Something I don't remember is seeing a lot of discussion about what the community is interested in WRT the water planets themselves. Lots of naval discussion, but nothing about the water. (Feel free to slap me upside the head and link whatever discussion there is if I'm wrong) Should it just be a featureless globe of water? A few small islands? What could even count as "landscape features" on a water planet?
Let me shed some light. Basically you make a water world by generating a terrain where all of the land happens to be below the height of the water. If you want a world that is mostly water it's as easy as simply lowering the water height a bit so that the peaks stick out of the water. If you want an iceball lower the temperature input. If you want low lying desert island crank up the temperature. You can also easily mess with the biome generation to get unbuildable mountains sticking out of the water in places. All this stuff works right now, I'm working on getting the systems in place to make it look prettier and increase our layout options.
That makes sense as a base, but I'm wondering how interesting "water as planet" will be to fight on. It'll probably depend on the unit setup though.
Wow that was more involved than I imagined. I didnt think that things like temperature etc were factoring into the kind of planet that was being generated. I was imagining it more as proceedural generation by planet type. This is awesome!
It is by planet type but the planet type takes a set of inputs. One of those is temperature. It also does things like calculate the closest distance to water for things like deserts etc. etc.
I can't wait to see something like this in action. Is it at all likely that Uber are going to release or show bits of the game to view prior to it being in an alpha state? like the planet generator for people to see and/or play with, kind of like what Introversion did with the Humble Introversion Bundle where they let people see the city generator. If you would rather not that is totally understandable, but I would very much like to see it at work : D
Thanks for bringing some light into the darkness. Can we affect the world generation with a map seed for the whole system or galactic war like in minecraft?
Here's a question - will water depth be a factor for the game? Namely, will you have different terrain under water, where some subs can go but others can't, or areas where you can build vs areas that are too deep?
Big fan of procedural generation like this! I'm assuming that you can set a certain number of planets at specified temperatures and such? Will there be a planet editor in-game or are we looking at that level of editing detail being an external tool?
Yes units matter a lot for this type. The biggest thing about it is that land units aren't much of a factor. If it's anything like TA then you will have things like floating resource systems. If I remember correctly you couldn't mine mineral resources directly in TA. You made floating tidal generators and then used mass converters to make the metals you needed. If a world had no buildable land at all or at least enough for an air factory you might not even have air units unless they have ocean units that can produce them. Thinking about PA and orbital bases/asteroids in regards to water planets. It would be really cool if you could do some kind of tsunami attack by splashing down an asteroid and anything within a certain depth of water and above would take tsunami damage.
Can we have Kevin Costner Commanders? :lol: Kidding aside, it's pretty cool that temperatures actually affect the planet's terrain.
Temperature is an interesting input, what exactly do you expect will be affected by it? Wind (weather)? Unit speed? Terrain? Probably still exploring these ideas yourself, but I'm curious to know what those ideas are and if you've ruled any in/out.
Not to burst your bubble, but I don't think that tsunami's are going to be a thing, or at least they have not been met with enthusiasm by Uber. http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=34022
