Ocean worlds - underwater environments

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Ocean worlds - underwater environments

Talisman

Date: Saturday, 28.01.2012, 02:16 | Message # 1

Pioneer

Group: Users

United States

Messages: 409

Status: Offline

After reading this in the noctis thread:

Quote (SpaceEngineer)

If I implement a good underwater environment, then players can use a submarine as well.

Just wanted some more info on that, I think that would be an amazing way to make the game even deeper (pun intended)

Currently water worlds are extremely boring, once you penetrate the thick cloudy athmosphere there's just water everywhere. Of course. but when you go under water it's pretty much flat everywhere. It would be awesome if the bottom of the bodies of water had different styles and rocky regions and pretty much looked like the bottom of the ocean, with caverns and such and even "corals' on ocean worlds with life. That would be awesome.

What do you guys think? cool

Gfamad

Date: Saturday, 28.01.2012, 11:45 | Message # 2

Observer

Group: Newbies

France

Messages: 7

Status: Offline

Of course Talisman, caverns, coral and undersea features are great ideas ! Imagine switching on the light of your sub-space-marine and entering a mysterious cave ! We can go further and imagine some abandoned structure in this cave, and why not mining spots (So we need a scanner to detect them...)

The problem is that I'm not sure the engine can handle inner caves because it's basically a height=f(x,y) function I bet. So it will be very hard to implement this kind of feature.

On the over side the Dev seems to be a very brilliant coder so why no dreaming after all ! Imagine each planet as complex as a single Minecraft map without the blocky aspect ! But one Dev is not enough for that kind of feature I think...

SpaceEngineer

Date: Saturday, 28.01.2012, 13:08 | Message # 3

Author of Space Engine

Group: Administrators

Russian Federation

Messages: 4800

Status: Offline

I have a problem with underwater environments. As you probably know, water quickly scatters and absorbs the light, so at >1 km depth we have complete darkness. Using lamps won't help - they can shine only to a few hundred meters. Switching to Infrared or microwaves won't help either - any electromagnetic waves absorb good in water environment. Using acoustic hydro-locators? The image on the screen should look like a b/w noisy pattern.

Another problem with oceania - is the depth of its ocean. It is several hundred kilometers deep! It has no rocky bottom, its bottom consists of "ice VII" - the forms ultra high pressure ice. No submarine could reach such depths.

I have an idea on how to make ice caps float on the surface of a water planet with the water underneath. Now it is made just like a huge mountain range growth from the ocean bottom. But this is incorrect. I plan to make water planets with 3 landscape layers. The first is the ocean bottom (relatively flat). The second is the ice cap surface (it can cover the entire planet, like on Europa). And the third is the ice cap bottom surface - its edge matches the ice cap top surface, and the normals are inverted - so ice caps are rendered as solid pieces of ice floating on the water surface. On the edge of the cap we will get some texture stretching, but Ill try to make it unnoticeable. The same method can be used for ice caps on terra planets.

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Ocean worlds - underwater environments

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