Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terrain

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

The scale of real coruscant is pretty insane (like buildings that go down for miles into the old city).

I think for a game like this there is a practical limit to the terrain complexity but it breaks the game.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

The Mod Community is crazy.
Crazy like a fox. "Possible" and "Within the scope of the game engine" are entirely irrelevant. We have the combined creative potential of thousands of people, the largest dev team on the planet.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

We could always just go for a water planet covered in one huge Gungan city in the middle of the map. Who ever destroys it first wins... =3

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

meesa no likey D:

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Lol, you are correct. The best part of this is that we are going to be actively supporting the mod community and encouraging user created content.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

This is the one of the best things about this project, the amount of developers who choose to close off their games is depressing.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

To be fair, I think it are the publishers who want them to close off their projects. I hope this mentality changes quickly. It will need to, if more publishers want to compete with Valve .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU

somewhere in the vid Gabe says the only developers Valve cannot compete with are their own customers .

He also says it also is lucrative for the developer to give customers this freedom. He states that some of the developers at other studio's make more money by selling TF2 hats, than from their payroll at the company they are working at... Now imagine that Valve gets a percentage of these sales.

Modding is a win-win for the customers and the devs, without mods certain games would have been dead ages ago.

It seems like Uber understood this well

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

I always enjoy these development posts. It gives such an interesting insight into the workings of a game.

This may be a silly question, but how will the boolian objects handle how the mesh is generated? In my (limited) experience with 3d modelling software, creating a compound object from even relatively simple sub-objects often results in a mess of un-intuitive and wildly positioned vertices.

The most egregious example that springs to mind was the "carve" tool from the Source engine map editor. Simply subtracting a cylinder from a block would often create a bizarre mish-mash of shapes:

http://i.imgur.com/FnBMn.jpg

I've had similar issues using software such as 3DSmax and other modelling applications. Is this simply the fault of these individual bits of software, or is it computationally difficult to produce neat boolian objects? Is this even an issue with the planet generator, or does the game really not care if the vertex positioning is very untidy?

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

The biggest reason other publishers/developers close off their game to mods is usually so they can charge money for extra content. The thing which Valve and people like say, Bohemia, saw, is that even if people dislike the game you release, if it's open then then there's a very good change that people will create a mod you DO like, and the developer can get sales from their game being a prerequisite to a mod.


That, and some people hate people tampering with their creative vision or something.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

The point is that this actually costs more money than income from sold DLC, even better, Skyrim for instance has sold DLC and has modding tools, granted to the community by Bethesda itself. One does not prohibit the other.

About the creative vision... there might be cases where this is true, but those cases would be rare.