All aboard the HypePlane for the rings video/kickstarter!

Maybe it’s possible to develop a rough and dirty interface, which allows to use see the path modeled in 3DSMax in real-time in the engine…?
The 3DXI interface in the SDK of 3DSMax sounds as if it only exist to serve your needs :smiley:

Yes, more art tools would be nice, but as we’ve been stating, we are still a small team with limited resources and time currently, and we have to be very diligent in how we allocate and scope our toolset. That interface wasn’t high priority and we managed to pull it off in max this time.

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Did anyone else notice the glitch on the planet from 0:46-0:51 in the big lake?

at 0:46

at :51

its Atlantis !

oh God… tsunami!

Wow, good find! Let’s see what the inovae team says about it

The oceans are a sphere at a fixed radius, the terrain generation utilizes an LOD system, you are seeing the delta between a static and dynamic system I believe. Flavien ofc would have more technical info and maybe can explain why it is happening at similar distances. I believe this is how the planetary engine has always worked, hence the reason for the running rivers feasibility talk/discussions of the past. As an artist, I’m going to assume it’s one of the many compromises that must be made in graphics programming to attain a performance level required/expected for a realtime game engine.

Morphing between the planet long distance color/bump-map and the actual terrain should solve this popping issue.

(Except that it doesn’t pop.)

You can see the same thing happening on Titan :wink:

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Obviously it is. But I think maybe its possible to work around it. When recreating the next more-detailed octave of noise (for the next LOD), this new octave of noise - added to the low LOD noise - should not break through the water surface at new places. Maybe an intelligent algorithm can be designed, to mask (or invert) places of the higher-LOD noise that it doesn’t change the shape of water surfaces more than refining its edges…

I guess that it could probably be improved (in the sense of smoothing out graphical quirks like this) but every new piece of code/algorithm adds to the processing time and will reduce performance - even if it’s a tiny bit, it all adds up. At some point, there has to be a trade-off between quality and performance. I also suspect it’s not a rare thing for LOD to cause things like this to happen - I’m pretty sure I have seen examples in other games, where a low-detail-level model causes an artefact that isn’t there close-up. I can live with that.

I can tell to content providers that this video is not enough for me. Sorry if I spoke for more people than myself, but I’m pretty sure that a lot of people could have the same feeling than me. This is the reaction of a gamer… I want to create a game like this one since I was a very young boy, but I’m not able to do it, so I’ve place many hopes in this game, and I was waiting for a new video or other news since 3 years now, checking Inovae’s Twitter, forums, (etc…) day by day, hoping that something like this finally comes. And then it comes, and there is nothing more than something very more beautiful than in the last video, for an initiate eye. I know that they are doing their best to make this game a reality, I know all of the difficulties they talk about, but nothing explains their bad communication about the game itself, this is a choice, like I said, unbearable.

I’m tired to wait an information for months or years. I’m waiting since 2006 for FF14, since 4 years to see spaceships, cities, planets, stars, travels, etc… on Infinity, one year for online heists on GTA 5… I just wanted to know for what I’m expecting this game, even without videos… I just need to dream about this game with Keith or Flavien telling us more things about the game experience itself, so I can imagine what will be possible in it (discovering planet, resources, make sciences, develop cities, and a billion other things that I can imagine for a game like this one).

You guys are saying : “you know, there’s the kickstarter, so they can tell us nothing more for the moment”… I say that the game existed before the kickstarter, and will be exist after, and if INovae can succed in making disapointed a huge fan and passioned guy like me, it’s maybe that their comunication’s strategy is not the good one…

I just want to know more about this game, without running like a dog behind a bone (here the bone is the information), what am I doing wrong ?

You are spending time on researching a pre-release game instead of making a pre-release game.

Protip: researching happens at a faster pace than making. That’s probably why it doesn’t seem to you that you can make a game yourself.

Flavien wrote on his twitter account:

Testing our new deferred renderer implementation with 4K lights, all with dynamic shadows. Fun :slight_smile:

Oh dear, there goes Flavien, trying to drastically lower the engine’s framerate. What ever will we do?

…Give him my undivided attention of course :wink:

I would be curious to know how much of a framerate hit the engine took, though.

It seems that Kimmo has posted a pic of a landed spacecraft:

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I was just about to post that here!

Good find. :smiley:

I see the Hyperion :grey_question: has sufficient downward lighting.

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It’s Helion
That light and shadow transition is amazing. I’ve never seen anything similar

And now that someone has told about the good stuff, all I have left is the petty nitpicking.

The terrain still does have a slight “procedurally generated” feel - you know, the uncanny “molten” feel landscape geometry has. I don’t know if it’s a hard limitation of current procedural generation, if it’s a particularity of this place or if it’s simply because it’s WIP.
Also, I guess the ground isn’t supposed to be seen at such a close range with this angle, as we can see the vegetation flattened. Again, whether it is a limitation of the engine for performances, of the available time for something we won’t see often zipping by with starships or simply a WIP.

But nitpicking aside, that’s pretty great!

I continue to like the Hellion. It feels like a mean light hauler modified for combat, the kind that you wouldn’t expect in a regular army but for gentlemen of fortune and other colourful independents.

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It’s literally the barebones ground / grass texture. Not even sure it has tessellation or anything else yet. You won’t see 3D vegetation geo or blades of grass for quite some time. Not a priority for Kickstarter. I’d be curious to see a ‘non-flattened’ version of a flat texture in other games you refer to.

Glad you like the Hellion. One of our goals with Gene post Kickstarter is to give it a proper makeover with the lessons learnt from this first pass process.

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