Terrain 2.0

Be last time I show some screenshots... Cannot find an Alpha Lava screenshot anymore, I deleted all the ones I did coz I gave up...

BETA:



CURRENT BUILD:



To me... THAT has not changed... the difference is absolutely miniscule.. What you're seeing here was the dramatic change when Uber added their new lighting system for the whole planet nothing to do with Lava.... turn that off and it looks exactly like the Beta....

CONCEPT BIOME:



This was what had me sold in the Kickstarter..... To be so far OFF that original design (especially when they had that in one of the livestreems) to what we have now..... is to me.... shocking.......... Thus why I do not believe Uber is ever going to change any of the terrain in how it has been implemented, if they were this would have happened long before now.....


(would love to be proven wrong)

This is one of the mistakes Uber has made with the kickstarter: They didn't make it clear what a concept image is. It is the shocking reality of game development that Uber is thrown at people like few people before.
That image shows the artistic vision of how it should look like. Then reality hits and changes how it looks like.
However that concept image shows that there are designers at Uber who probably feel not very happy with the lava as well, so if anything it means that if given time they would love to rework it. So let's see if they can find the time.

Not sure about the screenshots. They did do some reworks on the lava biome at some point, that much I am certain of.

I don't get all this "it would have happend a long time ago" talk. A long time ago PA roughly looked like this:

Code:

an empty file

Lava used to look like the concept inage.

yeah man I know that the concept biome is an artistic impression of what their vision is, but that had that in one of the livestreems, and they completely did a uturn on the entire biome because one of the new devs they got onboard thought that the current state of the lava's was better.... its been posted several times on these forums actually... but anyway that aside, the actual lava itself is just completely off.... there is a reason why the lava planets are never used in screenshots to show the game off, seriously go look at the steam page comunity screenshots or search google for PA images... they are definitely the most not used biome for screenshots, and theres a reason for that....

So actually there was a change, unlike you said before
I can't remember it anymore, has anybody a screenshot of how it looked like before?

well no because that was still alpha .... so my statement is still correct it hasn't been touched since alpha..

Not only was it in a livestream, it was in game too for a bit.

The brushes are still in the files today.

I don't remember what was alpha or beta or gamma, it is all just PA to me

I had to try myself, and I think I now know how to get at least the basic planet shape under full control:


May not look spectacular at first, but the important point is:
Elevation in that picture is FULLY controlled by the colored handle points which can be chosen arbitrarily. These half submerged spheres on the surface have been generated with random weight and elevation, and the surface adapted. The whole planet is defined by mere 80 support vectors, with random jitter (3D simplex noise) added both in the coordinate domain in order to achieve organic shapes, as well as in the height domain in order to create additional detail.

I can move the handle points individually, and I can regenerate both the shape as well as the micro jitter independently from each other. Which means about perfect control over the planet generation process in full detail.

And let's face it: That thing already looks more interesting than the stock moon even WITHOUT fancy CSG added.

I still have some numerical problems to solve before I can publish the algorithm (I don't have full control over slopes + cliffs on the same planet yet as I'm missing a yet unknown prefactor internally), but so far this was a work of mere 6 hours.

PS: Funny bonus round? That algorithm even supports "legacy" PA maps which were created using the old system. And biome painting comes included as well.

that looks fancy, but I don't understand what you did. Did you write your own planet generation system?

Yes. I basically chose to express the planets surface as a 3D, high order polynomial which can morph a normalized sphere based on any number of weighted support vectors into a planet surface and added noise to the input side.

And then I put that thing on top of the height generation process which PA currently uses to create additional details and to achieve full backward compatibility.

In case it still isn't clear what that thing allows:
It allows high level control over the general shape and land distribution of the planet, while retaining every single advantage of procedural planet generation. It also entirely decouples the individual random seeds used to morph the planet which allows fine-grained control for mappers in full detail.

Don't like the detail shape of the coastline yet? Just rerun the coast generation process, but keep the surface patterns and the land mass distribution. Don't like the surface? Regenerate it. Want to enlarge that island and keep the rest the same? Still no problem.

And all of that while keeping the data set required to generate the planet tiny. With that, you can generate an almost to-scale map which most player will recognize as earth, with all major mountain ranges, deep see trenches etc., while still staying below 1-2MB.

Without rolling the dice on the random generator thousands of times (except that the stock PA generator CAN'T even generate some of these details in the first place).

inbe4 ubermocking and mindboggle about how they didn't figure this out ....
or why this wasn't used before ...

backward compaitibility to old maps? Does this interact with PA then?

That's the plan. Uber said it's to difficult, and it would take to long. So I took the challenge and chose to implement it myself. That thing is designed as a drop-in replacement for the planet generation process we have in PA right now.

If you can figure out how to inject your own arbitrary data to make planets with custom height maps I'll appoint you the title of wizard then.

I don't hope that will be necessary, but in case it would, that's as easy as reimplementing my own algorithm in C++, disassembling the PA binary and rerouting the call to the simplex noise generator to my own method by overwriting the address of the function call. That's actually quite simple, as long as the compiler hasn't optimized *too* much. Second location I would have to intercept a function call is where the terrain type is sampled, as I don't want to use the longitude/simplex noise method for this.

Btw, I already have been given that title.

I would not call understanding the exact data format that PA requires, based only on what you can see via the disassembler, to be "easy", but I am not a wizard.

I don't understand how you could implement this form of planet generation so fast yet uber has done nothing with height values.

What he did is not yet in the game

How will you handle extreme height tranistions? You need a ramp or something between extremes otherwise you can't transverse large areas of the planet.

I wish Uber had height editing tools. A simple raise land, lower land, flatten, smooth and add water could do wounders. Even if I have to manually make winding rivers and canyons by hand that's not too bad.