Terrain 2.0

Itd be a bit odd to add interesting units early on as the reason the first units in the game are generic units is so that you can have a nice base for your balance.

Trust me when I say PA is capable of some awesome units, heck I worked on a balance mod in the past where personally everything was fun... The new PTE balance seems like it'll really spice things up a bit.

You need to see the old Grenadier and sniper bot model! XD

I agree they have to go back and take a second look at a lot of things, no question. But I think it is very obvious they are working on it and it takes as long as it takes. They are fast for sure, at normal development speed we would not have a playable game at all so far.

polish comes last ... they are working on stuff of higher priority ... and that being saves, better pathfinding and better galactic war ... those thing require time ...

Let me flip this around, because I am honestly curious. @cola_colin and @squishypon3, what terrain changes would you like to see if Uber could implement it today without any restrictions. Keep arguments like "I'd rather Uber does XYZ instead" out of it. Anyone else can chime in on this too of course.

Well I can come up with a lot if we assume Uber had unlimited resources, random ideas are:
- make lava look like a fluid
- make water have nice waves at the coats
- disable the removing of scorch marks
- have units leave marks in the sand, ice, etc with different looks on each biome
- add vulcanos that actually spew out lava
- interactive terrain that you can destroy to create new ways to go or to block paths, see starcraft 2
- all that stuff that can be done via better control of the terrain height in the editor.

Assuming Uber had unlimited resources I could probably continue this list quite a bit, but let's face it: Uber is far from having unlimited resources

I'd be happy if they just added new textures that give more of an outline to the raised unpathable hills, etc. On the lava planets the plateaus just blend into the flat land.

All sounds awesome to me! I'm surprised though, no height levels like hills mountains, cliffs and canyons? I think if said things increased unit ranges it could add a tactical layer to the game. Also, you gotta admit, fighting through a winding grand canyon would be pretty epic.

That is what I mean by control of terrain height.

Funny seeing this old topic do the rounds again... At this point I think it should be pretty clear that UBer are not gonna re-do the terrain or anything major with it now at this point, what we have is pretty much what PA will always have now unless some amazing modders can work a miracle... I personally have brought up examples after examples after examples of what the Lava should look like, its diabolical... Its still an orange mess as far as colour and texture goes, no post processing lighting effects or bloom of any kind. Both the lava and oceans haven't changed from Alpha, and the games been out a very long time now so your probably looking at 2 yrs now since alpha, and still hasn't been touched so they obviously feel their original vision is has been met on where that stuff is at....

Terrain height has been done with mods but still really limited because of what tools are available but that stuff can always be improved... The terrain for the most part needs much more drastic procedural generating planets, perhaps there is actually far too many different seed numbers that they all actually just look the same? I don't know the math, I don't pretend to, it would make my brain burst if I tried!! but as a player, that is what I see and experience.

This is exactly how I feel too. I feel like Uber has had forever to fix this and it still looks the same. It's frustrating for me. I agree I don't think it will ever be fixed which is why I am so vocal about it, hoping uber sees the light and reconsiders.

The maps in TA were not balanced at all but they were still cool to play. And I have no problem with somebody making the maps rather than them being generated if that's what it takes. It's not as if the developers don't know what is needed when it comes to maps, they have the experience, so why don't they just go ahead and do it?

I'm still waiting for that big update to make the game what it should be because at the minute I can't recommend it because a big part of why I love it is because of the fun I had in the previous games. People playing this kind of game for the first time don't have that nostalgia which is why every single one of my friends who bought it never play it.

It's not possible to do such a miracle right now.

Yes, you can try to carve a custom planet with CSG, but it's NEVER going to look as detailed as the random generated ones, not without creating maps of several MB in size, which makes them quite difficult to distribute them and nullifies all advantages the procedural system originally had.

Uber just hasn't provided all the tools yet which would be required to craft truly custom planets.

You really are far far off what "forever" means in terms of time for game development. Come back in 10 years if you want to speak about "forever"

Also somebody maybe has screenshots: According to my memory the look of lava did change at some point between alpha and today.

One thing I've never quite understood is why not make lava just use the same system as water, and give it a new shader? Surely that would make sense? You could have the surface texture animate a bit more that way as well.

One thing that did surprise me was that some of the brushes (for example, those for the desert biome) are very different to the concept images/unit size comparison pictures. Less detailed - I imagine that this is for performance's sake, but I feel like it went a bit far the other way.

Eg.

maybe @bgolus knows why

Yeah; I don't want to come across in the wrong way haha - I know relatively little about game design and I'm pretty certain that all of these things have a good reason for having been done. Just curious.

At the end of the day a lot of the polish that I think people want (me included) add relatively little to actual gameplay, but still, would be nice to see sometime in the future.

Yes, the lava shader / texture did change at some point, before it was barely distinguishable from the land mass.

But what did not change, was the appearance of the "coast line", which was the major turn off to begin with. And that's not going to change either, as the process which generates the heightmap is rather ... limited.

Thinking about it in detail, it would be the best if the planet descriptions could just include JS code which provides a generator procedure for the terrain. The overhead for calling JS functions from native context isn't that bad at all, as long as you stay away from any string operations and/or non-local variables in the JS part.

I will perform some benchmarking and then get back to you.

Calling one js function that generates a few megabyte of height map description that is then pushed into native code once while generating the planet doesn't sound problematic to me. Though I am not sure about the size of the height map data.

That's not what I had in mind. I planed on calling the JS function for every single point on the surface. And boy, that's fast!

On an old 1,8Ghz Core2Duo, I can do about 5 MILLION function calls from native to JS per second. That's more than enough to call a generator function written in JS for every single sample point.

Code used to test: http://pastebin.com/nXm3WVat (Warning: Code does NOT include a working GC as I was to lazy to set up the platform module which includes the garbage collector.)

Writing the same function in native C++ (while preventing inlining, of course!), is only about 40x faster. And with a more complex function using floating point arithmetics, it could get it even down to a ratio of under 3x.

TL;DR:
Calling JS from native code is fast. Definitely fast enough to make offloading generator functions to JS reasonable.