All aboard the HypePlane for the rings video/kickstarter!

Battlescape
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Given the emphasis on, you know, starfighters zipping by at ludicrous speeds, that’s probably a good move - it still looks better than most plane simulators I’ve seen about.

I think the problem is that the vegetation is not just short grass, but plants that are up to, what, half a metre high? So the fact that they are a flat image on the ground, at this angle and distance, becomes more apparent.
AFAICT, games wanting to avoid that either use shorter grass and longer distances/steeper angles, or generate 3d vegetation at close range.
If there are ways to make plants “stick out” from texture with normal maps or the like, you tell me.

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The textures are just grass, not meters high plants.

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I am by no means a programmer, so take my points with a grain of salt. I have however worked with World Machine Pro and Terragen 3, as well as 3dsmax and Modo. So I think I know a little bit about procedural generation from a purely practical point of view (of an artist using it).

I think the greatest challenge of making procedural planets is the Terran planet. Or, any planet with more than one climate across the surface. With a desert planet, you can use cosine and boolean functions, and some fillet functions, to create various dunes (Parabolic dunes, Star dunes, Rolling dunes, Transverse dunes, etc). And some mesa rock formations of course… but for a Terran planet, you would have to combine all the forms of ice, desert, foliage, terrain / rock formations such as tundra, fjords, mesa, mountain peaks, mountain chains, and ALL the forms of dunes etc…

And when you go into detail in any of these facets, there is even more inside of them that you could go into detail with.
With ice, you can have polar ice caps, ice sheets on mountains, regular snow, frozen lakes, etc. That’s just ice.

What I’m trying to say is that For a Terran planet, you will need to have nested procedurals.
1.First a terrain procedural that handles where there are plains, tundra, fjords, mountains, ice sheets, etc.
2.Then a base coloring / texturing procedural that handles the distribution of these various climates based on some algorithms and rules.These could be tied with longtitude, the density of the atmosphere and the radiation of the sun.
3.Then you go into each climate and have a procedural for each of them…
Ice, Desert, Green, etc

If we take Earth as inspiration, just inside our own “green” spaces, we have a huge variety from the giant Californian red wood (Endor in Star Wars), to regular pine trees in Northern hemisphere, to birch, to ferns, to yew, to oak, to fruit trees, to jungles with palm trees, to rain forests that are in certain times of the year completely flooded. Cacti in arid places…

My point is that nesting procedurals into each other is going to be super difficult to do in a game engine. I would like to hear someone like Flavien describe how he sees this being handled in a realistic way, without overburdening the computers.

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For flight sim 10, we had an army of contractor minions painting flat color atlases over terrain tiles to determine where to generate certain vegetation groups.

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Well, what about a rule-based procedural “painting” of climates based on distance to equator, density of atmosphere, the radiation of the sun, etc? Couldn’t that work as well? It’s impossible to hand-paint an entire galaxy.

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Oh lord I wasn’t suggesting that. I honestly don’t know how we’ll be generating that, one of our devs can probably elaborate when they have time. I do believe we have a system in place where certain textures get generated based on certain parameters, stands to reason we could do the same with geo as a bare bones system.

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349

Wiwine has managed to come up with a great way to design Dunes using cosine functions, as you can see in this Terragen tutorial. It’s based purely on mathematical functions:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18400.0.html

And to combine it all together with a fillet function:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18757.0.html

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[quote=“Shigawire, post:345, topic:524”]
What I’m trying to say is that For a Terran planet, you will need to have nested procedurals.[/quote]

As an engineer, this sounds like me telling an artist that he has to work in multiple shades of color.

Well, yeah, there will be a hierarchy of decisions made about what goes where. That’s the fun of creating the procedures. All data either will be created procedurally or it will be derived from procedural data. A planet’s orbit will be determined procedurally, and then the temperature of the planet’s surface at any given location will be derived from that (and other factors, as appropriate and as practical).

The engine team has a certain budget of GPU cycles that they can spend as they see fit. I’m sure they’ll be doing as much as they can to apply those resources effectively. They have a variety of mathematical and procedural tools that they can employ, and I expect good results from them.

However, nothing comes for free. Where resources don’t allow for it, realism will be sacrificed. Note that the galaxy generator is not a priority for the engine supporting Battlescape. It will apparently have a few hand-chosen planets. The procedures that trigger the creation of all those interesting combinations of terrain and vegetations are a ways down the road. While Battlescape could add to its appeal by having such a beast, it’s not a necessity. An MMO would require it.

[quote=“Shigawire, post:349, topic:524”]
Wiwine has managed to come up with a great way to design Dunes using cosine functions[/quote]

Now I’m telling an artist that I know of a guy who sculptures in metal. :smile:

If you have concerns, asking questions about technical topics might serve your needs better.

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Wops, looks like I got the scale quite wrong. I confused grass clumps for bigger plants.

The “flattened” looks I talk about is more visible in the lower right of the screen with the grass clumps. In-game, though, it would probably only be visible when landed with the camera very near the ground like here, or maybe flying slowly and extremely low - so no big deal for I:B, this level of detail seems good at it is.

That said, I’m curious if there are other tricks that are planned in the medium-to-long term to improve “FPS-like” quality for the ground, or even what kind of tricks could be possible.
Popping 3d grass close in as most games seem to do seems hard to pull off right, with even big-budget games having a visible Circle of Life accompanying the camera, growing heavenly seeds around it and dying off as it goes away again. Which can be a bit distracting when you are driving a T-34.
What other tricks are used for those cases? Andre is evoking tessellation, would making the clumps as bumps in the ground would help?

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Hi,
sadly I think that most (if not all) terragen generators cannot work in an engine like inovae. The reason is, that in inovae not only everything has to be calculated procedurally, furthermore you need to be able to render every single square-meter without knowing the surrounding ones.
This gets a problem with every landscape, which is based on erosion. Also rivers are impossible with this restriction.

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On ground textures: Compared with older games (mostly flight sims) it looks a lot better due to the procedural textures.
What you are talkong about ThornEel seems to be all the vegetation. Most FPS have even worse ground textures then this.

It’s true. The I-Novae engine is missing most details that could add depth to planets. Clouds, foliage, forests, dunes, towns … all complex to generate proceduraly.

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Unlikely a priority for Battlescape.

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355

Actually, come to think of it, I really just assumed that planetary landings weren’t going to be a thing in Battlescape. I guess landing is still important for ship hangars, though, right? So, we might see planetary landings, too (even if there’s little or nothing to do once you’ve parked the ship)?

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There absolutely has to be planetary landings in Battlescape AND something to do on the surface. Preferably something useful like building bases or something. I can’t see how they would sell the game without planetary landing since it’s their number one selling point when compared to the competition.

And I still secretly hope they will find a way to get clouds and some rudimentary procedural vegetation into the game (perhaps with enough funding through stretch goals?), although I recall they said these will not be a priority in Battlescape. :wink:

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Well they have seamless planetary to space transition. I think that’s the big part. A lot of games have the ground part, a lot of others have the space. But not both.
I think something to do in the broader sense isn’t required. Maybe just spawning from a planetary base. But there should be battles in the atmosphere for sure.

Well with enough funds maybe … I too hope for clouds and vegetation.

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358

Just personal opinion here, but it seems from a reasonable scoping perspective I would like to see (provided it’s fun for gameplay) some spawn point bases, ground structure objectives to blow up. (antenna relays / warehouses / small spaceports / fuel deposit storage).

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359

This. This is something I completely agree with.

For myself, flying in the atmosphere and dogfighting there will be half the game. I’m personally looking forward to the challenges of learning when to take the fight into space and when to take it to atmo assuming flight mechanics inside the atmo aren’t awful. I’m not saying they are, but we’ve talked a lot about space flight physics but almost nothing about how ships will handle inside an atmosphere.

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Ships that have no aerodynamic control surfaces (space ships), and use thrusters to hover (and fly in an atmo) will not all of the sudden fly like airplanes. Not to mention that airfoils are designed & optimized for specific atmospheric properties of a planet(s). To top it all off, I am not allowing any wing/fins of our ship designs :wink:

Flavien did mention a while ago (on the old forums), that ship flight characteristics will be impacted by the atmospheric properties of a given planet, but they will still fly like spaceships.

Incorporating planets into I:B gameplay is of course something are working on. If funding is available, there could possibly be atmospheric craft for planetary defense purposes, etc.

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361

Have you considered having having specialized craft for space, atmo, and a jack of trades ship that’s not the best at either but is okay as a sort of hybrid that has some wingy bits for atmo stability.

I am only slightly disappointed about a lack of wingy bits. As a primarily minnie pilot on eve wingy bits have become a staple(just like duct tape) of my spaceships. Having said that, I will be happy with any spaceships at all.

If they handle like spaceships in the atmo, what sort of combat will evoke? The way I imagine it, it would actually be like the flight mechanics of many space shooters that are basically airplanes in space(but really in a planet). Is this similar to what’s in mind?

Edit: At the least, will ships purposed to fight in atmo have a lifting body of sorts or look somewhat aerodynamic? Or is aerodynamics mostly ignored due to “advanced materials and technobabble stuffs?”

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We discussed it a little here: Balancing flight mechanics

The thing is that most spacecraft will have extremely powerful thrusters and be able to hover and change position in every direction in space … so why shouldn’t they be able to in atmospheres.
I want it to differ in the atmosphere too. But I don’t need wings for that. No matter how powerful your thrusters are there’s still the square air resistance law and, as you said, lifting body mechanics. Both things that could be interesting.

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