Ringworlds confirmed - UFO Sighted

All of this was done just with CSGs. The height range on most of these planets was actually set to 0, so without the subtractive brushes they're all just smooth spheres.

The biggest tool I used was the crater CSG - you know, the little pockmarks that generate in the moon biome. If you copy one of those and scale it up massively, you can carve out massive sections of terrain in a way that is compatible with unit pathfinding. Sink them into the ground a bit and you can create gaps under the top-level terrain.

It really all comes down to trying things out and seeing what happens. Don't be afraid to break everything, you might learn something in the process. (Just save frequent revisions!)

I've linked an image of the metal planet in edit mode on the /r/planetaryannihilation post, you might want to check that out.

ah yeah that is because that csg is mergable, as I described somewhere else that means it makes units be able to just path over it in whatever way they need to. I wonder if there is way in the uber map editor to change that per csg already, it's a really really helpful feature.

ping @jables, do you know if anything for the attributes mergable and pathable etc is planned for the csg placement?

Not for near term that I know of. Would have to ask around.

@jables - what would happen if someone created an actual Mobius strip brush, added it to a (tiny) planet and up-scaled it so that the entire planet was the mobius strip? Would it work?

Honestly, we are in emergent gameplay land here.. We're as curious to see what works as you internally we have been sticking to normal spherical planets, so even these were a toss up if they would work or not (they totally did, I love how crazy this game is).

As far as I know, the current map editor allows you to change scale, position, rotation and nothing else. Hopefully Uber or the modding community will add to the GUI in future; besides changing attributes, I'd love to have a way to spawn CSGs directly, and a selectable list of all CSGs on a planet (because right now, it's impossible to select one whose mesh is entirely under the terrain).

I mentioned this briefly during the stream, but I think custom brushes will be huge for making modified terrain both functional and aesthetically pleasing. You could probably reduce the number of CSGs used in this map to 1/10 of the current count with just a simple reductive cylinder.

Also thanks Jables! You guys have been doing a great job improving this game post-launch, keep up the good work.

Someone needs to create a Mobius strip brush NOW.

GO GO GO!

I could imagine it might work at least partially if you set it mergable. I mean mergable makes units go up walls after all. Try it

From a quick look at it currently it uses a reference to a file for the spec like this:
"spec": "/pa/terrain/lava/brushes/lava_plateau_08.json",

My editor was creating a ton of such files with generic names for that reason. The whole file content is this:
{"papa":"/pa/terrain/lava/fbx/lava_crack_04.papa","no_features":true}
That's also where it defines no_features, mergable and pathable.
So maybe it could made that the csg definition can either reference a file or instead directly give that small object with the papa reference and the other flags as well, allowing for a modification of them via either the default UI or from a mod. As it stands -from the quick look of my sleepy eyes xD- it looks like changing those attributes currently would still require to have a servermod that adds in the new brushes.

@raevn last I heard from a dev it wouldn't work to well, because of the fact there isn't a center of gravity, basically simulation would be really wonky probably.

We won't know if we don't try! Plus, the result could be hilarious

Fun fact: you can actually path units and build structures on the underside of the rings going around the metal planet. It's nearly impossible to see / control them, but it works. So, with a great deal of effort, you could in fact create and play on a Mobius strip planet composed of a twisting ring.

If all you want is a ring planet, that's possible right now. I actually made one in the editor - you can layer craters down to the core of a planet until it disappears completely - but it didn't make it into the map.

If I can play on a giant shlong planet I would be a happy camper

That looks pretty frickin awesome.

Play it using a server mod, where ALL projectiles ignore physics. Then, just simulate them falsely, using "staged" and "flight path" and junk.

This is very helpful, thank you very much!

I tried to recreate flatland in the system editor (since it was mostly placing brushes) and got similar results. Then I remembered what Cola has been going on about mergeable, and it seems I'd been experimenting with the wrong brush. Some more work would be needed to make it one sided, and lighting (both sun and vision) is weird, but it works.

The Uber Unit Cannon

That's pretty cool. I didn't realize you could change the projection type - in fact, looking through the JSON, there's a lot more properties to work with than I had thought. Will have to play around with this some more.

Edit: Does anyone have a comprehensive breakdown of what the tags in a .pas file do? I'm having trouble figuring out how the "transform" (12 numbers), "position" (3 numbers) and "height" (1 number) tags each determine where a brush is placed.

Made a flat map using subtractive brushes with projection type BP_None.

It looks cool, but it's too buggy to really play on. Icons tend to disappear when viewed from anything but a direct angle, making it impossible to control your units, and the camera is about as bad as you'd expect.

Also, air units have some weird reactions - they'll zip right up to the edge at great speed, and then drift slowly back down.



Simple ringworld. This is much more playable; I might beef it up with some more terrain features to make it fun. Something to note: this only took me four BP_None craters to make, which is a big improvement on the other planets in this thread.

If I remember correctly, @forrestthewoods mentioned that PA internally assumes that planets a spheres when it comes to visibility. You can see it on normal maps as well: When you have funky height maps, you may see units (*) below the horizon.

Time to switch to opengl occlusion queries

criz.

Edit: (*) Not the actual units, the stat-icons, since they are rendered as bill boards with no actual depth.