Modular Starport / City

[Geraldine]

So a Trantor/Coruscant type world might be possible one day in Pioneer? Yes please!

[Coolhand]

Geraldine wrote:
So a Trantor/Coruscant type world might be possible one day in Pioneer? Yes please!
Humble beginnings Geraldine, humble... Its really hard to say what could be possible isn't it... But make the concept too grand and it becomes offputting to someone to pick up the idea and make it "work" I think perhaps a solid beginning would be to place a larger spaceport outside a city somewhere, and perhaps link it with a bridge to an existing city or create a new basic template - like a flat city with deep foundations that can sit on terrain.

[Geraldine]

Yes of course, humble beginnings....................but if your gonna dream, make sure it's a good one!

[Subzeroplainzero]

AcesHigh wrote:


Subzeroplainzero wrote:
So how do you expect performance to be with these models? I have trouble running pioneer with city detail set to high, but if they end up looking any where near as good as your examples, I'll be happy to put up with a slideshow.
just what Coolhand said. Less triangles per building, better textures, more buildings looking as good or better than all the circular jetson-style buildings.btw, since you are from Yorkshire, why the hell does "shire" in Yorkshire sounds different than "the Shire", from Lord of the Rings?
Hmmmmm I'm not really sure but I would guess that it has something to do with our awsomeness :ugeek:Try asking Sean. He's from Sheffield, the same place as me

[Coolhand]

*edit* holy crap is that pic of sean bean large enough? Mods please change the title to Modular Starport / City Sean Bean *pushes seans girly locks aside*(i bet this thread shows up next time he ego surfs, i wonder, what other celebrities could we summon with a large pic and repeatedly mentioning their names? .)
Geraldine wrote:
Yes of course, humble beginnings....................but if your gonna dream, make sure it's a good one!
well i'll provide a hint as to how you could start such a thing, you would have to initially start with a new class of planet, a metal / city planet, perhaps more like classic cybertron. Covering a dirt planet with metal and concrete would be inefficient, you would want to have a lot of the planet showing through more developed patches, underneath it and so on.Pioneers terrain system uses fractal / procedural shapes, it turns formulae into geometry in an attempt to mimic nature. So, rather than using cellular or spikey shapes and so on, use simple geometric shapes like you might find in city layouts - squares and hexagons etc... this could be most easily done with a bitmap, though unfortunately it probably still does not support bitmaps which is a shame as it would provide no end of graphical improvements and possibilties. So then, with a metallic shader you would have cybertron-esq world (which can be texturally detailed down to the windows and airlocks on the surface - human scale features.) which could then be populated with spaceports and any structures placed into the planet (as they are now) will with the right texture suddenly look right at home, because its easy to imagine that theres infrastructure in the planet itself to support all these structures, like the surface of the deathstar for example. (and i've mentioned it before and to my knowledge there's been no interest but incorporating bitmaps into all the other planet types would really take them into the next level graphically, just in general.)Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean has a stupid name Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean has girls hair Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean sounds really silly when you say it loads Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean Sean Bean or even once Sean Bean

[Subzeroplainzero]

You're doing it wrong! you need to be staring in a mirror at midnight while saying his name 762 times to evoke the bean. Metalic surfaces sound like a good way to cover the structures. Then even extremely low res textures would look good, especially if they had illuminated windows using glowmaps. They could look really cool at night when making your final approach I might be able to give a hand with that if needed. I'm no expert but I've played around with glowmaps a bit before for a fallout 3 mod.edit: i meant for the starports, but the same might also apply for planet textures if you can get that working.

[Marcel]

Quote:
ollobrain wrote;im for the idea of the lua file moving traffic along certain paths. Any ideas how to go about it
I have a vague, general idea. There's an example in pimodles.lua of an object moving around in a circle. There's also the example of a spacecraft docking in a station. I've been thinking about animated objects inside a station, but I'm sure that traffic around ground stations will be possible as well.

[robn]

Marcel wrote:
I have a vague, general idea. There's an example in pimodles.lua of an object moving around in a circle. There's also the example of a spacecraft docking in a station. I've been thinking about animated objects inside a station, but I'm sure that traffic around ground stations will be possible as well.
Something I want to do at some point is a Lua-based animation system. Its not so different from the station docking animation in concept, just more generalised. The idea is that you'd define a set of waypoints and then instruct a ship or other object to follow them. The script would receive callbacks at the waypoints to take actions. I have two particular use cases in mind: police patrols, and an intro movie. There's no reason such a system couldn't be made generic enough to support vehicles in cities and so forth. Of course no work has been done on this so far; in fact I've barely even thought much further than what I described there.

[ollobrain]

Multi point missions now thats a good idea for the lua system sounds like its coming along nicley ( same could be done for mining missions on xyz planets) perhaps for pirate bases u could go out and hunt targets in certain sectors of heavy shipping and bring loot back to a pirate base ( later on this in turn could raise a criminality index in a system esp if youre an outlaw ) well down the track of course

[highlander]

I like modular cities as an idea. At the moment, buildings are literally strewn all over the landscape, somewhat like Lego bricks on a child's bedroom floor. Houses half-way up mountainsides.If anyone is familiar with Microsoft Flight Simulator X, the way the buildings are positioned relative to each other seems to be quite realistic:Buildings only appear on terrain that is realistically flat enough for building on (i.e. not more than about 10 degrees from horizontal), so you'll see houses on hilltops, in valleys, on plains and steppes, but you won't see them on mountainsides or cliffs.But further away from the cities, buildings disappear entirely, giving way to region-specific vegetation (cactuses in desert areas, trees in forested areas, fields in arable land areas):This would suggest that on a particular planet, you can procedurally place a marker that says "this is a city, it's about 20km across, and is densely populated". From there, the building placement engine would attempt to place "city blocks" in neat rows, forming a roughly circular shape around the position of the city centre. Blocks would be omitted on areas where the terrain is determined to be too steep. Blocks closer to the city centre could be defined as bigger buildings. Farther from the city centre could be defined as much smaller structures (individual houses).Flight Simulator also has the ability to put cars on roads - the issue is that roads are placed based on real-world roads of today - granted, you could do this for Earth, but it would be far too complex, and besides - Pioneer takes place more than 1000 years from now. What you could do is make roads run between the centres of cities, assuming there is no ocean or steep mountains between these two points. Then use lua to make very basic car models move between cities.This is what FSX has for cars:Pioneer doesn't need to have anything like as detailed as that. Note also that FSX has shipping, but that is probably not needed in Pioneer's world, as all the shipping companies would presumably use much larger cargo spacecraft to move cargo around planets.Note, I have absolutely no idea how to do any of the above - just trying to give some ideas to someone who does know. Hope it helps someone in some way

[Brianetta]

A city that covered an entire planet's surface would cook itself.

[robn]

Brianetta wrote:
A city that covered an entire planet's surface would cook itself.
But I saw it in a movie!

[Guest]

Brianetta wrote:
A city that covered an entire planet's surface would cook itself.
A city that covered an entire planet would have incredibily expensive outer districts.

[Coolhand]

There's always a way. If you can build a deathstar, or turn a planet into a city, you can figure out a way to manage heat... You can lump it under 'Engineering challenges" You have to use some imagination, and no one is being specific enough to validate the statement: "It cannot be done". Seems perfectly reasonable that a society with hyperdrives a thousand years ahead would probably know more than we do now. Hyperdrives cannot be made either, right? Humans cannot withstand sustained 30g etc... No need to be a party pooper.

[Geraldine]

Think of it another way, a little over 200 years ago (when steam trains were being developed), the accepted wisdom at the time said that if you were to go over 30 mph, you would suffocate due to lack of air at high speed, hence trains would be useless. As for flight, that was pure sci-fi.

[robn]

On the other hand, if city planets are impossible then we don't have to bother trying to code them

[Geraldine]

Honesty Aces High, it was no myth to the people at the time. An average horse could do around 30 mph, a race horse a little more. This was perceived as the maximum speed you could go. Also those who used horses for transporting goods and people had an invested interest in keeping this "speed barrier" going, otherwise they would be out of a job. History is full of little stories like this.

[ollobrain]

Geraldine wrote:
Think of it another way, a little over 200 years ago (when steam trains were being developed), the accepted wisdom at the time said that if you were to go over 30 mph, you would suffocate due to lack of air at high speed, hence trains would be useless. As for flight, that was pure sci-fi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloonquite false hot air baloons came first in 1782 now that would be lets see 220 years ago. So nope flight first and then trains .....Im a sticker for historical accuracyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transportrail transport came in at 1820 with the steam train but did utliise horses back 500 years

[Geraldine]

Actually ollobrain, if you are talking about the Montgolfier brothers and their hot air balloon, the Chinese beat them by about 1000 years as they were using lanterns which they floated up into the air. It was they who first discovered the principle of lighter than air flight, but just like with their discovery of gunpowder, they didn't take the idea to it's ultimate conclusion. if they had, the Chinese could have had hot air balloons and guns a 1000 years before the west. History could have been alot different. Strangely I see a lot of Chinese lanterns at Christmas time and new year here in Scotland. Seems quite the fashion these days to send a load of them up at festive times. Anyways, the point is, accepted contemporary wisdom can sometimes hold back development of new technologies.I liked how you went to the trouble of looking it all up though ollobrain

[Guest]

AcesHigh wrote:
that other building, which sorry to whoever made it, but its hideous... the one that its twin towers, each one made of several discs not aligned... like if it was a 2 year old kid putting the discs one over the other... that one is really a "triangle" eater... each disct has probably over 20 faces.
Yep, programmer art at its finest. The city models are functional but could definately be improved.
AcesHigh wrote:
I mean... we are in the year 3000... or 4000... something like that. How about some computer STABILIZERS on the ship? So it can mantain altitude? Really... let us fly in the atmosphere of planets as if it was a DESCENT game, (I mean the game called Descent)... I am under the full impression that the ship maintains speed when you turn off the throtle, as if it was flying in a vacuum!My point is that you can barely appreciate the cityscape with the present control scheme...
A little off topic, but have you tried the latest nightly build (not Alpha10), as we have added in Manual thruster control in set-speed mode. I now often when launching from a planet starport quickly set the speed to about 0m/s, and then I can use the manual thruster control to move around, without having to worry about things such as gravity.