The Planetary landing and planetside missions discussion Thread

[SentineI]

I guess if they can do caves that would indicate the ability to do overhangs too. However they lean very heavily on small draw distances when you're actually down on the ground to give time for the algorithms to churn and generate the terrain where as we can't use atmospheric fog (on account that we're doing airless bodies) to hide generation so we need to be able to generate terrain to quite a distance (all the way to space in fact seeing as you'll see these planets from super cruise as per normal).

A planetary-scale engine that's at least capable of terrain overhang (but not necessarily caves) is used by the still-not-yet-released indie game called Infinity. You can see overhangs in a video from 2007, at about the 2 minute 10 seconds mark:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibZZRDIhtVo

They do an insane amount of procedural calculations on the GPU itself, which I gather ED Horizons also does (from the explanation of why it won't be coming to the Mac yet).

P.S. I'm pretty sure Frontier must be well aware of Infinity, since they are their closest competitor (procedural technology wise).

 

[Tinman]

A planetary-scale engine that's at least capable of terrain overhang (but not necessarily caves) is used by the still-not-yet-released indie game called Infinity. You can see overhangs in a video from 2007, at about the 2 minute 10 seconds mark:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibZZRDIhtVo

They do an insane amount of procedural calculations on the GPU itself, which I gather ED Horizons also does (from the explanation of why it won't be coming to the Mac yet).

P.S. I'm pretty sure Frontier must be well aware of Infinity, since they are their closest competitor (procedural technology wise).

Can't see any overhangs myself and I've been following Inovae for quite some time.

 

[SentineI]

Can't see any overhangs myself

You can't be looking very hard ;-) . They are clearly visible, but just not very pronounced (you can mainly tell they are overhanging *slightly* from the shadows).

and I've been following Inovae for quite some time.

I'm not sure how that's relevant, but I've been following them from 2006...

 

[Tinman]

You can't be looking very hard ;-) . They are clearly visible, but just not very pronounced (you can mainly tell they are overhanging *slightly* from the shadows).

Better take a screenshot then and point them out...in case you mean the steep cliffs back up the hill I doubt very much they are overhangs. They are just steep.

If Inovae really had real overhangs they would have showed that of very clearly already. Not just as something that quickly goes by and maybe, if you really force yourself, can possibly on a good day be interpreted as overhangs.

 

[Mike Evans]

You can't be looking very hard ;-) . They are clearly visible, but just not very pronounced (you can mainly tell they are overhanging *slightly* from the shadows).

I am 99% certain those are not overhangs given that you never actually get to see them from the side with a properly orientated camera. In that video the camera is constantly rolling and turning you can't make any sound judgement on whether a slope is overhanging or just quite steep and you're view is tilted.

 

[SentineI]

I may be mistaken about that 2007 video, since a 2007 interview says that their FUTURE plans include "Horizontal displacements, might form cliffs and overhangs."
http://www.indiedb.com/games/infinity-the-quest-for-earth/news/new-terrain-engine

Ah well, ED Horizons is still gonna get released sooner than Infinity (they've been promising a Kickstarter for several years, but seemingly want to perfect their technology before doing it, meaning it's never gonna be finished).

 

[Tinman]

I may be mistaken about that 2007 video, since a 2007 interview says that their FUTURE plans include "Horizontal displacements, might form cliffs and overhangs."
http://www.indiedb.com/games/infinity-the-quest-for-earth/news/new-terrain-engine

Ah well, ED Horizons is still gonna get released sooner than Infinity (they've been promising a Kickstarter for several years).

There you go then.

 

[SentineI]

Ah well, ED Horizons is still gonna get released sooner than Infinity (they've been promising a Kickstarter for several years, but seemingly want to perfect their technology before doing it, meaning it's never gonna be finished).

One good thing I can say about Frontier is that they take a pragmatic approach to developing Elite Dangerous: They're prepared to make technical sacrifices to release a "good enough" game NOW, rather than delaying it indefinitely until the technical side is "perfect". And then once they have money from games sales they continue to improve the technical side, resulting in something that's eventually pretty close to the "perfection" they probably originally would have liked. Just compare how planets looks in v1.0 to those in v1.3 - they just look so much better now.

Where-as I-Novae (the people developing Infinity) have been developing their procedural generation & game engine for well over a decade, and they're STILL not willing to start making a playable/sellable game using it, because the engine isn't yet 100% physically accurate, and they aren't willing to compromise with artistic kludges that would give (say) 80% of the same visual result. (e.g. Elite Dangerous still seems to lack HDR, but isn't much worse off for it, although I really do hope Frontier add HDR one day.)

Why I'm not being off-topic: I fully expect that Horizon's procedural generation of planets & moons to be a "good enough" work-in-progress, which Frontier will refine & enhance as long as Horizons sells well enough (which I expect it will do). If they don't have 'horizontal displacement' (aka overhangs & caves) in the v2.0 release, that doesn't mean we won't get it eventually (although if I am being realistic, maybe not until atmospheric landings which are at least a year later). They certainly ARE promising vulcanism (volcanoes) sometime after release...

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Yeah, I would not be hung about overhangs and caves at this point - I doubt that FD aren't aware that these limitations exist and how to tackle them.

 

[Xzandhor V'Tar]

I do know that stations are capable of snatching up a ship in it's trajectory though that isn't in it's reference frame since I've tried that several times. I've been sitting ahead of its orbit and see it approach even though I am still (relatively speaking) at a certain distance it suddenly "stops" which means that my ship just switched into its reference frame. So changing reference frame while in normal space is possible. The rings seem to be the exception though...and hardly a priority to fix either to be honest.

Do You mean by "it suddenly stops" as the station not crashing into the ship?? Maybe the ship has been caught by one of its Lagrange points???

 

[NeilF]

A planetary-scale engine that's at least capable of terrain overhang (but not necessarily caves) is used by the still-not-yet-released indie game called Infinity. You can see overhangs in a video from 2007, at about the 2 minute 10 seconds mark:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibZZRDIhtVo

They do an insane amount of procedural calculations on the GPU itself, which I gather ED Horizons also does (from the explanation of why it won't be coming to the Mac yet).

P.S. I'm pretty sure Frontier must be well aware of Infinity, since they are their closest competitor (procedural technology wise).

I can't see any over hangs around that part of the video?

 

[Tinman]

Do You mean by "it suddenly stops" as the station not crashing into the ship?? Maybe the ship has been caught by one of its Lagrange points???

I mean that the game constantly must put your reference frame against something in the game since everything is always moving. If the ship for example stopped close to a planet but still was in the stars reference frame then the planet would move away from the ship due to its orbit. This wouldn't be very playable.

So what happens is that your ship gets matched to other objects/POIs as you get close to them. If you drop out into normal space more than 1Mm ahead of a stations orbit you will most likely be matched against the planet and not the station. When the station gets close enough your ship will instead snap into its frame of reference instead.

 

[dynamicbob]

lets makes ure theres deep interaction between the background simulation, minor faction elements and planetary landings.

 

[Zephyriel]

Regarding caves, I'm no geologist, but wouldn't these require the presence (at least in the past) of water, and atmosphere, etc, to be formed? I imagine actual airless moons to be like they are in Mass Effect, ie. just height maps.

 

[wstephenson]

Regarding caves, I'm no geologist, but wouldn't these require the presence (at least in the past) of water, and atmosphere, etc, to be formed? I imagine actual airless moons to be like they are in Mass Effect, ie. just height maps.

No: Lava Tubes (link)

 

[Xzandhor V'Tar]

I mean offline in terms of rendering, not internet connection. I.e. offline rendering you can spend weeks rendering a scene if so desired because you don't have to be able to interact and move through said scene in real time like in a game. Terregen is a good piece of offline terrain generation software.

Hey, I love to do renders in Terragen!!!

Two of my works:

 

[Zephyriel]

No: Lava Tubes (link)

Oh, nice. I stand corrected.

 

[Mike Evans]

Hey, I love to do renders in Terragen!!!

One of my works:
View attachment 55371

I loved playing with terragen back in the day, I used it to great effect in composing space art with foreground landscapes. Not had the time or inclination to boot it back up in recent years though as it can get quite involved.

 

[Vaelin]

I may be mistaken about that 2007 video, since a 2007 interview says that their FUTURE plans include "Horizontal displacements, might form cliffs and overhangs."
http://www.indiedb.com/games/infinity-the-quest-for-earth/news/new-terrain-engine

Ah well, ED Horizons is still gonna get released sooner than Infinity (they've been promising a Kickstarter for several years, but seemingly want to perfect their technology before doing it, meaning it's never gonna be finished).

Yeah, I-Novae afaik still doesn't and probably never will support PG overhangs/caves.
From the horses mouth last year:

"Yes the engine allows you to create your own terrain however we haven't built tools yet that allow you to do this in an easy, visual sort of way like Unreal. Our procedural algorithms are currently incapable of generating caves or any sort of overhang however you can easily create those sorts of things using other methods or even using a 3rd party tool and then importing it into the I-Novae Engine - particularly if you don't need entire planets." INovaeKeith CEO & Cofounder (July 2014)

https://forums.inovaestudios.com/t/what-is-i-novae-engine/485/4

Edit: Apart from caves/overhangs another of the non trivial problems regarding PG planets is generating realistic rivers/river networks although obviously this won't be an issue for the horizons expansion. (I'll be impressed and very surprised if No Mans Sky has any rivers on its planets! It's not impossible but it's quite a tricky problem to address.)

 

[NeilF]

The thing about overhangs and caves, I'd imagine, is the additional complication they put upon other mechanics? eg: Path finding for AI etc? For example, you go into a tunnel, or under and overhang, so how does the AI work out how to get to you, and if it has line of sight etc...