It's been discussed before. One of our devs is already looking at dynamic city generation; however, he's also one of our busiest devs. I don't believe that anybody is taking a serious look at dynamic ship generation.

Of course, there's nothing to stop you.

I cannot promise anything but if I can look seriously into it I will.

Yes! I've looked into procedural city generation at a previous company and had been hoping to integrate Procedural's CityEngine http://www.procedural.com/ , we went through the evaluation before the company I worked for got braindead and abandoned the idea. Pascal Mueller has authored a lot of really interesting papers about the subject.

The main problem with their approach is that it's not real-time, and the constraints for real time city generation are a lot tighter.

Spaceship generation is another one that I've looked into and the main problem with every single approach I've seen is that they all seem to lack any artistic or humanising aspects. I spent some time trying to construct a spaceship editor using simple cubes, a bit like the "Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts n' Bolts" vehicle editor, and then attempt to "skin" it afterwards. I think that's probably a more promising approach than the "kit-bash" technique used in that video. Unfortunately I don't have time to work on these things, I don't even have time for my current stated work on the project!

However if you want to chat about it then I absolutely LOVE everything procedural so we can swap ideas until the cows come home on here 😀

Andy

IMO this would actually be useful.. But whenever anyone talks about procedurally generating ships I tend to think of Ad-Astra, which shows that while it can be done there is probably no benefit for gameplay to doing so, ships lose their character among other things. Although perhaps Ad-Astra is not a good example as it has a totally different graphical style to Pioneer's, but its the only one I know of.

Now an actual ship editor, while still rather pointless from some perspectives I feel it would actually add to the game in many ways and its actually one of my over-the-top wishes from FFE (Custom ship building). I played a game not long ago called Shores of Hazeron, and the biggest drive with that game was the design and building of your own spaceships block by block.

Artlav's Spaceway space-sim/game has a built in ship editor/creator.

I suppose there are also many examples of games that procedurally alter static models, so they add damage and/or dirt maps procedurally and perhaps decals and equipment parts to make for a lot of variation.

Edit// That blender clip is cool! The ships are a little crazy but something like that might actually work with some more symetry

Wow! CityEngine is absolutely amazing, be developper on a software project like that must be a stunning experience indeed !

The real-time constraint is a big one indeed, and any solution I can think of to include non real-time generated procedural cities would harm users experience (generation on a parallel thread while approching a planet, caching, etc.)

About the ships auto-generation or customized creation, I completely understand it's not a P1 thing at the moment (there is so much to do). But this kind of procedural feature would suit to a sandbox game like this one at some point - To help it keeping mojo on long term usage.

Yeah I started with cubes because that scheme was the simplest, then I "skinned" the resulting mesh using a convex hull creator meant for collision meshes.

The results were ok, I got a few basic shapes out of them although I should have used a different hull algorithm as it was a bit rough. I think that the concept is sound though.

The reason for the approach was that I figure that ships are a series of components held together by a structure and then wrapped in a skin, so if I could just reproduce those steps I'd have a way of building ships quite easily. After that I could figure out how to do it procedurally by iterating and randomising those components within the constraints I'd discovered as I went along.

The biggest problems, if you can think of them like that, are the invalid ship designs - things like wheels on the roof/bay doors that open through engines & hull etc - as well as the usual perils of user generated content, i.e: Every spaceship is a giant penis.

Andy

PS: I had a longer post about cutting out holes for engine exhaust, cockpits and attachment points etc but it got eaten by the internet :/

There's been some discussion about this before, it was just pointed out to me the other day too http://www.spacesimcentral.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=1837&hilit=cities&start=60 .

Something like CityEngine is great for offline generation, the results are just astounding but I'd actually prefer something much simpler that produce acceptable results. I think robn is already pretty much on the right track with his current approach.

I've been meaning to suggest a more 'zoned' approach to city generation, so that the spaceport isn't smack dab in the middle of a high population density area. We rarely put airports in the middle of big cities, because of the potential for disaster. I imagine starports would be built some distance away from urban centers. there'd be a downtown region, surrounded by commercial and residential areas, and these could have their own base texture, something that resembles urban sprawl in the modern world.

Well we already have a zoned approach, though its not always obvious because of the lack of variety in building types right now. I disabled them out while working on a new city generator but I got sidetracked on some other stuff.

The algorithm I'm planning right now is to use the city population and and environmental conditions to select a range of compatible buildings. Each building model will have an amount of population that it consumes. Then from the city's central point, we walk out in all directions, placing buildings. If the slope in any given direction becomes too steep then we don't go in that direction, so we should see the buildings follow the terrain to some extent. For each building placed we subtract its population from the city population, and stop when we've placed enough buildings to hold the entire population.

Initially I'd place the starport dead centre and grow out from there, because that's the way the code is currently structured. Later I'd like to place the starport as just another building.

Zoning based on building type/purpose (power, starport support, residential, etc) can later be built into this algorithm. There's plenty of variables and things to figure out - I haven't thought this through in a lot of depth. This should be a good place to start.

As the one pushing for into the future some form of colony influence, settlement, player political control-mission system , system development based on trade etc etc this is a good baseline

Fyi, and somewhat offtopic, the general consensus among the development team right now is that the player should not have a disproportionately large influence on the universe. Yes, some actions might have knock on effects, but things like colonisation and empire building are not something we're thinking about even in the long term. If someone was to step up and code it that position might change, but for now its a non-starter.

yup robn as always fully understood, however such discussion should not be silenced just because the currently involved developers have a close to 0% interest in attending to this specific angle. Such discussion may encourage a lurker with programming skills to put their hand up or a group to come along and try their hand thats where some of this dicsussion is aimed.

As u were

Edit, pioneer is a great looking space sim flying simulator with some elements of content, the eye candy development is simply amazing, the meat and bones are coming from some emergening contributors and i am fully wanting to encourage this type of powerful cross genre thinking, the only thing stopping the player having a bigger impact or a wider but subtle development influence on the universe is a narrow focused development on eye candy and at the moment a lack of creative thinking well its there its focus is just towards a few other elements and sooner or later the eye candy will be complete and then it will be where can we take this beast now

HAHA Somebody please implement the empire building and colonising stuff for ollobrain so he can stop yapping on about it. Shouldn't take long.... 😆 😆

That's a lot of criticism of the dev team from ollobrain there, who has to date contributed nothing to the project itself except demands. Ollobrain, the game that you want isn't Pioneer. Go try X.

😆 Oh if I could I would, but I guess it would be a step to far for someone like me who still struggles with AMOS and Amiga OS 😆

Oh, and Brianetta? Did you get my scottish txt? I am going to try modding the files in the modules folder next and "scotify" them too, although this does look a bit more complex to do, but if I get stuck, I am sure someone can advise me or I will have a look around the forum 😉

I did. Is it Scots or Scottish English? I'm not familiar enough with the language to tell, really. )-:

No, no, don't put yourself off. Lua is one of the easiest scripting languages to use! Plus people here would be more than willing to help you learn, AMOS and AmigaOS actually are a bit of a pain 😉

It's actually a wild mix of the two, which is what many (and I am generalising a bit here) people in and around the West of Scotland speak. Using your links you provided Brianetta, I guess you could loosely call it Lowland Scots. I could expand it to include the East of Scotland too, but the sentences would not look right if you mixed the two. East and West dialects tend to be mutually exclusive, and all this before I even mention Highland dialects and Gaelic. Both of these would be beyond me I am afraid as I don't know enough about them. Yes "Scots" is very complex indeed! 😕

I guess it's a leftover from the clan days where you would have lots of isolated communities living independently of each other, all with their own forms of speech, culture and even different coloured tartan in their clothing.

Anyways I am, as always open to suggestions in how to improve it.

And thanks for the encouragement fluffyfreak 😉

Oh, I thought you had made a translation to Scottish Gaelic. But it appears to be an English variant translation.

I own a Tannahill Weavers music CD and some traditional lyrics are extremely hard to understand, at least to me, my god... The CD had a final glossary or dictionary of terms 😀

It was not gaelic.

Could this variant be the translation you are speaking about?

Greetings

Constructive and positive feedback = criticism no, attempting to get lurking potential developers to step up and expand the games horizon sure, demands nope just discussion - please dont mix the two up.

The game that pioneer is is open to anyone that wants to contribute even if just discussion - open source after all.

LUA script looks interesting to any chance it could be expaneded to influence spaceship and city auto creation = dynamic procedural generation that would be a cool "idea" ( scratch the demand description)

Scots is a Germanic language, whereas Gaelic is a Goidelic language - an entirely different language family altogether. English is also a Germanic language, and the two (Scots and English) are mutually intelligible (if the speakers slow down and the listeners pay attention). There used to be an attitude in the UK that speakers of broad Scots were speaking poor English, with a very heavy regional accent and some very different words. More recently, it's been accepted that this is more like the definition of a dialect, or even a separate language. So much so that the Scottish parliament now makes information available in Scots as well as in English. The UK government, and the EU, recognise Scots as a language. It's likely that Scots and English are not descended one from another, but rather have common heritage.

Other mutually intelligible languages include Spanish and Portuguese, or Norwegian and Swedish. Even Italians and Spaniards can, at a pinch, understand each other if necessary.

Evolution of language fascinates me. (:

More or less Gudadantza. To do a full on Gaelic translation would require an expert speaker. I could try some Gaelic forums and see if anyone would be willing to give it a go? I also thought about using online translation services, but it wouldn't look right. If it was to be done, it would be far better to get a real speaker of Gaelic involved. Is there any out there who also have a love of space sims?

Incidentally Gudadantza, that CD you mentioned is by a group who got their name from a famous Scottish poet called Robert Tannahill who was a weaver based in a town called Paisley, which is were I grew up 🙂 You can even visit his house if you like. Locally known as The Sma' Shot Cottages

In fact, here is one of their tracks Farewell To Fiunary http://www.tannahillweavers.com/music/F ... iunary.mp3

Nice, if you like that sort of thing 🙂

Oany wiys am aff teh stuffmacraw am starvin 😆

In fact I am a Languages lover, and I have lot of interest in them. Although It is not easy to me (as you can see in the quality of my texts...). I am not a dutch or a german with an innate capability to learn languages since they are born...:)

Well, in fact I undertand three...apart my interest in dead languages, But I am an adult...:)

We must take in account every language is a "dialect" from a previous language, it can be contemporary or not. So the term dialect,, is just a linguistic concept to make scientific order, in fact Spanish is a dialect of latin and latin one dialect of indoeuropean language. (Latin, ancient greek, hittite, gaelic languages, sanscrit... etc)

Even languages not considered "dialect" nowadays were called despectively dialect. considered like second row language or poor men language, or bad spoken language during a lot of time. It´s been universal.

So for me and for a lot of linguistics the term dialect is not so correct or important to take in account because the term is (to me) contaminated.

What I thought I knew was Gaelic have families and they were structured in: Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic), Scottish Gaelic (Highlands), Isle of Man, Breton, Welsh Gaelic... etc...

So I had in mind The "scott" was a family from gaelic (in fact the scottish gaelic), not from a germanic branch. The problem was I called Scott to what appears to be the Gaelic Language.

So In Scotland the languages are: Scott, English, Gaelic. Is it correct?

The relationship between Scott and English would be like those between Spanish and Galego or Catala or asturian (official latinic or romance languages in the same country). And the relationship between English and Gaelic would be something like the relationship/lack of relationship between Spanish and basque language (Latinic and non latinic preindoeuropean language)

It seems I have it now clear...:)

And Small is the world, Geraldine...What a coincidence 🙂 Yes I like that kind of things...

Greetings

Scottish English, Scots and Gaelic (in order of number of speakers).

Scottish English is very close to English; most would simply describe it as "English with a Scottish accent."

Scots, or Broad Scots (or Braid Scots as natives would say) is close enough to English that we English can learn to understand most of it with simple exposure. Without having been exposed to it, it's very hard for us to understand. It's also spoken in Northern Ireland, where it's called Ulster Scots on account of sounding a little different.

Gaelic is a Celtic language, closely related to Irish Gaelic and those others you mentioned. It isn't even slightly mutually intelligible; if we English want to understand it, we have to learn it from scratch.

So anyway, what a deviation from city generation... Geraldine's fault!