Cities

[WeakSpring995]

It would be cool that instead of Kerbin being desolate except for ksp and a few other structures that there could be city’s suburbs and farmlands with Kerbals roaming them it would be an awesome touch and make Kerbin feel like a real earth equivalent It would also make landing sites for crafts and boaters more challenging because you would have to avoid buildings and populated areas 

[linuxgurugamer]

1 hour ago, WeakSpring995 said:

It would be cool that instead of Kerbin being desolate except for ksp and a few other structures that there could be city’s suburbs and farmlands with Kerbals roaming them it would be an awesome touch and make Kerbin feel like a real earth equivalent It would also make landing sites for crafts and boaters more challenging because you would have to avoid buildings and populated areas 

It would also make the game unplayable.  All of that adds to the system load

[fulgur]

Not for my potato U+1F954

[LittleBitMore]

2 hours ago, fulgur said:

Not for my potato U+1F954

You made me google this.

[Bej Kerman]

5 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

It would also make the game unplayable.  All of that adds to the system load

Procedural generation? Just generate it where the player goes. You seem a bit too used to the game loading everything on startup and having no proc gen, and KSP 2 probably won't make the same mistake that Squad did.

[Kerbart]

3 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Procedural generation? Just generate it where the player goes. You seem a bit too used to the game loading everything on startup and having no proc gen, and KSP 2 probably won't make the same mistake that Squad did.

It still needs to be generated. Producing 100 km² on the fly, every frame, that’s going to suck up the frame rate.Of course there are ways to optimize it, but there will definitely be a performance hit.

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, Kerbart said:

It still needs to be generated. Producing 100 km² on the fly, every frame, that’s going to suck up the frame rate.Of course there are ways to optimize it, but there will definitely be a performance hit.

NMS and Spore vastly overuse procedural generation and get away with it without being a slideshow where Longplayer is half the soundtrack.

[Kerbart]

4 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

NMS and Spore vastly overuse procedural generation and get away with it without being a slideshow where Longplayer is half the soundtrack.

Cities = something at least 100 times the size of KCS,  completely populated with building all unlike their neighbors. We're not talking about landscapes filled with plants that mostly look similar to each other. Astroneer does the same thing. We know that works. But a realistic looking city that doesn't look repetitive or unrealistic?

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, Kerbart said:

But a realistic looking city that doesn't look repetitive or unrealistic?

I'll personally accept a fake looking city that looks repetitive and unrealistic.

[DunaManiac]

I would accept if it was just textures on the ground, maybe with a few actual building scatter near there, but I would like to see it from space.

[Bej Kerman]

12 hours ago, Kerbart said:

Cities = something at least 100 times the size of KCS,  completely populated with building all unlike their neighbors.

We never asked for a realistic city that has a ridiculous size. 

[WeakSpring995]

5 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

We never asked for a realistic city that has a ridiculous size. 

He’s right they could ranger from 5 house village clusters to what ever the devs can squeeze out and it would be fine if the city’s were repetitive all squad would have to do is a ad a few recognizable buildings to the important ones and call it a day it could even be a graphics opinion to “render structure detail: low, medium, high,” 

[Dirkidirk]

19 minutes ago, WeakSpring995 said:

He’s right they could ranger from 5 house village clusters to what ever the devs can squeeze out and it would be fine if the city’s were repetitive all squad would have to do is a ad a few recognizable buildings to the important ones and call it a day it could even be a graphics opinion to “render structure detail: low, medium, high,” 

that's one looooooooooooooooooong sentence

[kerbiloid]

Imagine they live in underground cities, with small, round, green hobbit-style doors invisible from orbit.

Castles. They can be generated, and they are small.

Magic Carpet II. pseudo-3d buildings (actually, 2d-textured pyramids).

Spoiler

 

 

Edited February 8, 2020 by kerbiloid

[Kim Hanson]

Microsoft Flight Simulator X did this and more back in 2005.  Don't look at Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, you will cry with envy.  Squad should be able to do some minimal cities at least.

[WeakSpring995]

On 2/19/2020 at 10:59 PM, Kim Hanson said:

Simulator 2020

Jesus I just looked it up imagine if ksp looked like that!

 

[Pds314]

On 2/5/2020 at 9:04 AM, linuxgurugamer said:

It would also make the game unplayable.  All of that adds to the system load

So would having terrain detail of ~10 meters on a 600 kilometer radius planet. Kerbin's 3D model with no PQS or procedural generation or LOD should require some 45 billion doubles, or about 400 Gigabytes, to store. Even if you can use 32 bit floats, fixed point integers, or something else, that's still ~200 GB for one planet's terrain.

And yet here we are. Kerbin doesn't take anywhere near that much disk space. Let alone memory.

The solution to this is not to load, e.g. multiple metro areas down to every shingle on every roof at once. Load buildings how you load terrain. Far away cities are just single simple objects. Close by buildings and such are procedurally generated to a higher stable detail level using some function of coherent noise based on a fixed and global seed.

You do this to make buildings, farms, fountains, vehicles, dams, ships, Kerbals, plants and roads the same way Space Engine can be a few gigabytes in size, run on a modest Nvidea card offline, and generate a hundred trillion persistent galaxies with a trillion planets each down to a meter resolution, each individual one of which should be 4 Petabytes in size, and the whole universe should be 400 quadrillion yottabytes in size. And yet it's all done with procedural generation.

 

This does limit what you can actually do with the buildings. For example, making them permanently deform when hit by a ship could be tricky unless you store the deformation information separately (and that file would grow the more damage you did to the city. Not ideal). But if they're just basically more complex terrain, not editable, and not manually built by the devs as 3D models, there should be absolutely no reason they need to be a huge performance drain.

 

Nor would it need to be unfeasibly artistically demanding. The upfront cost to create a procedural structure and city layout generator would be quite high and maybe not justifiable for KSP, but the results would be that once that exists, it will generate arbitrarily many buildings and cities for you. Perhaps even taking into account local geography and such by using some of the same noise functions as Kerbin's terrain.

Edited March 18, 2020 by Pds314