Planet size contest ;)

Would like to see one of these bigger planets with equivalently big biome scales. Would be awesome if we could get something Earth like with big oceans and big land masses.

biome scale is also a slider.
small cpu, you're on! 500 radius 50 height range 500 biome scale 50 waterheight 23 temperature 100 resources go!

Oh god if we could just plonk some oceans on that thing.

Full scale global robot warfare.

Hummm...
All this make me wonder.

If someone manage to get his hand on some idle servers, we could probably push thing pretty far...
I remember having a friend doing that kind of things for shared calculations on scientific projects.

I'll see on what my little hands can have a grip...

A server farm would be not enough, as the machine needs a good gfx as well.

And haven't we already established that SLI = not good at the moment? So that limits people to a single graphics card.

Hey Guys,
cool threat! Keep going

Currently PA renderer isn't really optimized, so it's need to process tons of geometry you never see.
If Uber add some LOD system (or something like that) it's should work much faster then.

SLI/CF actually is never something good because you actually can't use multiple GPU devices as one powerful GPU. You can only use few different techniques which can improve framerate a bit, but when you have super-heavy scene like that planet it won't help.

It's because two GPU can't work together and share each other memory, they only can render own frame or part of frame, this technique have it's own problems because it's not always possible to split frame efficiently.

Could one of you generate a planet with radius around 300, but have a very high Height Variance? I would be interested in seeing how mutated you can get it.

I can't wait to try this when I get home tonight... finally a sane use for 16gb of ram!

Hmmm.

Where is the main load in planetary generation? I assume it's in creating the planet originally, rather than rendering it once done.

Because IF there was a way to run the planet creator as a separate, non-interactive procedural piece of code, IF this software saved the generated planet for later viewing/playing, and IF, the the planet creator was well parallelised for multi-core CPU's...

then in theory I may be able to nab a bit of CPU time at work, and run the planet creator on one of the 16-core, 48 Gb boxes while nobody is using it overnight. I would be very curious to see how big a planet could be created.

I'd really love to run it on the 384-core, 5 TB (yes that is the RAM) shared memory monster that lives in the basement. However i doubt it would run on that, as it has a different architecture to conventional computers, and I doubt even more that I could get time on that to run it.

Still, this kind of thought experiment does lead to some suggestions. It would be great if the planet creator was released as a separate entity from PA itself, preferably with command line options (as well as the standard GUI). Then people could rent a powerful box for a bit, and generate a massive planet/solar system to play on later.

Woops, i fear that i opened the Pendora box.
Super computers, here we come !

From what I understand PA will have games run from the server for the most part similar to FPS games right? Does that mean someone with a lower end machine can play and a 300+ planet even though they would have no hope of rendering it themselves because the load is carried by the server instead?

bleh.. I failed, after close to 8 hours of having let the generation run I gave up. I guess my PC's not adapted to this race... ...maybe some oc?
but overall I can't seem to spit out a 500 radius planet. I'd need double the ram and double the revodrive space. (revodrive space is awesome virtual ram I gotta say).

I'll try the 300 heigh height range one, and also throw in some big biome.

I am loving this thread guys xD You must have some serious rigs going on there! Once I start my PhD and can build my dream rig maybe I can compete!

Hmm, from watching Petard's video, it looks like biome scale controls how separated the biomes are due to temperature, not the actual size of the biomes. :/

No sadly because it absolutely criples your GPU to render the planet once you have it. My card has tons of problems on minimum graphics no shadows circling around the final product and it's a this

Yes, all simulation (AI, path finding, ballistic calculation) done by server, but generated maps are really big and it's took really long to download it from server, so map generation done by both client and server before start of game.

Server doesn't do any rendering, it's don't even need videocard. Probably currently Uber got some debug stuff in it, but in future it's should run without adapter.

But if PA client, network protocol and renderer will done optimized well your computer doesn't even need to think about all objects in 300 planets system. It's only need to store in memory object which you currently see, and only spend GPU power on them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIOvXdK6Dr4

Just me messing around with chrono cam

you'll notice I have five mods installed.

I love the way PA looks that way. considering casting.