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 thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project.

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filtratedbread
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thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project. Empty
PostSubject: thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project.   thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project. Icon_minitimeMon Feb 20, 2012 5:28 pm

Hello just found this awsome forum and was wanting to spill some ideas.

[left]questions... (and ideas if unknown)
    for the planets...

  1. So I was wondering how you guys were planing on rendering(or faking) planet entry?

  2. are you going to make the worlds round? (sujest having a max wigth distance then tieing the edges together)

  3. will you be rendering the image from space? (kinda like the maping function) (might need to draw up stuff before landing, or draw biomes regions with generic textures)

  4. ever concidered making a LOD of the chunks?(look below for this idea)

  5. (chunk LOD: if you do have planet entrys, or high flying craft that are too high for normal ground rendering and still to low for exiting to the space render area, plus if you make it its own render space then you could have mountain peaks riseing up through the clouds, or skylands with little memory loss compared to a all-in-one render...

  6. This can be done tech wise like crossing over to the nether, but It can be player activated by crossing above the clouds y-limit...
    so we just think that we are just quite high up.
    if you wish to avoid the LOD visuals just have a cloud floor like in the skylands. (maby minus the land bits) )

  7. Have the land chunks be made more much shallow
    ( to give us alot more head room Wink lol )

  8. Maby also have the bed rock be destructable and when the player crosses below the bed rock, start a new chunk area render like crossing to a new area (like the nether)
    but have it start in an underground space and cross back by going up through the entrey methoid
    (idea: make a invincible and black voxel cube and on player selection use it like a "Oblivion Cave door" effect to cross game renders so players dont fall under the map...

  9. (extention of above idea)
    I recomend using that idea for Large ships to ease rendering sizes and alow bigger ships to be made

    (you don't have to render the other guys ship, and the interor can be still damaged by incoming fire by alowing the explosion damage / projectiles to cross the intership chunks boundrys when they reach them)
    (the projectile could be tracked as its own space x,y,z enitity.)
    (NPC ships can be premade insides and can use less complete math for damage like a noise delete, or just cut away space from interor rendering if the player boards their derliect ships. afro )

  10. Im guessing that astroides are going to be isolated chunk renders like the ships? (so you can store them as cordenates and not afixed to a voxel grid)



ship ideas

  • if space ships are isolated voxel grids then could we have a (.config)control plan that has roll and a nose tilt ?

  • How are you going to do gravity on a ship?

  • If your ejected in to space in a pressure suit... do you die, or are you killed after a set time? (like anywere from instant to five min)

  • How many critcal ship parts are there?

  • what ones that you will need?
    (I was thinking that the hull metal must be good, power supply(check!), gravity well? air refueling station? life suport (make the ship chunks habital but explosive if damged too much, ectra.., add more ideas later)?
  • Are the multiple chunks room based, area based, player decided room/area based (by placing required ship parts (I like this one!!))



PS: I ran out of time to ask questions and tell you all the ideas.
so i'll be back on another time
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Keon
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thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project. Empty
PostSubject: Re: thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project.   thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project. Icon_minitimeMon Feb 20, 2012 6:16 pm

filtratedbread wrote:
Hello just found this awsome forum and was wanting to spill some ideas.

[left]questions... (and ideas if unknown)
    for the planets...

  1. So I was wondering how you guys were planing on rendering(or faking) planet entry?

    I think a loading screen, like changing worlds. Not sure, though.

  2. are you going to make the worlds round? (sujest having a max wigth distance then tieing the edges together)

    Worlds will be round.

  3. will you be rendering the image from space? (kinda like the maping function) (might need to draw up stuff before landing, or draw biomes regions with generic textures)

    See fr0st's devlog, he is handeling that.

  4. ever concidered making a LOD of the chunks?(look below for this idea)

  5. (chunk LOD: if you do have planet entrys, or high flying craft that are too high for normal ground rendering and still to low for exiting to the space render area, plus if you make it its own render space then you could have mountain peaks riseing up through the clouds, or skylands with little memory loss compared to a all-in-one render...

  6. This can be done tech wise like crossing over to the nether, but It can be player activated by crossing above the clouds y-limit...
    so we just think that we are just quite high up.
    if you wish to avoid the LOD visuals just have a cloud floor like in the skylands. (maby minus the land bits) )

    Ask Fr0st, but I think he might do it.

  7. Have the land chunks be made more much shallow
    ( to give us alot more head room Wink lol )

    If you mean lowering sea level so there is more place to build ships, we have a solution for you! Cubic Chunks allows us to go many kilometers deep and high, with not much lag!

  8. Maby also have the bed rock be destructable and when the player crosses below the bed rock, start a new chunk area render like crossing to a new area (like the nether)
    but have it start in an underground space and cross back by going up through the entrey methoid
    (idea: make a invincible and black voxel cube and on player selection use it like a "Oblivion Cave door" effect to cross game renders so players dont fall under the map...

    I think cubic chunks handles this with no loading screen.

  9. (extention of above idea)
    I recomend using that idea for Large ships to ease rendering sizes and alow bigger ships to be made

    Ask fr0st about all your visual ideas. Anyway, might happen, not sure

    (you don't have to render the other guys ship, and the interor can be still damaged by incoming fire by alowing the explosion damage / projectiles to cross the intership chunks boundrys when they reach them)
    (the projectile could be tracked as its own space x,y,z enitity.)
    (NPC ships can be premade insides and can use less complete math for damage like a noise delete, or just cut away space from interor rendering if the player boards their derliect ships. afro )

  10. Im guessing that astroides are going to be isolated chunk renders like the ships? (so you can store them as cordenates and not afixed to a voxel grid)

    Not sure if they will exist, but if so, they will most likely be a "Natrullyish Looking Ship"



ship ideas

  • if space ships are isolated voxel grids then could we have a (.config)control plan that has roll and a nose tilt ?

    Not understanding that.

  • How are you going to do gravity on a ship?

    It will just be there.

  • If your ejected in to space in a pressure suit... do you die, or are you killed after a set time? (like anywere from instant to five min)

    Again, ask Fr0st, but I think you will take damage like lava or suffocation

  • How many critcal ship parts are there?

    Quite a few. Lemme see how many I know, I may be missing some:
    Guns
    Lasers
    Guns
    Lasers
    Macs
    Guns
    Lasers.

    Oh, in all seriousness, I don't know, I hope not many.


  • what ones that you will need?
    (I was thinking that the hull metal must be good, power supply(check!), gravity well? air refueling station? life suport (make the ship chunks habital but explosive if damged too much, ectra.., add more ideas later)?
  • Are the multiple chunks room based, area based, player decided room/area based (by placing required ship parts (I like this one!!))

    Again, fr0st knows more on this, but I think it will be similar to how it is normally.



PS: I ran out of time to ask questions and tell you all the ideas.
so i'll be back on another time

Welcome to the Fourms! I tried to answer your questions, but I'm not a dev.
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hyperlite
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PostSubject: Re: thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project.   thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project. Icon_minitimeMon Feb 20, 2012 7:58 pm

For #1 Fr0st really wants to have a seamless transfer between worlds, but not sure if he will be able to draw terrain from long distances in space so you can see the planets. But yes it has been clearly stated that is the goal.
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fr0stbyte124
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PostSubject: Re: thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project.   thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project. Icon_minitimeMon Feb 20, 2012 7:59 pm

Can't answer too many of your ship questions because that part still needs more fleshing out and is prone to change.

The (fancy) world renderer will use a hybrid voxel engine (a real one) coded in GLSL running in tandem with the normal polygon system. First there will be an approximated mesh of the above-ground terrain, probably generated with like marching cubes or based around the heightmap. When rendering this mesh, GLSL takes each of the pixels as a starting point for raytracing the underlying voxel structure. This structure is set up as an oct-tree, similar to the GigaVoxel engine (PDF). It would, however, be optimized to spend a lot of time near the finest resolution of voxels (probably 0.5m^3 resolution to accommodate stairs and half blocks). If implemented properly, it should be possible to view any scale of voxel structure from any distance, assuming you have enough memory bandwidth. In our case, we'll may end up lowering the scanning resolution of the voxel renderer as a way of increasing performance.

On computers incapable of GLSL, we will use the Google Earth approach, where you take actual top-down images and paste them onto that approximated mesh. It will look hideous up close, but it will get the job done.

Let's see, what else was there? There will be no loading screens. Everything loads in real-time, also not unlike Google Earth. Ships at a distance will also use the voxel system, though at a distance you would only see a ship icon on the HUD when piloting. Ships in space can have 6 degrees of freedom and utilize quaternion math to handle changes to orientation. I'm thinking about having an auto-orienting option to maintain a sense of which way is up. Otherwise it might get too disorienting for most players.

Gravity is on by default for whatever ship you have. Since it is hard-coded into a lot of entities, it would be troublesome to overwrite that property.

We're still working out exactly how ships will be partitioned, but you will have some ability to allocate rooms and sections of the ship.
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Keon
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PostSubject: Re: thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project.   thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project. Icon_minitimeMon Feb 20, 2012 8:44 pm

fr0stbyte124 wrote:
Can't answer too many of your ship questions because that part still needs more fleshing out and is prone to change.

The (fancy) world renderer will use a hybrid voxel engine (a real one) coded in GLSL running in tandem with the normal polygon system. First there will be an approximated mesh of the above-ground terrain, probably generated with like marching cubes or based around the heightmap. When rendering this mesh, GLSL takes each of the pixels as a starting point for raytracing the underlying voxel structure. This structure is set up as an oct-tree, similar to the GigaVoxel engine (PDF). It would, however, be optimized to spend a lot of time near the finest resolution of voxels (probably 0.5m^3 resolution to accommodate stairs and half blocks). If implemented properly, it should be possible to view any scale of voxel structure from any distance, assuming you have enough memory bandwidth. In our case, we'll may end up lowering the scanning resolution of the voxel renderer as a way of increasing performance.

On computers incapable of GLSL, we will use the Google Earth approach, where you take actual top-down images and paste them onto that approximated mesh. It will look hideous up close, but it will get the job done.

Let's see, what else was there? There will be no loading screens. Everything loads in real-time, also not unlike Google Earth. Ships at a distance will also use the voxel system, though at a distance you would only see a ship icon on the HUD when piloting. Ships in space can have 6 degrees of freedom and utilize quaternion math to handle changes to orientation. I'm thinking about having an auto-orienting option to maintain a sense of which way is up. Otherwise it might get too disorienting for most players.

Gravity is on by default for whatever ship you have. Since it is hard-coded into a lot of entities, it would be troublesome to overwrite that property.

We're still working out exactly how ships will be partitioned, but you will have some ability to allocate rooms and sections of the ship.

Yeah, have an item for stabilizing, making them fly kinda like planes. I however like 6 degrees of freedom, it just makes more awesome battles and manuvers.
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filtratedbread
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PostSubject: Re: thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project.   thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project. Icon_minitimeWed Feb 22, 2012 7:22 pm

hmmmm, nice!
For using a hight map gen, have you checked out the decade engine?

(would place a link here, but new members can't do so)

I think its rather inspiring! Wink

but thats just me...

So on your hight map, your doing some Image-based meshing?
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fr0stbyte124
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PostSubject: Re: thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project.   thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project. Icon_minitimeThu Feb 23, 2012 10:15 am

I am familiar with the Decade Engine. Although relatively light on the graphical effects, I was astounded by its performance. However, Minecraft terrain is voxel-based, which is much, much more difficult to deal with. The techniques used in that engine are sadly non-transferable to our situation. That said, much of Minecraft's terrain (especially once disregarding trees) can be described as a contiguous height map. I plan to take full advantage of this for the distance rendering system.

I have no idea what you mean by image-based meshing.
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filtratedbread
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PostSubject: Re: thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project.   thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project. Icon_minitimeThu Feb 23, 2012 8:52 pm

fr0stbyte124 wrote:
Can't answer too many of your ship questions because that part still needs more fleshing out and is prone to change.

The (fancy) world renderer will use a hybrid voxel engine (a real one) coded in GLSL running in tandem with the normal polygon system. First there will be an approximated mesh of the above-ground terrain, probably generated with like marching cubes or based around the heightmap.

.

Sorry, "voxelizing polygon meshes"... The "image-based meshing" was a wrong term I used.

This with a similer "decade Engine" to generate the approximated mesh of the above-ground terrain for the heightmap,

(try'd to post a link, It failed. if you like, just google it...)

Hey, dude sorry about being Bat sh-t with my posts... the creativty is stronger than my memory.

and a slight forseen issue (I could be mistaken)

I was thinking that If you approched a planet ingame, you would need to generate it from space first, rather than from on ground first (like as it is right now).
By the current generation methods, we would start rendering it as you approch it, but from the ground up...
Thats alot of generating to do, and I don't know how long that would take before we can start to show a half planet size, because thats always the amount you can see untill your landed (the other half can be built as they fiy in, because they can't see it) of the downed resolution or texture to the player flying in.

Another worry, if two players fly at the same planet and cause the world to generate at the same time, the world generating would have to be synchronized between, them and if some flew by the planet and generated small bits but not a whole world, you'd have to track were they left off.
In short all the problems come from having to make a huge portion of the planet in one go.

an lod or a simple place marker terrain generation would help out alot...
(its why I bring up the decade engine)

Also, how would one make a round voxel planet... with gravity?

Made the ideas below before the statment above, so im sorry if I mention somthing twice.

possible fixes.

Here i'll I will put it in to a list. Because I will forget to flush stuff out, if I don't.

[list=1][*] idea: take the normal world gen and tie chunk recalls together.
problem: spaceside planet textures would need to be made before landing.

(a) fix: maby, use the texture from space planet image as a template for future voxel placement to mantain synchronization from ground to space and back.

problem: for things like a devloped city with lights, a huge alien building seen from orbit, or just a over hang cliff or hollow volcano ... The noise file might not work, likke when it comes to builing anything that has an interor.

(b)fix: maby a shader file, or hidden texture levels

problem: still a very simple world gen.
fix: re-render once closer to the ground, then update the space image to match it better and then save the generated chunk.

[*] idea: take the chunks and place them in a radial around the planets center.
problem: Wtf? the voxel chunks would have to overlap each other.

fix: they would be cliping so slightly that we wont notice, because the world's circumference is that large.

problem: voxels chunk generation need to be built off the grid.

fix: we buld them off the grid, then reload them based around the world center instead.
so each chunk radialy relocated (next to the chunk they spawned off).

problem: that still needs the textures to still be space built first.
fix: lod place holder generation, eather make a simple voxel based one, or the voxelizing polygon meshes, of a generated lod mesh.

problem: gravity?
fix: if the chunk that the player is standing on is conciderd the normal world space, then the gravity issue is done with.

Sorry, I focus to hard to remember stuff Im in the middle of focusing on sometimes.
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Keon
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PostSubject: Re: thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project.   thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project. Icon_minitimeThu Feb 23, 2012 9:00 pm

I still think that what Frost needs to do is take a cartographer when servers back-up, then render it onto a sphere. I mean, that world we use as an example will be just fine. We can render it in advance, and then just look at a rendered sphere.
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PostSubject: Re: thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project.   thoughts, questions, and ideas, on world/space/ship renders for the project. Icon_minitime

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