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Procedural Generation questions.
filmoret
Member EpicPosts: 4,906
in Star Citizen
Just wondering since they are doing PG of planet surfaces that are basically generated on demand by the PC. Won't that make planet surface different for every user? I always understood PG as the game engine itself generating worlds and then saving those generated worlds. But it looks like Star Citizen is taking a different approach and letting the generating come from the PC instead.
Are you onto something or just on something?
Comments
It just means you generate based on formulas/calculations.
If you use the same formulas and the same input values/seeds for every user, you get the same result for everyone.
Just like 2+2 will give the result 4 on any calculator independently from each other.
For instance, if you have a planet at a certain position, you can use the position to seed all the randomness for the generation and you will get a unique and different planet compared to planets in other positions, but this specific planet at this specific position will none the less be always exactly the same for every user.
You should use google and read about pg.
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With procedural generation the computer can place those 1 million pieces for you in just a couple of minutes.
Yup, making a whole land-able zone where you have to get the whole terrain going by hand as a way more costy effect on time and resources than using PG.
Like Arccorp, once we saw the first landing on it, the artists had to manually place all those buildings to make it feel like a massive city up to the horizon as you down from space to your landing pad. PG is the perfect filler for things like that.
Let's say your formula for planet size is : size = x * 1000
Your second formula is for landing zone coords:
coordinateA = x + 100
coordinateB = x - 100
Each planet then, is assigned a unique seed.
Planet A could have seed (x) 1. It would then, have a size of 1 * 1000 ( = 1000), and landing zone at [101,-99].
Planet B could have seed 3. That would mean size 3000, landing zone at [103,-97].
The formulas can then even be stored on the client, along with a list of seeds. You could make a fully single player game, where the planets are generated by each game separately, but always result in the same thing. Minecraft does that to generate worlds for example. If you want it to be different for each player, you don't provide a list of seeds, you only provide the formulas. The client then generates random numbers as seeds.
In this case, you are only generating the size and landing location (and the formula if very stupid
There are two big benefits to this:
- You do not need to repeat world design tasks. Your world may have 10.000 rocks. You don't need to place them one by one anymore - you can just tell the system "This is roughly how I want the rocks to be placed, go place them." In the case of Star Citizen, you can't design the planet's surface entirely - it's just too big. So you use a formula to design it all for you, then go in to tweak the formula until it looks alright.
- You can add content easily. Without Procedural Generation, adding a second planet means doing roughly the same amount of work as when you were making the first. With Procedural Generation, you can pretty much just tell the system to make two planets instead of one. Something like No Man's Sky (or Elite Dangerous) can then claim to have "unlimited content". The game simply keeps adding more as you play.
The downside is the fact that too much randomness can get boring, because players learn to "predict the formula". When you visit the 1000th planet in No Man's Sky, chances are it's going to be different in a similar way that the 501st planet was different to the 500th. In other words, the Procedural Generation output is different each time, but different in a predictable way (because the formula stays the same).so it will randomly exactly recreate the same planet for each client / user.
this is how Elite works, and was pioneered on the original Elite (48k spectrum holding 8 galaxies)
You don't see the point in not having to actually create entire planetary surfaces by hand?