It looks a good bit like this:

https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20160812155315_1.jpg?fit=1920,1080&strip=all
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No Man's Sky uses voxels like Planet Coaster and Astroneer, not height maps like Elite Dangerous, so yeah it can generate overhangs, cliffs, and caves very nicely. Two different ways of generating surface terrain, with the former much more flexible (but processing intensive) than the latter. I'm guessing Frontier went with height maps in ED purely for performance reasons, seeing how the Cobra engine is more than capable of using voxels.

Barking_Mad said:
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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Interesting, that's actually a pretty great idea. It wouldn't be cheap to do cycle wise, but it would be cheaper than a pure voxel engine. I'd seriously love to see Frontier do that with the Stellar Forge!
 

Barking_Mad

Barking_Mad
Mengy said:
No Man's Sky uses voxels like Planet Coaster and Astroneer, not height maps like Elite Dangerous, so yeah it can generate overhangs, cliffs, and caves very nicely. Two different ways of generating surface terrain, with the former much more flexible (but processing intensive) than the latter. I'm guessing Frontier went with height maps in ED purely for performance reasons, seeing how the Cobra engine is more than capable of using voxels.



Interesting, that's actually a pretty great idea. It wouldn't be cheap to do cycle wise, but it would be cheaper than a pure voxel engine. I'd seriously love to see Frontier do that with the Stellar Forge!
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Just to be clear, as I didn't want the suggestion to sound flippant... it's certainly a challenge because of lots of things that are individual to Elite, but as a pure technical exercise it's not (so I'm told) anywhere near impossible to do with height maps, as has been occasionally suggested.

Of course how much time and person power you are prepared to throw at something is another question. Other stuff might well get you more bang for your buck. I'd guess from a realism point of view it's something David Braben would probably quite like, but that's probably on a long list he has!
 
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Cmdr Eagleboy

Cmdr Eagleboy
picommander said:
Procedurally generated caves would be fascinating for sure! Though I don't want them at all costs like e.g. a set of handcrafted structures that would be procedurally (in this case we probably should call it just 'randomly') placed on surfaces. This would be too obvious and getting old after 2 weeks at best, an expensive but short entertainment.
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It's doable via authored algorithms, which are best next thing to handcrafted.

FD devs during FX said they know how to do it, so it is all about decisions of management where they put their effort to.
 

ebbrell

ebbrell
I'm really looking forward to this, I'm holding off my first 65000ly trip until this is in.

it looks gorgeous, i think the other coloured planets will look stunning side by side etc.

I'm hoping the FPS doesn't take to much of a hit.

fingers crossed
 
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Cmdr Eagleboy

Cmdr Eagleboy
Mengy said:
No Man's Sky uses voxels like Planet Coaster and Astroneer, not height maps like Elite Dangerous, so yeah it can generate overhangs, cliffs, and caves very nicely. Two different ways of generating surface terrain, with the former much more flexible (but processing intensive) than the latter. I'm guessing Frontier went with height maps in ED purely for performance reasons, seeing how the Cobra engine is more than capable of using voxels.
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Voxels give you way less detailed surface detail overall too.
 

Winterwalker

Winterwalker
I know we've had to put up with the beige the while ... but the idea of the planets being generated from their chemicals - plus this screenshot - makes me feel like getting dirty!

ps. Not unusual; I still enjoy ED mining and geologcal digs are fascinating after all. :D
 
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MrFailfactory

MrFailfactory
It's been awhile back, but I would swear that somewhere around the time the Thargoid bases were being discovered, I saw screenshots of SRV's in what looked to be a cave/tunnel.

These did not look like the insides of the Thargoid bases, but I suppose they could have been very low-res screens.

I am quite looking forward to the new planetary visuals, yes indeed.

Rôt
 

RooksBailey

RooksBailey
Wow, looking really nice. It's going to feel like a whole new galaxy when this upgrade arrives. I sense another character wipe coming for me. :)
 

Cmdr. Heavenly

C
I'm not sure if this has been mentioned, but the "game" Outerra has added procedurally generated overhangs via Horizontal Fractal Displacement:

https://forum.outerra.com/index.php?topic=6.0

And I'm pretty sure Outerra uses height maps as a base layer too. Generally Outerra is really worth a look. Especially the mountain top regions with its rocks can be extremely convincing imho. Unfortunetaly it "only" simulates earth.

Edit: Our friend ObsidianAnt has made a very nice review of Outerra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlKz6r1uCfw
 
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krylite

krylite
Thanks for the heads up. So much for the recent spate of 'ED being "terminal"' threads. They even said they were currently "working" on it in the clip. [up]
 

Lightspeed

Lightspeed
Remember the "Ice World" image we were shown at FX17 ?

FD said that was the kind of landscape they hoped to be able to achieve in the near future. It was a kind of target which they were aiming for.

I don't have the image to hand, but I believe it was showing "non vertical" ice features which were leaning over. Not caves, but overhanging walls at least.

EDIT ..... I found the position in the video clip .... look to see what I mean here https://youtu.be/5MYuX9vrP_o?t=1472
 
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