Auto-creation algorithms (spaceships and cities)

[tnxgalaxy]

Hi everyone,First of all I would like to say even though I registered on the forum jusst a minute ago, I have been following Pioneer's project progress and discussions with a admiration and interest. Congratulation to everyone ! creativity and what you guys are doing is great !So here is my first post, and I would like to point you two things that could give you ideas (you might already have):Wouldn't it be cool if some of the ships and some of the cities were automatically generated using algorithms ?Crazy idea you think ? wait, it's been done before ... check the links bellow and please tell me what you think:http://richsunproductions.info/vsfx705/modelingsuite.htmlhttp://www.blendernation.com/2011/07/01/the-shipwright/What would be the spaceship generation benefit ? that way we would always have new space ships to discover, even if no one has ever met them in the first place. They could be shaped based on the system they are from for example. Same thing for the cities.What do you guys think ?tnxgalaxy

[Brianetta]

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.

[tnxgalaxy]

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

[fluffyfreak]

tnxgalaxy wrote:
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 [url]http://www.procedural.com/[/url] 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 :DAndy

[s2odan]

Quote:
I spent some time trying to construct a spaceship editor using simple cubes
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

[tnxgalaxy]

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.

[fluffyfreak]

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

[fluffyfreak]

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

[pebblegarden]

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.

[robn]

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.

[ollobrain]

robn wrote:
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

[robn]

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.

[ollobrain]

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 wereEdit, 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

[Subzeroplainzero]

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

[Brianetta]

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.

[Geraldine]

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

[Brianetta]

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

[fluffyfreak]

Geraldine wrote:
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
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

[Geraldine]

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

[Guest]

Geraldine wrote:


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