Voxels In Planet Coaster - Why none in Elite?

Colonel Kenney

Colonel Kenney
More specifically - Mining?

I'm new on the Planet Coaster bandwagon and it looks to be a lot of fun (although why there is no first person view with ability to walk around your park with friends is beyond me). I'm definitely getting on board. Especially since its using the standard voxel tech out there in many engines such as Unity etc. Many many games are using it successfully. 7 Days to Die, Planet Explorers, Space Engineers, No Man's Sky etc.

Just wondering why there was never any decision for them to try and put them in for Asteroids? It would have made it so much more fun mining. I don't mind the current mining method but I enjoy Space Engineer's method waaay more.


You think in the 10 year plan they have anything planned for Voxels on the surface? If we ever are able to build our own base?
 

Jools

Jools
network limitatons.... they experimented with it but it was too problematic for multiplayer.. I believe David himself (Or was it Mr. Brookes?) spoke about it during one of the very early "question and answer" sessions.

NMS isn`t really multiplayer, and due to network limitations you will not see voxel displacement/deformation made by others on the planets/asteroids
 
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nosleepdemon

nosleepdemon
No modern games use voxels that I am aware of, since GPUs were built around the idea of rasterizing triangles with independent position data, instead of representing a continuous space. There are of course games that emulate it, like Minecraft and apparently NMS, and there was a GPU gems demo some time ago that built a triangle mesh around a procedurally generated voxel space, but it's rather computationally intensive.
 
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Arkantes

Arkantes
Jools said:
network limitatons.... they experimented with it but it was too problematic for multiplayer.. I believe David himself (Or was it Mr. Brookes?) spoke about it during one of the very early "question and answer" sessions.

NMS isn`t really multiplayer, and due to network limitations you will not see voxel displacement made by others on the planets/asteroids
Click to expand...

A solution inbetween could probably be found though, one could for instance break big chunks off of asteroids, that would still be fairly easy for the network to handle.
 

Hurricane Moon

Banned
H
no fps to walk about with mates?!!...what is this madness?
have frontier got something against having legs in games?.....you build a gigantic theme park...naturally before the grand opening you would want to walk around it and make sure shes good....perhaps if a ride is broken you could fix it so the public doesnt get hurt...let one of your mates on it first for a laugh! all in first person....my god they could have another quirky occulus hit on there hands.

yeah i have played rct3 a lot in the past...cool game
 

Retrograde

Retrograde
I'm guessing that voxel tech might be fairly new to the Cobra engine. But I think it's extremely promising to see that it's now supported.

In addition to future terrain with overhangs, I suspect voxels would be great for upcoming features like asteroids and the ability to fly much closer to gas giants.
 

lysan

lysan
There are a small company who promised that you can use their voxel add-on with any Engine out today? don't know if that is only concerning single player or if its multi player too.
 

Doolittle

D
Novalogic from the 90s used voxels before 3D acceleration in games like Comanche. Boy were they clunky. Of course you couldn't deform anything back then (I don't think), but the tech was used. It's not necessarily the tech that makes or breaks the game, but the devs who develop it. Was reading about "Dying Light" and the sudden idea the dev got, to instead of putting tags on all surfaces for using the parkour feature adapt the feature to the character..........Made me think, DUH! Common sense escapes some people, and they wind up wasting endless time on the insanity of a poorly implemented feature, aka Batmans grapple, or how Farcry poorly implemented it.

FD as the design is done, it wouldn't be that difficult to make a region of voxel space in an instance for mining purposes. Just depends on the engine, and what they want to achieve.
 

Bacalao

Bacalao
Cynaqq said:
Volumetric pixel.A pixel is a dot in a 2D coordinate system. It has a colour value and a position.A voxel is a dot in a 3D coordinate system. It has position, and usually a mass associated with it.
Click to expand...
And if you've ever made the jump from 2d algebra to 3d calculus you understand why it must be so much more computationally intense! That third coordinate just makes everything....harder.
 

Cynaqq

Cynaqq
Bacalao said:
And if you've ever made the jump from 2d algebra to 3d calculus you understand why it must be so much more computationally intense! That third coordinate just makes everything....harder.
Click to expand...

Harder for people, not really for computers. Computers were invented to make numerical approaches to solving equations which include a lot of simple but repetitive calculations faster so they are quite good at calculus.

The reason we don't have voxel based geometry deformation in ED is, as with everything criticised to death about it, of course procedural generation and p2p instancing.

If you go to a planetary ring and there is someone mining there, your version of generated rocks will not fit their version of altered rock. This means you can't enter the same instance. The only way to do this is to store the altered version on the first player's computer and transfer the state to yours so your computer will apply the deformations to the generated version before placing you in the instance. With multiple people coming and going, or in RESs with NPCs altering shapes, it would be a proper nightmare to sync over p2p.

We'll probably have people start bashing FD for letting go of offline play or for choosing a p2p architecture instead of dedicated servers but it is what it is.
 

Marek15

M
I don't see much use for voxels in ED except for one thing:
Generating complex terrain structures that cannot be achieved using traditional hightmap terrain. CryEngine used to to have such a feature allowing a mesh to be generated from voxel data. This was often used for creating caves and overhangs in the terrain like this:
VoxelOverhang.jpg
Voxel_Material.jpg
More info here: http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC2/Voxel+Objects
 
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