Let's Talk: Terrain Height

Terrain is a common topic on the forums. But it's a little more complicated than it would initially seem. It's easy to say, "I want more terrain variety!" I say it all the time. However, wanting it and executing it are two extremely different things.

I've been playing RUSE a lot lately, which means I stare at terrain like this:



And it's awesome.

See those small rolling hills and then those big ones with cliffs? Not to mention a unit's ability to walk into a forest and disappear. Plus all the rivers, towns, and the like. Ruse is a really beautiful game.

However, PA is very different than RUSE. PA is on a sphere. This creates two difficulties with terrain.

Difficulty 1: Visual Aesthetics

Some biome sizes will look awesome on a radius 2,000 planet, and would be just stupid on a size 300 planet. Having biome sizes scale with the planet is cool at first thought, but creates issues when it comes to air units. Air units will either not be able to fly over them (could be considered good or bad), or the air units will have to fly higher to compensate. And if they fly higher, then projectile speed would be an issue since bombs dropping from a low height will hit, but bombs at the same speed at a greater height will be traveling too slow to be accurate. So if biome sizes scaled, then a bunch of things would have to scale along with it, which would be a huge challenge and cause problems. And I'm probably not thinking of all the issues it creates.

So I like the idea of having scaling biome sizes, but it would be quite the challenge to pull off.

Difficulty 2: Visual Interpretation

Being able to visually tell a difference in the biome heights. When playing on a flat surface, it's easy. Simply look at the picture above. It's real easy to see the terrain differences because we're at ground level. But when we're playing on a sphere, particularly a small sphere, it's difficult to tell terrain height.

Just look at this image from Varrak's thread.



Can't tell that much terrain difference, especially if you were zoomed out with hundreds of icons moving around. Thankfully Uber is awesome and is improving things.



So that's better, but still. When zoomed out, it's difficult to see terrain height. That's why we have topographical maps for real life application. But topographical lines wouldn't really work in a game like this.

Now let's look at this image of a height 250 planet from this thread.



Or this image of a height 500 planet.



It's easy to say, "That's so cool! I would love to play on planets like that!" I was one of the people saying stuff like that.

But look at those images again. We see those bumps on the side of the planet, but we can't see the bumps that are coming straight up at us at all. That would make for a strategic nightmare because you can't tell whether your units or defensive structures can actually shoot at their targets.

Is More Terrain Height Variety Actually Viable?

Not really sure. We all want more terrain height, but do we really? If we were to have more terrain height, then we'd just get frustrated because units and towers would just shoot at the ground. I remember playing games during early Beta and running into that. It was extremely frustrating to try and assault a pelter line and have my tanks just sitting there shooting a hill. Or laser defense towers shooting a hill instead of the attacking Shellers.

I suppose that could be considered a game feature, but I'd be inclined to guess that it would be more frustrating then actually useful. Since it's difficult to see terrain height, then it's difficult to properly use.

Then there's all of the programatic difficulties of getting the units to properly shoot compensating for hills and whatnot.

I dunno. Maybe there could be some sort of UI addition to show hills and valleys? Not really sure what that would look like...

So Now What?

We all want more terrain variations. We want terrain to be a factor in gameplay. I'm just not so sure that terrain height is the way to do it. I'd love it if it could be pulled off, but short of adding topographical lines to the game, which would be stupid, I don't know how it would be valid.

So maybe the answer is simply in other biomes.

I'd love to see rivers, cities, passable canyons, more types of rocks/plateaus/mountains, and who knows what else.

It'd also be awesome to see more biomes that are actually useable. Building defensive structures on top of Plateaus, or buildings down in canyons. Or adding in that all terrain bot that can climb over mountains.

Thoughts?

Do y'all have any brilliant ideas for making terrain height actually viable? You would be my hero if you could come up with something that would fix these dilemmas.

I know this isn't a perfect solution, but bigger planets?

Well the catch is that your examples deal primarily with gradual terrain changes in what is basically like the heightmap system from SupCom, but that's only half the story as it were because with PA we also have the Terrain Brushes that work both Additively and Attractively that can provide far finer control and provide teh ability to provide more detail as well.

We have some of this already so it's more so a matter of expanding on the brushes available to the system rather than needing to create a system for this kind of stuff.

We also need to consider that just with the way the scale of the game is at the moment it's just not really all that practical and we might need to focus on making the best of what we got which all told isn't all that bad really, terrain wise PA still has a lot more going for it than many RTSs out there even as-is IMO.

Mike

I miss this.

I don't want to say too much but a little bird told me that terrain might be getting significantly better-looking very soon.

We can't rely on that.

Small planets will be a thing because people like to play rush maps, there will be astroids, and multiple planets.

Varrak talked about it, and I linked to it and used images of it in this thread.

If you're talking about just visual changes, then yeah, those will help. But as I pointed out above, it's not yet enough.

In order for lots of terrain height to be actually useable, we're gonna need more than just shadows.

Are you talking about better visuals or more interesting terrain features?

We'll see.

Actually I can say I'd like how desert biome looks right now and it's looks way better than in alpha. I fully agree devs view that large objects on small planets don't make game any better to play. Still I see at least two problems...

First problem at moment it's fact that units too large for current terrain scale, imho. E.g I agree that some units like laser towers might become higher to not shoot terrain, but everything else looks too large and you barely can set T2 factory in desert biome.

Second problem it's lack of real plateaus, mountains, islands and sea. I don't mean we need large objects, but instead we need ability to actually change scale of biomes to make them larger. It's failure of current map generator and I sure this can be fixed without any big changes in assets.

Considering He just spent a bunch of time with the Devs at PAXEast it's entirely possible there might be something else as well! ;p

Mike

That's the important part.
We don't need that much more height variation. What we truly need is more interesting terrain.

And that can only be accomplished by more sophisticated brushes (that are more than simply obstacles on a flat map).

And about @cwarner7264's hint:

He might not be talking about AO... I remember Mavor talking about working on improving the terrain variation and one of the other devs said that the Metal Cluster and Density Sliders will only become available after some "significant upgrades to planet generation".

My hint above was only about visuals I'm afraid - and comes with the caveat 'if I understood the conversation correctly'

Yeah that's exactly it, we have the systems we need already, we just need to make better use and/or provide more variety for the systems to make use of.

Mike

The more sphere-like a planet is, the better the sim works.

That's true.

However many games use essentially "fake" height differences by using height layers that are brushed on top. While i'm no expert in computer simulations, i would expect it to be a lot easier to use clearly defined shapes and forms rather than "arbitrary" height differences.

In stead of varying the height sphere, we need stuff like a flat plateau that we can build on (like the early screenshot desert/mountain biome). Steep, flat-top mountains. step-like hills. It might look more artificial but most people will forgive that when they realize they can build on it.

As to biome scaling: something like that is going to be inevitable for "proper" planets. it doesn't have to be a continuous scaling thing, but a few sets of assets like "big mountain / small mountain" is going to be necessary.

I personally like that idea and it works. Whilst a bumpy planet might look nice it gets more complicated gameplay wise. For example,not a good one though, Starcraft uses that kind of method just on a flat surface.

Strategically you can use that to actually control the moves of your foe, especially if you make it so that normal ground units like ants or dox can't hit the stuff on that higher ground, wich makes not just mex clusters an important part of the map but high grounds too since it limits the directions your opponet can move to and it is more easy to see, without looking up close, if you can hit or not hit (clear lines).

So my proposal would be keeping the planets perfectly round but add terrain variety through those plateaus, crevices and water, since the artwork of the game is kinda more in the direction of artifical rather then realisitc,again like Starcraft wich is even more out of scale than PA.

The technical part about the size of these features, besides biome scaling, you might could scale those features with planet size bigger planets have bigger features. So on a smaller planet you might just get a plateau where you can only build one turret on or dissapears altogether since it would be too small and would look kinda stupid. Guess for smaller planets crevices and such would work alot better.

I think small things like rivers, cities, canyons and plateau's and more variation in mountains will do a lot!! If you have more variety everything looks more interesting and we will probably forget about huge height distances. For a city or something it would be cool if you could build turrets on top of the buildings or to have a canyon where turrets are on each side which shoot everything going through the canyon. Especially cool if you would have a ring of mountains with a few canyons as entrances.

I think that if the terrain becomes more usable for strategies, that it will solve the flat looking game problem. Here the biomes would become a factor for the gameplay instead of just flat terrain which is buildable and anomalies in the terrain act like natural walls.

Id be good with a perfectly round planet with "static-mesh" terrain features.

Adding static-meshes like cliffs, plateau's, canyons, crators, hills, different size mountains etc etc could be a good thing as it opens the door to a true from scratch system editor.

Static-meshs should also be able to be accessed by units and structures can be built on them.

Added terrain like the pics above i think would be problematic for PA.

Well first off, dozens and dozens of games use it.

the second part: blindly scaling won't work. it'll just look out of place on a big/small planet.


But yea, i expect "brushes" to be a more manageable, more clearly defined terrain alteration. Although it'll create other difficulties with hitting stuff

More variation to terrain height, possibly plateux with ramps climbable mountains, ect...

None of these things can hurt the game, flat terrain, on the other hand, is already available with moon biome anyways. So let's mix it up!

Well Starcraft was on the top of my head so i used that as an example.

Second: Agreed, it might look out of place if you do it blindly, but what if you put some kind of system behind it. Like making some Features invalid on a planet that's too small, specially terrain features wich would be simply too small or to big to hold any value so it gets replaced by one of the valid features, but then again im not very confident in my knowledge with these kind of things so its just an idea.

Guess i mean more like static-mesh things, anyways just wanted to give my oppinion on that im fine with not messing with the "roundness" of the planet and adding variety in a different form, more managable form.