Voxels

[kinger6621]

I was woundering if there is a mod or planned feature to transform planets / astriods into voxel's so when we mine resources it digs a hole in said planet / astriod?

[monstah]

There could be a mod, but I don't know about it, and it's not very likely anyway. Planned feature, I'm sorry, but definitely no.

[Tex_NL]

The closest thing to what you're looking for would be Kerbal Terrain System. Unfortunately the development thread has been lost in a forum screw-up half a year ago. (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/146598-kerbal-terrain-system-thread-bug/)
But I was able to find it on GitHub. https://github.com/StollD/Kerbal-Terrain-System. However that too is almost a year old.

 

[moogoob]

Someone has been playing Planet Coaster, it seems.

It has the best terrain editing I've EVER used in a game,  but one that I'm sure would be a bit hard to handle at KSP scale. If you use a Minecraft-like density of 1m cubed/voxel then Kerbin alone would need... *googles* 905 million voxels.  Assuming that voxels are like pixels (my expertise) say 32 bits each to depict colour/texture would not be out of the question, and may even be a low estimate. 32/8=4 bytes per voxel, or in other words a 3.616 GB file, MINIMUM.

That's just for Kerbin - you'd need equivalent amounts of data for the other planets, moons etc too.

That's one good reason to not use voxels. If anyone with more specific info had input, I'm all ears.

[paulprogart]

4 minutes ago, moogoob said:

It has the best terrain editing I've EVER used in a game,  but one that I'm sure would be a bit hard to handle at KSP scale. If you use a Minecraft-like density of 1m cubed/voxel then Kerbin alone would need... *googles* 905 million voxels.  Assuming that voxels are like pixels (my expertise) say 32 bits each to depict colour/texture would not be out of the question, and may even be a low estimate. 32/8=4 bytes per voxel, or in other words a 3.616 GB file, MINIMUM.

Well there is such a thing as compression.    Especially because in most cases probably something like 90% of the core of any body wouldn't ever get altered... even if you could drill right down to the core that's still just a tiny fraction the volume.

 

4 minutes ago, moogoob said:

That's one good reason to not use voxels. If anyone with more specific info had input, I'm all ears.

Notwithstanding the above detail, you're right, it's not a simple thing to do.  All you have to do is go search through any game development forum and you'll see a swaths of posts from people trying to make their own Minecraft clones, and all the trouble they run into.  They think "oh it's just cubes, this ought to be super-simple!" and then they get absolutely nowhere.  Even if you're really experienced, it's tricky.

Minecraft uses its own custom-built engine that is heavily optimized for its purpose.  Trying to do the same task with a generic engine like Unity is not going to give satisfactory results unless it's majorly limited in scope/area.  (I know first hand:  I've done a *2D* game that wasn't trying to even do anything close to what Minecraft does, and I still had to find ways to cut down on the number of objects.)

That being said, there are other ways to meet OP's goal, like overlays and stuff.  Might not look as realistic, but much easier to do computationally.

On a related note, I always thought it would be nice if when you mined somewhere the resources actually depleted so that you couldn't keep mining the same area infinitely.  Also not trivial to implement as KSP is because it changes the how the scanners have to work and stuff, but would be cool.

 

[kinger6621]

On 02/03/2017 at 3:19 PM, moogoob said:

Someone has been playing Planet Coaster, it seems.

It has the best terrain editing I've EVER used in a game,  but one that I'm sure would be a bit hard to handle at KSP scale. If you use a Minecraft-like density of 1m cubed/voxel then Kerbin alone would need... *googles* 905 million voxels.  Assuming that voxels are like pixels (my expertise) say 32 bits each to depict colour/texture would not be out of the question, and may even be a low estimate. 32/8=4 bytes per voxel, or in other words a 3.616 GB file, MINIMUM.

That's just for Kerbin - you'd need equivalent amounts of data for the other planets, moons etc too.

That's one good reason to not use voxels. If anyone with more specific info had input, I'm all ears.

Well they could have the ksp building and other monuments static and make everything else on planets procseedually generated with simplex noise couldnt they? 

Edited March 17, 2017 by kinger6621

[monstah]

Sure, they could. But Perlin/simplex planets look terrible.

[Thomas P.]

15 hours ago, kinger6621 said:

Well they could have the ksp building and other monuments static and make everything else on planets procseedually generated with simplex noise couldnt they? 

They already do that for most of the planets. For example, Minmus is completely procedural, and Kerbin only uses a heightmap as a base.

A lot of the terrain is procedural.

[cantab]

In terms of implementation, 'voxels' would not be the way to go I don't think. KSP's terrain is a two-dimensional polygonal mesh, and deforming it should work on changing that mesh. Kerbal Terrain System shows it can be done.