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3 ideas: Procedural vegetation, auto-pilot routes & vehicles
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| Sekse | Date: Tuesday, 14.06.2011, 01:20 | Message # 1 |
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Observer
Group: Newbies
United States
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| I thought of 3 things that would be awesome in SpaceEngine.
1: Procedural vegetation. The planets look amazing, but it is missing the vegetation you would see on a terra with life. You go to a planet with life, and there's nothing there. Maybe even procedural cities would be nice.
2: Being able to plot a course with multiple points for the autopilot, like have it fly by saturn, jupiter, etc. on it's way to neptune as an example.
3: with the free, spacecraft, and aircraft modes, maybe add a vehicle mode so you can drive on the planets.
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| Gabriel | Date: Tuesday, 14.06.2011, 06:00 | Message # 2 |
 Space Tourist
Group: Users
Australia
Messages: 20
Status: Offline
| Dude the vehicle mode sounds awesome, especially if there was procedural vegetation and cities. Although those might make hit the vram pretty hard. I think there was a list of planned feature somewhere that included the plotting a course thing you mentioned, I really want that too, it would be really useful for a number of things. That list might have actually had something about procedural life in it too, but I forget now.
Edit:
Check out these comments by the game's programmer:
http://en.spaceengine.org/forum/14-27-1
http://en.spaceengine.org/forum/9-11-1
Edited by Gabriel - Tuesday, 14.06.2011, 06:04 |
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| Neon | Date: Tuesday, 14.06.2011, 14:05 | Message # 3 |
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Explorer
Group: SE team
Australia
Messages: 208
Status: Offline
| I would love all thoe things... I think it's already on the todo list
except for the vegetation. Great idea +1  Would love that.
Thought I think load times of planet lod would need to be made
more efficient before we can get that.
I also wouldn't object to some of the stars in centre of the galaxy
being reduced, it's a no go zone for me, as it just crashes the game
and when it doesn't, it's impossible to move as frame rate is about 5
when normally it's between 60 - 90.
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| Sekse | Date: Thursday, 16.06.2011, 04:11 | Message # 4 |
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Observer
Group: Newbies
United States
Messages: 5
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| Another thought or two, on terra planets, maybe the procedural generation could be made to use plate tectonics as a pattern, creating intelligently placed oceans, mountain ranges and maybe even sea cliffs instead of perlin patterns that look too computer simulated. Programming the generator to generate plates, then where the plates collide there would be ranges of mountains along the rims, then using erosion filters for a finishing touch. The result would be incredible continents, islands, and general terrains. Would make it the most realistic terrain generator out there if it could be done. Also, I would like to see some different atmospheres and textures on terra planets. All terras seem to be based on one of 3 models it seems, they are either earth-like, or they are full of blue fog, or they are those brown and green terras with a red atmosphere. Would like to see some with maybe purple or yellow skies, maybe even green.
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| Thurs | Date: Thursday, 16.06.2011, 07:51 | Message # 5 |
 Astronaut
Group: Users
United States
Messages: 49
Status: Offline
| Quote (Sekse) I thought of 3 things that would be awesome in SpaceEngine. 1: Procedural vegetation. The planets look amazing, but it is missing the vegetation you would see on a terra with life. You go to a planet with life, and there's nothing there. Maybe even procedural cities would be nice. 2: Being able to plot a course with multiple points for the autopilot, like have it fly by saturn, jupiter, etc. on it's way to neptune as an example. 3: with the free, spacecraft, and aircraft modes, maybe add a vehicle mode so you can drive on the planets.
Yes! This is what I would like to see added soon to the program - this would give it a level of playability that would definitely be addictive. Then when all the other things are added, you're still hooked on the program.
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| Pandur | Date: Friday, 17.06.2011, 00:49 | Message # 6 |
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Astronaut
Group: SE team
Germany
Messages: 42
Status: Offline
| Sounds really awesome, indeed. I also guess, some of those things are already on the Todo-list.
But the most important thing for me is to have correct collissions with planets, for making it impossible to easily fly through
objects in space. Also a calculation of any objects gravity would be nice, maybe a simulation of planetfall while flying in spacecraft mode, if you are in an objects gravity field...
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| SpaceEngineer | Date: Friday, 17.06.2011, 13:05 | Message # 7 |
 Author of Space Engine
Group: Administrators
Russian Federation
Messages: 4800
Status: Offline
| I have no idea how model tectonics. Procedural generator shader receives only (x,y,z) - coordinates of a point on the surface of sphere, and returns height of landscape on this point. So how to make plates, what approach to use? I have only 2 basic functions - Perlin noise and its modifications (Ridged multifractal for mountains) and Cellural noise (similar to Voronoi noise) and its modifications (craters and lunar mare, solar granulation and spots)....Maybe the last one could help.
Erosion simulation is possible, but it's very expensive and has problems along edges of tiles - smulation must run over transitions between adjanced landscape tiles. I watched some demos of real-time water erosion on GPU, but they need ~1 ms for one step on texture 512*512. To obtain realistic looking mountains, we need to run near 1000 steps of simulation, that takes ~1 second to generate one tile of landscape! So we need to wait ~10 years or so for more powerful computers:) For now, erosion is possible only for upper levels of planet textures, but no results will be visible there - resolution of upper levels is hundreds of kilometers per pixel.
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| Neon | Date: Friday, 17.06.2011, 15:23 | Message # 8 |
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Explorer
Group: SE team
Australia
Messages: 208
Status: Offline
| I don't think real geology is needed really. We have the geology
there atm, n it's pretty damn good. Mountains, plains, valleys etc.
Vegetation & walking organisms is definitely somewhere I hope we go.
One thing on landscapes Vova, is it possible for planets with water
to generate beaches? Waves might be possible later with shaders,
but I think the land does need a transition zone between land & water.
I keep seeing the beaches on Titan, n just wish I saw them in here.
It just creates that last missing element. It should be doable, just a
colour change between one poly of land meets a poly of water.
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| SpaceEngineer | Date: Friday, 17.06.2011, 15:39 | Message # 9 |
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Author of Space Engine
Group: Administrators
Russian Federation
Messages: 4800
Status: Offline
| I've made coastlines, you can see them on some terras. But it has a horrible aliasing effect: From big distances, you might see a couple of yellow pixels instead of a smooth yellow line. I must do some filtering of generated texture or make coastlines fade out on upper quadtree levels.
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| Sekse | Date: Saturday, 30.07.2011, 18:44 | Message # 10 |
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Observer
Group: Newbies
United States
Messages: 5
Status: Offline
| Ok, I thought of a way to model tectonics simply if you decided to try it. You could start with a very large and coarse perlin that would cover the world to be used as an overall heightmap basis, then use it as a mask to add finer perlins as they are configured now to the highlighted areas, resulting in the dark areas of the coarse perlin becoming the tectonic plates with mountain ranges where the plates meet and plains and oceans in between. You could also lighten randomly selected "plates" to make them rise higher than the rest to add a sea level and possibly sea cliffs even. Just saying it would make terras a bit more realistic.
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