... do they intend the artists to touch every square meter of surface? ...
Welcome back Derek, and indeed things are turning out to be...interesting. Either we all are played (ohh I guess some part of us will always want that to be true), or project is in serious trouble indeed.
Positive news is that people start to question things and don't get downvoted on reddit anymore. Maybe sign of change? One could hope heh.
Btw, for people who are interested ED rest of Season 2 is carried over 2017 (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...inues-in-2017-(2-3-and-2-4-updates-next-year))
My goal was never - ever - to tear down the project. Though burning their JPEGs was directed at the salty backers who decided that waging an Internet war of attrition against me, was the best course of action.
As it stands, even when I took the gloves off and took legal action, I only asked them for three things in that legal demand letter we sent them:
1) refunds for those who ask // now happening as a result of my numerous writings explain how/why backers could/should get refunds. Then Streetroller literally took that ball and dropped it on CIG
2) a definitive release date for the project due to the ToS requirement // they removed the delivery date completely from the Tos. And croberts had stopped giving dates. then he started up again. backers are still screwed because they're all still pure rubbish
3) financial accountability for the money due to the ToS requirement // see #2 in which they removed this from the new ToS
So to say that I haven't delivered, or that my efforts haven't yielded any results, is without merit. Especially when you also consider that, in a sense, I have been somewhat vindicated because not only has he proven that the game pitched can't be made, he's also confident the shoving out an MVP is going to be perfectly OK
You make it look like you just came back from Sagittarius A! Lol
dsmart... dsmart... dsmart... No, doesn't ring a bell. Who are you again?
Oh wait, now I remember, you're the guy who makes Star Citizen, right? Or is that just the impression I get from the fans of that game, since they seem to know every single word you said, but can't remember the stuff Chris Roberts said three weeks ago![]()
You know, that's a fantastic point made. Thing is that, it's not so much that they can't remember; it's that they selectively choose to forget.
That's Derek Smart ARE Toto.![]()
What did Genuine Roberts say a few weeks ago? Something to do with Star Marine coming in a few weeks or something![]()
Nah, that can't be it. I'm sure he said that a few years ago.![]()
The citizen post after that first link from Disco is blistering.
A couple questions about Planet Tech:
how much memory will their methods consume? The height map and artist manually brushing in trees and grass is probably not too memory intensive for a 10 KM map. But what about for an entire planet if that hand-touched area has to be stored versus created by procedure from a seed value?
Will CIG build planets with just a few hand-crafted landing zones and the rest more or less empty (shades of Elite Dangerous, oh my), or do they intend the artists to touch every square meter of surface?
How will they fill the planets with content? Will it mirror ED with RNG POI outside the few hand-built areas as 10ftC maybe #78 (IIRC) sounded?
Surely than hand brushing is in effect changing the seed to it could be a work backwards to generate a new seed.
So if we had a seed of 123456
And that made a scene of Grass tree rock tree rock tree
And then the artist looks at it and thinks "hmm maybe it would look more organic as grass tree tree tree rock tree "
As uses the tool to hand touch it, then the system works backward and figures out the seed for that is 123446
And thus they keep the procedural generation memory foot print but also the benefit of the artists eye fine tuning the outcome.
Isn't that what Frontier used to fine tune their PG.
PG generates the planet, then the artists worked on the results, then that was take back into the PG formulae, and integrated on.
That was my take up from the Season 2.0 preview videos but that might be my laymans misunderstanding of this well over my head
No, i don't think its possible to use PG like that.
Surely than hand brushing is in effect changing the seed to it could be a work backwards to generate a new seed.
So if we had a seed of 123456
And that made a scene of Grass tree rock tree rock tree
And then the artist looks at it and thinks "hmm maybe it would look more organic as grass tree tree tree rock tree "
As uses the tool to hand touch it, then the system works backward and figures out the seed for that is 123446
And thus they keep the procedural generation memory foot print but also the benefit of the artists eye fine tuning the outcome.
Isn't that what Frontier used to fine tune their PG.
PG generates the planet, then the artists worked on the results, then that was take back into the PG formulae, and integrated on.
That was my take up from the Season 2.0 preview videos but that might be my laymans misunderstanding of this well over my head
Oh .. but it is! The challenge then becomes defining an encoding scheme for all the objects you want in your 'scene'.
Perhaps i should have said realistic rather than possible.
You know, that's a fantastic point made. Thing is that, it's not so much that they can't remember; it's that they selectively choose to forget.
Err, no, that's not possible. If you were dealing with something like a 10x10 grid then you could, but only because you could work out seeds for every possible combination of terrain you might want and then select which one you liked: To generate the possible seeds for a 1 km² Crysis map (with 10cm resolution) would probably tie up a supercomputer for a year, and on a planetary scale it's unthinkable.
What you *can* do - and what I think they were doing in the demo - is say "Generate planet number 48. Now make this bit water, and put a rock here, and a tree here, etc: But you're piling up the data pretty quick, especially if all they're proc-genning is a height map (which is all they showed us on the design demo).
Yeah, I think there was a PG programmer talking about NMS in this blog who had a really great metaphor for PG, and likened it to pouring bowls of oatmeal.
So yeah assuming every possible variable is consistent, once the computer has poured a bowl of oatmeal you can get it to pour exactly the same bowl using the original settings. But if you craft a nice shape out of the oatmeal (like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encouters, only with oatmeal instead of mash) you'd never have enough computing power to figure out exactly what the settings need to be to pour a bowl of oatmeal that looks like the mountain from Close Encouters.
What we've currently seen of SC's PG tech is a zoomed in area on the size of one carefully carved bowl of Oatmeal. OK, so we did see another planet vary briefly in one of the videos, but still it's not available for us to scrutinise. Until they have more bowls of oatmeal to compare the PG is actually fairly ambiguous.
If ED are ever going to provide the ability to land on the very small number of planets we have height data for (Earth, Moon, Mars etc.) they will need include that data in the game too. I think that the data will probably be fairly low resolution and the detail will be PG. So the data provides areas like the Pennines or the Rocky Mountains but it'll only be an approximation. If Star Citizen is going to provide us with level data comprised of entire planets and the location of every tree and feature then 1) They probably won't ever finish the first planet, 2) Even if they could, they probably won't be able to compress it to anything sensible 3) We'll probably never be able to download it,.. and 4) I seriously doubt it'll fit onto a hard drive. It will be interesting to see how they do it, but common sense is telling me they'll just end up with something like ED anyway.
I guess one thing in CIG's favour is they're using little Noddy planets, so there's a lot less data needed.
https://lovelace-media.imgix.net/uploads/112/ce91eab0-d46a-0131-a40e-4a7baa886aae.jpg
Relative to real planets yes. But even if they are the size of a small country in our real world, that's a huge amount of data for a crafted level.
I was doing some rough sums (in this thread) after the citizencon demo trying to work out a rough approximation of the area they quickly "crafted" within 5 minutes in the demo then figuring out how long it would take them to 'craft' an area the size of the UK 243,610 km² and it wasn't practical. There are some really large game maps out there, but there is certainly a point where you go past what is possible even with as many artists and developers and budget you can get.
So it's almost a certainty that planets (even very small ones) will be filled with PG content. The real question is how they will provide that PG content to clients and I have a sneaking suspicion that the 'map' seen in the non-playable demos was pre-baked and stored as height data, and didn't include the rest of the planet. I wonder if they have put much thought into how this is going to work in a consumer application? My best guess is that they intend to provide crafted areas of the map and use seeded stuff in-between, I really hope they aren't thinking of just stuffing (even small scale) planetary 'maps' onto our hard drives.
Oh, who knows what they're thinking... But it's PG or bust, frankly.
Slightly out of date, but may still be interesting: The 10 biggest (non PG) video game worlds. On this list, the record is Guild Wars Nightfall, at 15,000 sq miles / 38,850 sq km. Although if it's anything like the original GW, there'll be lots of areas in there filled with unclimable mountains.![]()