Possibilities for Caves in ED
- Thread starter Aussiedroid
- Start date
Looking at how they do stations and stuff, yeah, this is a possibility, its FD's forte.
I hope not. They've got a huge opportunity to address a lot of "quality of gameplay" stuff by going the other route, with probably the same order of magnitude in design and coding effort to make it happen. On the other hand, if those ARE added models on top of a height map, they are darn good ones
Same engine. Don't they do caves with models though? You can mess with the heightmap with the tools, but not sure you can tunnel under the terrain... i might be wrong, i have planet coaster but barely touched it.
Sheesh....I read this post and despair.
What is this potholing dangerous? It's a space game....SPACE and you lot are obsessing about something so niche, so tiny in the grand scheme of things it boggles the mind.
There are so many things in this game that need to be addressed, fundamental things, basic mechanics that don't work or are 'placeholder' to the point of it being barely there. The whole of the exploration 'meta' is so basic as to be virtually non existent.
And you lot want FDev to build you caves.......[???]
I know 3.0 will concentrate on the core mechanics but putting pressure on FDev to build caves when there are so many other more pressing matters at hand is frankly bizarre.
My worry is that FDev 'cave' and actually spend time and resources on this nonsense (see what i did there). This is the sort of feature I'd like to see when everything else has been addressed.....this is the cherry on the icing on the multi tiered cake.....right now we have a barely formed base layer of that cake....very little jam or fondant.
Now look what you've done....I'm hungry for cake.
What is this potholing dangerous? It's a space game....SPACE and you lot are obsessing about something so niche, so tiny in the grand scheme of things it boggles the mind.
There are so many things in this game that need to be addressed, fundamental things, basic mechanics that don't work or are 'placeholder' to the point of it being barely there. The whole of the exploration 'meta' is so basic as to be virtually non existent.
And you lot want FDev to build you caves.......[???]
I know 3.0 will concentrate on the core mechanics but putting pressure on FDev to build caves when there are so many other more pressing matters at hand is frankly bizarre.
My worry is that FDev 'cave' and actually spend time and resources on this nonsense (see what i did there). This is the sort of feature I'd like to see when everything else has been addressed.....this is the cherry on the icing on the multi tiered cake.....right now we have a barely formed base layer of that cake....very little jam or fondant.
Now look what you've done....I'm hungry for cake.
Yes, I did see what you did there... You needlessly insulted lots of people in the thread suggesting the gameplay opportunities they can see with cave mechanics are pointless and a waste of time.
There's (better) ways to make a point without needless belittling folks...
Last edited:
As has been pointed out, there are a few different ways in which a mesh can be modified to produce caves or extra features on planets, but doing it in a way that can basically be optimised and then left alone... is another thing all together.
I can imagine a double displacement pass that could easily produce overhang like features, in which you have your height map produce a near vertical cliff, you do a pass with a subdivision mask, then you apply another height map to the normal direction.
Despite saying 'easily' that would still be fraught with issues without lots of optimisation but could give you features such as impact craters that dig out small parts in the sides of hills and canyons, or overhangs and cliffs.
Caves, as pointed out already, are a whole different ballgame.
The other (and most important part) is gameplay. The question is what does it add in terms of gameplay? Overhangs give nothing other than pretty visuals, would caves really add enough gameplay to warrant the development time? Maybe? Maybe not? not sure personally
I can imagine a double displacement pass that could easily produce overhang like features, in which you have your height map produce a near vertical cliff, you do a pass with a subdivision mask, then you apply another height map to the normal direction.
Despite saying 'easily' that would still be fraught with issues without lots of optimisation but could give you features such as impact craters that dig out small parts in the sides of hills and canyons, or overhangs and cliffs.
Caves, as pointed out already, are a whole different ballgame.
The other (and most important part) is gameplay. The question is what does it add in terms of gameplay? Overhangs give nothing other than pretty visuals, would caves really add enough gameplay to warrant the development time? Maybe? Maybe not? not sure personally
Oh no need to be a Debbie Downer
My hype is in check, not to worry my friend.. just thought I would start a conversation, see what others think or would like.
I'll leave the technical side to the devs on what may be possible or even if this may be a thing in the future .. I'll just day dream on what might be
Well yes....sort of. Didn't mean it to be insulting...more tongue in cheek. It was about priorities.
Well, it calls into two distinct areas?
Visuals? ie: Would it result in nice visual experiences that merit the feature alone. If you think of lava tubes, thes often over time collapse giving access and also hugh skylights to the tunnels. These might give some interesting experinces especially visually?
Gameplay?: A mentioned if there's nice reasons to go into the tunnels to find rare valuable things? Nice! Imagine later liquids are added? Imagine later grappling/tow cables are added. Imagine it's best to search tunnels in SRVs in pairs, just incase you get stuck (in a trick spot or in deep water) and the other SRV can pull you out. ie: Emergent (co-op) gameplay also opens up.
Understood... But if a reasonable amount of effort can produce some interesting cave orientated gameplay great! See my "Visuals" & "Gameplay" comment above this one?
If it's a huge amount of work - as you suggest - there's clearly plenty else to invest that time in. But if there's a nice win to be had with a sensible amount of time with "cave" technolgy... Great.
ps: As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread. The cave tech might also be employed in rare huge asteroids too, so you could fly into/through asteroids?
Last edited:
This is the crux of Elite: Dangerous. We have expectations, based on the fact that this game has potential beyond anything gone before, of what could be. Every time there is a snippet of anything new, everyone goes into overdrive with what they all hope it can mean, and rightly so.
However, lets not get our hopes up just yet but let us all continue to be patient and .........................and......................and........................and.
CMIV
However, lets not get our hopes up just yet but let us all continue to be patient and .........................and......................and........................and.
CMIV
I want to drill a hole through the planet and jump into it with my srv to check how well gravity is simulated.
"And you lot want FDev to build you caves..." No, we (since I'm presuming to be part of "you lot", whoever we actually are...) want them to take the opportunity that their own leaked gameplay footage has suggested to make a quantum leap in the quality of their planet generation. The fact that it will give properly mapped cave systems along with everything else it will address is almost irrelevant, but nonetheless a good thing. You want better exploration meta? Better planets would be a darn good start on that!
Nonsense? the only nonsense here is that negative attitude and "there's a cave for that"
*plonk*
I agree, caves would be a cool feature.....eventually. As part of the exploration update and improving that core mechanic it would be a great feature but as I said I see this as the sort of thing they would introduce once other features have been added.
If they added caves tomorrow (theorizing here) then it would just be a hole in the ground with nothing to do in it. Once we have proper exploration mechanics, resource mapping, improved scanning mechanics, improved planetary features like lava, resource nodes, planetary mining etc. Then it makes sense to have caves as there would be a feature set to support it......IMO
Fair enough....point taken....i'll sit in my cave.
The OP pointed out some nice ideas, but honestly speaking, it sounds like a whole different kind of game to me. These expectations or hopes are a bit too much. This is like asking for aerial combat sim in HalfLife.
I agree it would be great, but like someone said, it is a space game.
I for myself am already happy that we can land of planets at all.
I agree it would be great, but like someone said, it is a space game.
I for myself am already happy that we can land of planets at all.
This is a great post. Agony is right, heightmaps can’t do caves justice, and like you state above transitioning planet gen to voxels solves a lot of problems. The issue with that though is that it pretty much requires Frontier to throw out the entire current planet gen engine for a totally new one. While I agree that would go a long way to improve the game and provide much more flexibility for future (and current) content, I honestly don’t see Frontier going back to the drawing board to that extent. They could have gone the voxel route from the beginning but they chose not to, going with heightmaps instead. Most likely for performance reasons, heightmap worlds are faster to generate than voxel worlds.
I do believe that Planet Coaster also uses heightmap worlds, with caves and such added as “buildings” or static props. Elite will most likely go the same route, just on a larger scale than PC, as both games use the Cobra engine. I agree though, voxels would be the best way to go.
