Author Topic: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface  (Read 11127 times)

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Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
Guess I'll have to stick with having the same modell 2 or 3 times then. But as long as I keep the tbls for them in a TBM instead of the main table I don't feel that bad about it anymore, anyway. :D Certainly one of the things where coders find better things to spend their FreeTime with. :)

@Bryan: I did not say that other people tried it before, but none of them are currently active AFAIK.

 

Offline Bryan See

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Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
@Nightmare, but I am the only one active.

Aww, that sounds like the kind of things that can't be fixed. :(
(in particular if I'm the only one with use for that) :lol:
There are some ways to reduce the effects of floating point inaccuracies while rendering the game but that still leaves the physics code which still only uses single precision floating point numbers so even if the rendering code could handle larger distances from the origin, the physics engine would still break down.

And again, there are ways to improve this by using higher precision data types for doing physics but that would come at a performance cost and a huge amount of changes required to make it work so it is highly unlikely that this will ever be done.
@m!m, why not re-write the physics code so it doesn't use arbitrary precision floating point numbers? Plus, it supports third party engines.
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Offline The E

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Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
Bryan.  I told you to stop posting in this thread. You're wrong and not contributing anything worthwhile to the discussion.
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Offline HLD_Prophecy

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Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
This really interests me, questions about this as I've only just stumbled on the possibility:

Would this mean a transparent collision model for the "ground" that gets textured "chunk" by "chunk" as the player approaches the horizon - that is, can AI ships far in the distance, beyond the rendered ground, collide with the ground?

Would that be exceptionally more or less resource-intensive than a pre-loaded ground texture?

Seems like it would work best for a very non-descript, "flowy" grassland/ocean/desert landscape.

 
Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
That sounds something you could do when you split the ground into several models with LODs or use detail boxes.

 

Offline Bryan See

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Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
Bryan.  I told you to stop posting in this thread. You're wrong and not contributing anything worthwhile to the discussion.
The E, where can I made this statement? I know this discussion is about the Procedural Planet Surface.
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Offline Colonol Dekker

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Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
:|
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Offline The E

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Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
Bryan.  I told you to stop posting in this thread. You're wrong and not contributing anything worthwhile to the discussion.
The E, where can I made this statement? I know this discussion is about the Procedural Planet Surface.

*words*

Bryan, you're doing that thing again where you are saying words with no understanding of what they mean. Stop it.

And by "stop it", I mean "do not post in this thread again". Noone has the time or patience to keep explaining to other people why and how you're wrong (since explaining it to you doesn't seem to work).

Disregard this warning at your peril.
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I really need lifе to touch me
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Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
So if I understand everything correctly, a procedure plus gravity could easily be scripted in LUA but the tiles would need to be pre-defined POF-files. And there's the danger of the AI crashing into the surface and a whole bunch of graphics issues when flying beyond 100km from the center.

I'm obviously not a programmer, so any ideas I might offer may not be good ones.
Is it possible to create a flag for ground tiles, so when an AI controlled fighter is within x meters from a ground tile, it would change direction in order to avoid collisions?
For instance:
If (fighter X distance to object Y flagged ground tile < Z meters)
Then (fighter X change direction)
Else (operate normally)

Am I also right to assume that if a ground mission is to have ground vehicles like hover tanks (as in Wing Commander 4), they'd need to have pre-defined waypoints and couldn't move freely like fighters can?
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Offline Kiloku

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Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
If (fighter X distance to object Y flagged ground tile < Z meters)
Then (fighter X change direction)
Else (operate normally)


In this form it seems really simple, but in real code this sort of thing is kinda hard to do. For example, what if the fighter's regular behavior makes it want to go below a ground tile? It'd probably keep flip-flopping between the "change direction" behavior and the "normal" behavior. 
What if the "change direction" behavior forces the fighter into colliding with another ship? Alternatively, how do we mix the collision avoidance behavior together with the ground avoidance behavior?
I'm sure there's more trouble than what I can think of right now
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Offline The E

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Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
Am I also right to assume that if a ground mission is to have ground vehicles like hover tanks (as in Wing Commander 4), they'd need to have pre-defined waypoints and couldn't move freely like fighters can?

Ground vehicles are a whole other layer of complexity, starting with the fact that they can only rotate around 2 axes instead of 3 and that their pitch and roll need to be matched to whatever surface they're currently on.

Is it possible to create a flag for ground tiles, so when an AI controlled fighter is within x meters from a ground tile, it would change direction in order to avoid collisions?

The FreeSpace AI is hilariously bad at not colliding with things as it is. Sorting that part out would have to take priority over implementing special ground-avoidance behaviour; in fact, ground avoidance would be a side-effect of such work.
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I really need lifе to touch me
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Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
Some random ideas on collision avoidance vs ground.

It could be done with SEXPs like this one - https://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=87880.msg1871458#msg1871458
Unless you're using a flat plain, you'd need to prepare the terrain model with an annoying amount of subsystems that could be used as "bounce-off" points.

On the other hand you could think about "collision avoidance spheres". For smaller craft a simple radius/distance-based system that uses coordinate/orientation-manipulation magic that forces one (or both) ships to alter their paths manually.

For capital ships it would be more complicated, but somebody made something called "auto spread shields" which also generate spheres around the ship that could serve a similar purpose (like "when fighter XY enters this sphere perfom maneuver that directs it away"). The way they are made it doesn't look like it would be benefitial for the performance of the engine though.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Idea: Procedural Planet Surface
I just teleport ships upward when their Y coordinates get too low. Awkward when players notice, but not as awkward as head butting the ground forever.