Terrain 2.0

Find an indie dev with a project as much ambitious as PA, with as many technical challenges as in PA, with ridiculous small team and communicating with players/fans as much as Uber team does .... Errr, no you won't.
Just read @jables and @sorian older and current posts. You will realize they spend a big part of their time sharing info with the community. Better Terrain may come, but it's not on the priority list. They have provided a plan about what they are working on. And they keep delivering on a constant basis. Just for comparison purpose go and check the "Godus" epic fail history ....

That´s false
I can tell you one:
They guy who is currently doing Limit Theory. This is his last update

If you search a little you will find out why it is even more complex than PA

You have fallen into an miss-assumption, regarding complexity. Yes, the player experience may be more complex in any 4X game, but that does not mean that the engine is as complicated.

First of all, doing a multiplayer game is always far more complicated than singleplayer, since you need to think a lot about how you synchronize stuff and how you prevent cheating.

Then there are also special features like the Chronocam (respectively the "use any arbitrary point in time as a savegame" feature which builds upon int), which are also taking a lot of time to develop - that's nothing you could just do on your own in a week.

Don't forget about the AI either, while that thing still has a lot of flaws, it's still pretty advanced. In an 4X game, the ship AI is usually the most advanced stuff you have, while in an RTS, the AI script every single unit is just as advanced. And then you the stuff for higher cognitive functions on top of that, otherwise the AI wouldn't even be able to construct a proper base.

And then you have the overall scale. Don't be fooled, it's actually a lot easier if the player is bound to a single space ship, as you don't have to worry about stuff like detailed planet surfaces (and hell, these planets in PA ARE detailed! They are just not so beautifully composed) which are to be viewed both from close up and from space, or not only having a dozen, but several thousand units in a single scene. (Projectiles added on top of that.)



And as for the original topic:

What is missing mostly for Terrain 2.0 is the ability to provide your OWN heightmap (or a generator which yields support vectors). From that point on, it should be a breeze for the more skilled programmers in the community to write their very own planet generator which does NOT rely on 2D noise, but actually uses more structured approaches when generating the terrain and placing "natural" obstacles-

PA doesn't use heightmaps for pathing. And if you are creative enough with your brushes (and possibly make your own brushes) you can make your cliffs, rivers, etc... But you'd need to make a LOT for them to all be unique.

I agree that the maps have to improve, and not custom maps, the actual maps in the game so I can gather a bunch of friends and easily demonstrate why this game is awesome with the standard game not download this, install that etc.

TA's maps were the best! very interesting and varied. On those massive maps you really felt like you were lost in a big world. It would be really nice if we could have some similar sized maps in PA that look like naturally occurring terrain. Sure, balance them, but you don't have to be 100% symmetrical.

You could even create like for like maps of some of the ones in SupCom and SupCom2 so why not just do it!

A procedural generation based map will never reach the same look or balance of a hand made map. All supcom and TA maps were hand made anyhow.

Just get Cpt Conundrum's system sharing mod; then nothing else afterward!

Unfortunately, it does.

It uses 3D perlin noise, sampled on the surface of the sphere. This noise is used for feature placement, elevation and biome distribution.

Features can be place manually as well, but biome distribution and the height map can't be user provided yet.

In order to overcome that limitation, and to generate smooth transitions (which isn't possible using the CSG), it would be necessary to provide a support vector based loader for the height and biome distribution map. The performance isn't so much worse, but it's essential in order to create arbitrary maps without constructing the entire planet solely from CSG.

I've been told otherwise, if PA uses heightmaps- how are bridges and tunnels possible?

It's not solely using height maps but combines the basic shape of the planet with CSG brushes, respectively it isn't using the heightmap at all on metal planets.

The heightmap is used on any planet type except the metal and gas planet to create these long, smooth slopes, oceans, and smooth hills. Distinct mesas, mountains, cracks and alike on the other hand are CSG which are added or cut from the basic shape of the planet.

The elevation of the basic terrain on the natural looking planet is defined by a height map which is currently randomly generated from a 3D noise function.

The alternative to that noise function, which allows entirely CUSTOM height maps, is a support vector system. That means you define up to a few thousand data points in the 3D space around the sphere, and the elevation of each point of the sphere tries to match the elevation of the nearest data point (support vector) as close as possible. This procedure can be overlaid with the original 3D noise in order to create more natural / interesting small features on top of the manually defined ones, in order to create complex planets without loosing the benefits of having a procedural generation system, which is mostly only distributing a sparse representation of the final product. If you were to ship the fully baked heightmap as a whole, you would easily end up consuming several MB just for it, same goes for all these tiny decals which are placed in biomes and which are currently also distributed according to a noise function.

To put it short: Which such system in place, you can actually create a river, a sea, or a large highlands without the use of CSG, just by adding support vectors per drag&drop wherever you want to lower or raise the terrain. And all which has to be stored, is the location of each click you made. Which is far less, than if you had tried to sculpt the land manually with geometric primitives used for CSG, not even to mention that the CSG suffer from a lack of variation since their surface is not subject to "random decoration" which makes areas on a planet distinguishable by notable patterns.

Your comparison is ridiculous, this guy has been developing his prototype since a very long time (long before his kickstarter project started) and you can't barely compare a procedural program with the complexity of PA. I think you misunderstand what complexity means when it comes to RTS using real simulation bombined to a complex AI and so on ...

Sure, Trendy that is making Dungeon Defenders 2. Multiplayer, lots of balancing skills, items and towers. Hundreds of units on the screen at a time. Weekly devoloper updates with a q and a every two weeks. Very open about what's going on, what needs work, if and when they can hopefully get to it. Just about every indie devoloper I know is better with community interactions. Starpoint Gemini and Distant World Revenant devolopers (smaller teams btw) have taken the time to even reply to my threads with long responses. There is more to this game then just balance changes btw.

That looks like you willingly ignore every communication from the devs unless it is about your personal pet peeve.

or devolopers are ignoring every hot item and instead playing it safe only talking about balance and bug fixes instead of interacting with the community as a whole. Since I've recently been here there have been more "terran needs work" posts then almost anything else. Yet it's completely ignored. I could say the same to you and the other handful of people on this forum that seem to only care about multiplayer balance. And what do you guys not understand about devolopment not being unilateral. Coder works on balance issues, art team works on effects and models. No reason multiple issues can't be tackled.

There is a whole game that needs massive work, unit diversity and Gameplay, terrian, effects, galactic war. They have been doing multiplayer tweaks for awhile now it's time to step away from balance for a bit and talk to the community about other planned changes or plans to adress certain concerns.

Sure the art team works on art and the coders work on balance (well general tech stuff actually). Lately I think coders put a lot of work into save+load and the art people into submarines, walls, commanders (yes there is drama in this point, but let's just accept Uber has been paid to make them and is bound to make them) and probably a lot of small stuff I forgot. They certainly don't sit and idle. What do you think they are doing?!

You realize that save+load is a gigantic item to make work and it is mainly a single player function?

Also about plans for what they are doing, they do those posts. The last big one was about doing save+load mainly and also hinted at them thinking about galactic war stuff. Before that they added submarines. In the current PTE they randomly added the new walls. They are working on PA, you can read about new stuff every month (or in PTE by the week) and they can't clone themselves to go faster.

Whoa I am not arguing they aren't doing anything. I am saying they could communicate more. Some examples are:

I know galactic war will be worked on soon, what are your plans to fix it?

Any plans to polish terrain and add more biomes in the future?

Any plans for more units or even expiramentals?

Any plans to polish up unit effects?

Units feeling boring gets brought up a lot, any plans to adress that so they feel more interesting?

Yes the new walls are pretty cool. The subs I feel like are pretty half assed and generic and boring. Why are they always surfaced? There is a lot you could do with subs. Cruise missile sub or tactical nuke. Have a surface button where a sub could bring aa guns to bare. Aircraft sub / mobile factor. Hell you can even have multiple torpedoes so it just looks cool. Getting a bit off topic here but my point being is when Uber does things they are often generic and unimaginative. Probably why people complain about almost every aspect of the game so much.

Those are a lot of valid questions for sure. However answering them in a satisfactory way requires a way to look into the future. In the past there have been instances where Uber declared stuff and later realized they had burned their fingers bad because they could not keep what was promised. And for everything they say a dozen people take it as promised and interpret it so that they expect the most crazy stuff possible, then the drama starts when they realize Uber can't fulfill that promise.
So they now only show what is very likely to work out as scheduled to the public. That stuff really does work out in return. They do read the forums though, there is a LOT of stuff that has surfaced in the last few month that basically was asked for in the forums for a long time. It just takes time to get there.

And before you do those cool things with submarines you need to first add simple submarines. You can't make the last step before you do the first one.

Fun fact: You can create rivers by dipping one end of a metal planet trench into water.

You have some validity with your first point but most companies handle this with a disclaimer "This is our idea BUT it's a work in progress and subject to change." That usually shuts people up from complaining. I guess I don't want more of the "what" they are or plan to be working on. I want more of the "how" and "why" so we the players can provide feedback and interesting discussions to Ubers Dissions. If players played a more pivotal role in devolopment things might be very different today.

I disagree. There is no written law that says you have to have generic units first, or clones from TA or FA. The problem with that statement is that's basically ALL uber has been doing except they forget to copy the fun and interesting units as well, stopping at generic version. But this is probably more fitting in a different thread like the Epic one.

Well you have to implement the functionality to be able to have submarines at all first. Then you can either not use it until you put more time into it or directly provide basic submarines to the players. Uber is delivering stuff to us as they finish it. Not with a huge delays, as was the norm up until kickstarter funded games. You can't expect them to deliver the tip without delivering the bottom first.
Same with terrain: It is a very logical thing to first improve the map editor before you think about making better looking maps, as the developers need to have a good editor to make good maps. Before the system editor they had to edit json files to make maps. Making interesting terrain on maps from looking at text files is not going to work out well.

I suppose there is some truth to that, but I feel like (atleast so far) Uber has yet to go back and polish or really fix those things with the exception of walls.