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Science of the Spheres - development

NovaSilisko

By NovaSilisko
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NovaSilisko

NovaSilisko

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That video looks pretty awesome! I presume that was rendered in realtime? If so how performance intensive is it going to be?

Hard to say at this early stage. Lots of optimizations and tweaks that can be done to improve it, though I rarely have it drop below ~80 fps right now. I need to add LOD meshes for more things, for instance.

The game is doubtless going to put your GPU to work, though, and the system requirements make playing it on anything but the best laptops unlikely :P

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Nemrav

Nemrav

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the system requirements make playing it on anything but the best laptops unlikely :P

No

No

No

NoNo

NO just NO

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Bye bye (okay not really, I can always upgrade, but that's a big no-no to a lot of the KSP community that uses horrible laptop)

But otherwise those screens look really good ! :)

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NovaSilisko

NovaSilisko

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No

No

No

NoNo

NO just NO

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Bye bye (okay not really, I can always upgrade, but that's a big no-no to a lot of the KSP community that uses horrible laptop)

But otherwise those screens look really good ! :)

Unlikely != impossible. Given the engine's open-source, we should be able to make it quite scalable to work on lesser hardware.

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Whirligig Girl

Whirligig Girl

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Updated the gallery on the first post with some more recent stuff

http://imgur.com/a/eHK77

Haha at 5&6! It almost looks like antiminmus! Rocky instead of pudding, and things pushed in instead of out.

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Unlikely != impossible. Given the engine's open-source, we should be able to make it quite scalable to work on lesser hardware.

!= being ≠ seems new to me. I always saw it as =/= or at least /=.

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Sometimes I wish games were magical and you could just take two flash drives that each have a game in them and but them in a blender and pour out a new game that combines the two, becuase the mechanics of Species ALRE in this universe where creatures could even hop around to different planets is a really cool idea.

Or combining Spore and Orbiter, that would be cool, maybe even a tad bit of Race into Space? Nah, that'd be stupid.

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Whirligig Girl

Whirligig Girl

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Will the planets have caves/overhangs? I always like caves.

I wouldn't be surprised, since this is a voxel-based system in the long-run and there will be planet mining. But, and I'm not sure, this might be heightmap based. But on such a small scale, heightmaps and caves might be able to coexist.

And of course, I don't know if they use heightmaps. Nova?

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NovaSilisko

NovaSilisko

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I wouldn't be surprised, since this is a voxel-based system in the long-run and there will be planet mining. But, and I'm not sure, this might be heightmap based. But on such a small scale, heightmaps and caves might be able to coexist.

And of course, I don't know if they use heightmaps. Nova?

Initially caves and overhangs won't be possible. The terrain engine works just by deforming a sphere with noise, not unlike what KSP does, just on a smaller scale. Later on this will be replaced with the voxel terrain engine you mentioned, which will indeed allow all sorts of terrain features, like caves/cliffs/steep canyons/overhangs/etc.

However the demo planets, being handmade, more emulate the final terrain engine than the interim. So that means between the demo and the alpha game, there will actually be a bit of a step down in terrain fidelity since it needs to go to the sphere deformation method, which as I mentioned doesn't allow as much freedom in landforms.

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Vaporo

Vaporo

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Will life adjusts its appearance to fit its environment? I ask because the first picture you posted of the thorn-plants had them on a desert-like planet looking very dry and brittle (Bent over. Lights on tips nearly invisible), but the video had them on a lush planet looking much healthier (Standing up straight. Lights on tips visible. Maybe a bit taller. Maybe less Yellowish-brown.) Or am I reading too much into lighting differences and changes during development?

Also, will there be "jungle" planets, where foliage is so thick that it's difficult or impossible to see the ground?

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NovaSilisko

NovaSilisko

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Will life adjusts its appearance to fit its environment? I ask because the first picture you posted of the thorn-plants had them on a desert-like planet looking very dry and brittle (Bent over. Lights on tips nearly invisible), but the video had them on a lush planet looking much healthier (Standing up straight. Lights on tips visible. Maybe a bit taller. Maybe less Yellowish-brown.) Or am I reading too much into lighting differences and changes during development?

Well, it gained so much grass because there was a recent update to Unreal that brought with it a lighting method specifically for foliage, so I took the opportunity to put in the amount of grass I originally wanted on that planet. At the same time, I added in vertex animation in the grass shader to make it sway, and made the thorns flash. So yeah, just changes over the course of development.

Also, will there be "jungle" planets, where foliage is so thick that it's difficult or impossible to see the ground?

I have some ideas on that front...

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Bill Phil

Bill Phil

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Hey, Nova, I have a question about noise. Specifically Perlin and Simplex Noise. Do you have any suggestions as to how to use it? How to implement it?

And more importantly, how to give it a small range of values, so it goes between them. (I think that's pretty easy, though...)

Basically, could I use a form of noise to determine the mass distribution of a young solar system that's still forming planets? And the chemical composition? If so, and I presume so, then you could pretty easily( in theory) aggregate masses by looking at how each cell's mass attract's every other cell's mass, and then combine them to create a new mass over x amount of time.

But the problem is implementing the noise. Getting it done. I'm not very good with programming, so if you could very carefully explain it?

Thanks.

P.S. I hope development is going well...

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Whirligig Girl

Whirligig Girl

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Quick and dirty 2d simulations of planet formation

http://i.imgur.com/J8xCuWS.png

Need to find some sort of fluid dynamics solution to run similar simulations on to determine where and how atmospheres form.

I predict one of two things: Either atmospheric gasses fill up most of the system (far enough away from the star to not be blown away), or only very very tenuous, near-vacuum atmospheres ever touche planets.

That said, I definitely do think you should model atmospheres being blown away from the sun.

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Tá ficando muito bonito.

Gostaria de ver esse nível de arte no KSP e seus planetas. Ficaria muito massa.

Além de Aliens, rsrsrsrsrr.

Google translation from Portugese: "Is getting very beautiful.

I would like to see this level of art in KSP and its planets . I would be mass.

Besides Aliens , rsrsrsrsrr ."

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