ROAM Planet rendering

[Zonder]

Ahhh excellent. What I have in mind is to create a 3D galaxy with a few dozen or so star systems, also of course in 3d. But for each planet, instead of being capable of seamless letting you get from orbit to the ground, create the terrain maps like those of civilization or total war games, and when "double clicking the planet" for example, enter the "Civ" like map, and from there each square, hex or tile would have it's full detailed map at ground level. I don't know if I'm explaining myself well or not.

Thats something like I am planning as well

[DavlexDesign]

G'day Lord Baal and Zonder,

I do get what you mean, and that sounds pretty cool too, but, don't expect to have a planet the size of these ones we have in this game, because full detailed versions of these would mean you need to have around 40 gigabytes of storage (just for a height map at around 10 - 20 meter resolution per vertex) for each planet. I suppose you could go the way of only storing small areas of artist driven terrain segments, and proceduraly generate the rest, I suppose that would work. Or just go with smaller celestial bodies like small planetoids or moons orbiting a bigger body like a gas giant or something, and treat each of the smaller ones as some sort of level or series of levels, actually that would be pretty cool too.

With that idea in mind, then you could generate a really cool sky box for that small area of game play , would make the building of the game allot simpler than driving a zillion systems on the fly, and trying to get them to come together seamlessly in real time (welcome to my world).

Alex

[LordBaal]

Good day my friend and thanks for the answers! I'm eagerly waiting on this!

Oh well, something at the scale of Baal perhaps would be not necessary for a strategy game. Far smaller maps could do, also, perhaps, the combat terrain for most "wild" (as in not urbanized or otherwise changed by the player) areas could be procedurally made each time the area is "zoomed in" (like if a battle is triggered or the player want to check it) from a seed assigned to that tile/square/hex during the generation of the world map, so each time a combat happens there, the landscape is the same. It's not a perfect solution but could do a lot for the save space problem, perhaps, however, making the maps borders fit together, so that in battle you see the adjacent maps in the horizon would be a huge challenge.

Also, I wonder if cities, specially ones in control of the AI and those under "auto" for the player (also the AI) could employ different seeds at different levels/stages, so they also get made on the fly and only when you manually make significant changes the battle map (by putting specific buildings on specific places or destroying anything) the maps gets saved on the hard drive.

Anyway, if those things are possible then, given that most of the time the player would be on the strategic map levels, the loading (or better yet, creating) times could be tolerable enough.

[DavlexDesign]

G'day Lord Baal,

Yeah, I can see what you mean with all that, and it actually shows that you've been thinking a bit about it.

however, making the maps borders fit together, so that in battle you see the adjacent maps in the horizon would be a huge challenge.

Not really, if you where to have different seeds per page, just store the seeds in the page structures that depict them, and maybe at a certain distance lerp between the neighboring pages, so that the edges will always have the same results for vertex placements between pages at the boundaries.

Also, I wonder if cities, specially ones in control of the AI and those under "auto" for the player (also the AI) could employ different seeds at different levels/stages, so they also get made on the fly and only when you manually make significant changes the battle map (by putting specific buildings on specific places or destroying anything) the maps gets saved on the hard drive.

I'm employing an effector system for just this type of scenario, I won't go into too much detail, but needless to say, this system allows me to do a gazillion different things to a gazillion different systems, and it's all very cheap to serialize and store. it will allow an artist to influence all manner of things in a friendly way, say for example, create caves and subterranean areas, modify overhangs, put dents in metal panels, make whole forests wither and die over time, change gravity in a zone, all that kind of stuff.

Alex

[LordBaal]

Again, my hat off to you. And again, I stand by my statement that this engine will change the way video games development is looked upon.

And yes, as you might not remember from a few private messages we had one or two years ago, I have been putting a lot of thought for what in my mind is kind of the ultimate strategy game, I have been always constrained by the fact that an engine capable of holding such beast haven't been ever developed, at least not at the levels you are doing it.

[DavlexDesign]

G'day again LordBaal,

I stand by my statement that this engine will change the way video games development is looked upon.

WOW mate, thank you for the huge praise there, that's a huge statement, I hope I don't let you down, and disappoint you when I release this thing.
It's taking allot longer than I expected, for this thing to get to a usable state, but hopefully the wait will be worth it.

I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist (just ask sovaka) , everything has to run smooth, and pixel perfect, even on a lesser machine like this one, but then I know that it will run nice on most machines then.

Alex

[Aranor]

That's sort of what it is doing anyway, it really doesn't matter what kind of mesh you want to produce, the procedural mechanics part of this thing doesn't give a dam about what point on a shape you are asking for, so you don't have to ask for left to right, top to bottom orders or anything like that, but if that's what you want, it will supply it. so using a standard tiled approach like Geometry Clip maps, or just a recursive quad tree, will work fine, it will also (if you want it to) supply a colour map, a height field, a detail normal map, a climate map, a surface substance map, and a couple of other specialized ones for my engine, if required, all at different resolutions, for the same tile, if need be.

Alex

For a while now I have been working on an old school paper and dice game. The bane of my development has been good maps. I have been searching for a system to allow me to create a world map, capture the image, zoom in and edit minor details and capture another image. Repeat down to city/town level. The best software I have found for that is Fractal Terrains 3 however when it comes to city sized maps that original world map becomes sloppy and editing in not possible due to cursor size. Thus making an entirely new map is needed for the city. If I read the quote above correctly part of your engine does that? Capture a jpeg for instance, zoom in with new LoD, capture another, repeat. If so that something I have shelled out a few hundred dollars searching for. And kind of the holy grail for some folks over at cartographers guild.

Most impressive.

[Zonder]

That's sort of what it is doing anyway, it really doesn't matter what kind of mesh you want to produce, the procedural mechanics part of this thing doesn't give a dam about what point on a shape you are asking for, so you don't have to ask for left to right, top to bottom orders or anything like that, but if that's what you want, it will supply it. so using a standard tiled approach like Geometry Clip maps, or just a recursive quad tree, will work fine, it will also (if you want it to) supply a colour map, a height field, a detail normal map, a climate map, a surface substance map, and a couple of other specialized ones for my engine, if required, all at different resolutions, for the same tile, if need be.

Alex

For a while now I have been working on an old school paper and dice game. The bane of my development has been good maps. I have been searching for a system to allow me to create a world map, capture the image, zoom in and edit minor details and capture another image. Repeat down to city/town level. The best software I have found for that is Fractal Terrains 3 however when it comes to city sized maps that original world map becomes sloppy and editing in not possible due to cursor size. Thus making an entirely new map is needed for the city. If I read the quote above correctly part of your engine does that? Capture a jpeg for instance, zoom in with new LoD, capture another, repeat. If so that something I have shelled out a few hundred dollars searching for. And kind of the holy grail for some folks over at cartographers guild.

Most impressive.

Yes he is designing it to zoom into the city level. Not sure if he has done anything about lod transitions on placed objects yet.

[DavlexDesign]

G'day Aranor,

cartographers guild

Hadn't heard of that before, looks pretty interesting though, and this thing might be right up your alley.
It really isn't ready for mainstream yet, but it's close, it can already use real world data (DEMs / Tiffs from GIS, USGS) and can convert from WGS84 to Geographic coordinates (for rendering) and vice versa.
So for cartography it may be a pretty useful tool, haven't made shaders to render out proper topographical maps and stuff, but they wouldn't be too hard I don't think.

Yes he is designing it to zoom into the city level. Not sure if he has done anything about lod transitions on placed objects yet.

That is correct, from space to ground, and also move about inside buildings, as for the lodding, it is functioning to a point, a bit poppy for my liking, but it is functional.

Alex

[Aranor]

I'll show you what I am doing. Here is my world map.



I can zoom in on the center continent (or any for that matter). That continent is about the size of Australia. So to zoom in on the lake and try to make a city map everything is pixelated. This forces me to redraw the map with but a reference image from the larger map. Fractal Terrains 3 makes this possible but their software of more designed for pure procedural rather than hand sculpting. A 3D engine with LoD systems would make doing this quick, easy and accurate. Problem is, there are non that render full worlds yet that also allow editing of the world.

So, I anxiously await yours

[Sovaka]

I can zoom in on the center continent (or any for that matter). That continent is about the size of Australia. So to zoom in on the lake and try to make a city map everything is pixelated. This forces me to redraw the map with but a reference image from the larger map. Fractal Terrains 3 makes this possible but their software of more designed for pure procedural rather than hand sculpting. A 3D engine with LoD systems would make doing this quick, easy and accurate. Problem is, there are non that render full worlds yet that also allow editing of the world.

So, I anxiously await yours

Greetings Aranor,

Our system will be working a little differently...
At the moment, we procedurally generate the entire planet. We can from there, with our LOD system, export World Maps as JPG, TIFF et c.

What we can do to an extent, is take the map you have made for example, and import it into the engine. But as you have found that with a lack of quality or LOD, is the planet would have rough coasts and mass of other issues.
What we would need in conjunction with it would be a topographical map to give us accurate elevations and such (greyscale heightmap would work to an extent, but again, lack of LOD).

However, what would be much easier to do (which we will have in a future release of the game), is allow players to "paint" their planets design instead of taking a randomly generated planet.
We can then take that painted planet and give it a seed number our engine will recognize and be able to send to other players.
From this painting, you'd then be able to export any LOD image you want of the planet.
We are talking 0.5m resolution images (hundreds of MBs) all the way up to which ever file size you want.

This would also allow us to separate the Terrain, Water and Cloud maps as well.

[Aranor]

Thats pretty much what I am looking for. A rough design (painted planet) and let the system work out the details. As for images. I just need to take a screenshot. But exporting jpegs is convenient as well.

Just imagine how much more in depth the old school rpgs of middle earth and dungeons and dragons could have been with your engine to make the world of middle earth

Keep up the good work guys/gals.

[LordBaal]

HI! I hope you are all doing alright! Last night I was on bed thinking about features for the hypothetical game I want to create and suddenly I started to wonder, how is the documentation of this marvelous engine?

I'm not doubting about your capabilities or professionalism. Just that sometimes (It happened to me a lot) when codding one can lost track of things as you code and forget to do proper documentation or even some basic comments at code level that leave the future yourself scratching your head.

[Sovaka]

Being most of it modular, we need to keep track of its states and functions... So the code is very well commented.

We haven't started on actual Documentation yet.

[LordBaal]

Good to know!!
I eagerly waiting for any update!

[DavlexDesign]

G'day all,

However, what would be much easier to do (which we will have in a future release of the game), is allow players to "paint" their planets design instead of taking a randomly generated planet.
We can then take that painted planet and give it a seed number our engine will recognize and be able to send to other players.

Yeah, this is all pretty accurate, what we "CAN DO" is paint a lo res base topology of the planet, or take a generated base topology of a planet and let you modify that in a paint program or in engine, then set seeds for the fractal detail type/s so that when you go close to the ground, the detail will just augment the base continent layer (that you supplied).

What I mean by that is, That the base topology will get modified quite a bit by the other fractals, but keep the same basic shape of the continent layers, otherwise, sending too high a resolution bitmap across the waves to another player visiting your planet would be quite an expensive process on bandwidth, and then at ground level have customisations as well for the more precise stuff, but those are just modifiers / affectors.

Alex

[palaslet]

Hi guys,
I've just started playing this cool game named Kerbal Space Program. One can create mods for it. And the default planets isn't very interresting...
Just saying...
Get my hint?


EDIT: Just read a few forum posts about that, and it would apparently be illegal...
So apparently I was just being stupid. And almost criminal...

[Sovaka]

We will get there eventually...

There are only two of us working on it.

For the moment progress has been halted so that we can work on another project that we can push out within the next couple weeks hopefully to get some income flowing.

[LordBaal]

Why don't you guys put up a kickstarter? I mean, if this engine goes over the public there's a big chance of people giving you money in return of having the perfect, all stars engine to make their dream games come true.

[ultramedia]

It's not an overly bad suggestion... you've already got a working prototype, that'd go a long way to showing people it's not a pie in the sky thing...

[Sovaka]

We have brain stormed that idea and it was in the works.

But we wanted something more than a proof of.
We wanted to show it off with some content... Like a working Solar Sim and a Galaxy cloud amongst other things like Vegetation.

I have no doubts that it would be a successful Kickstarter project but the scale of it was huge.

So we decided to get something small out there to start with.
Which of course will also be featured on Kickstarter and IndieGoGo in the coming weeks.

Though be warned, it isn't an Ogre engine product.

[Aranor]

I've said before I would gladly throw a few dollars at this project. Might I direct you to a similar project called limit theory. They had quite the successful campaign. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jos ... space-game I would throw up a few more youtube videos showing what you can do now, build a bigger fan base then put yourself up on kickstarter.

[LordBaal]

So... happy new year and all that!

[DavlexDesign]

Happy New Year to you all.

Alex

[LordBaal]

Are we there yet?