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[motorherp]

Hiya folks.  I've started work on a new open-ended space adventure type game and figured for the first time I'd keep a devlog.  I'll keep you guys updated here, or alternatively you can read all about it on my website -> ForbiddenFunction.

Enjoy 


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EPIC
Original Blog Post


For a long time a desire has dwelled within me.
 
A desire to remake in my own imagining a game that filled me with awe and wonder as a child.
 
A desire to push that game beyond the physical limitations of the machines of those early days.
 
A desire to expand and fill that game with all the additional imaginations I used to dream for it.
 
A desire to re-invent one of the greatest games of all time!
 
 

I am of course talking about the almighty BBC Elite.



Yes, I know there have been newer more up to date versions of Elite over the years, but I always felt they were mostly graphical upgrades.  They didn’t fulfil my childhood aspirations of running my own space stations, or of building and commanding my own galactic armada to wage war with and then, as the whim takes me, to participate in that war as a fighter pilot or a battleship gunner, or of exploring undiscovered systems and colonising new planets to become the leader of billions.  I want to play the roles of many lives in an on-going persistent universe spread over millennia, to watch political borders ebb and flow, to see races evolve and rise to power before diminishing into extinction, to observe the death and rebirth of stars.  Pretty ambitious I know, but there’s no harm in dreaming.

Elite isn’t the only game that has influenced me, just the first and in some ways the most special.  I’ve enjoyed many other space games too since then such as X-wing vs tie fighter, the X series of games, and Eve online.  Although they all try to do different things and are different games in their own ways, they all have that same magical quality that drew me in and reminded me of being a child playing Elite again.  The feeling of epic-ness.

So in reality, what exactly will you be able to do in this new game?  How will it work?  Who will you play as?  What will it look like?  All these questions and many more I have no answer for, nor do I intend to answer them any time soon.  Not only do I not wish to box myself in by placing boundaries on my developments before I’ve even begun, but also I wish to enjoy the journey and discovery of my creation which can’t really happen if I already know where I’m headed in great detail.  My only guiding light shall be that I strive towards creating an experience that appeals to my childhood space fantasies and invokes the same feeling of epic-ness that the great games in this genre have stirred in me.  Hence, I have chosen to name this project, EPIC.


Will this project involve far more work than is realistic for a single developer in their free time?
-Definitely
 
Am I being far too ambitious in my scope and imaginations?
-Probably
 
Will I ever finish this project?
-Not likely
 
Will I try and do it anyway?
-Hell yes
 
 
Dan.

[motorherp]

Space .... the 'first' frontier
Original Blog Post


A space game wouldn’t be much of a space game without space, so my first task along this epic road was to create a visualisation of space itself.  One thing I’ve always really liked about modern space games is the beauty of the backgrounds and the sense of scale they imply.  Much of the enjoyment I get from these games is from simply journeying through these stunning environments imagining myself as a real space pilot and looking forward to discovering what the next system on my travels will look like.  Therefore I knew the space backdrops had to be high quality, and also that they should be randomly generated to create a large and widely varied number of combinations so the magic of discovery isn’t lost.

In the end I opted for creating the basis of my space scenes using a skybox with 6 high resolution textures, one for each face of the box.  In order to fill the textures I decided I’d rely upon using procedural texturing techniques based on combining together different sources of randomly generated high quality 3d fractal Brownian motion noise in differing ways so that the game could generate for itself many variations of highly detailed and natural looking images.

Each texel of the skybox textures were mapped to a sphere surrounding the camera to get an even density distribution of samples, and these sphere points were used as the co-ordinates to sample each of the 3d noise sources.  The image itself is then composited of several layers.  First low and high frequency noises are combined to create the cloudy looking space dust in the background.  Then the galactic plane was added by blending in a glow colour based on the samples distance to the plane and overlaying this with another higher frequency noise around the plane line to increase the cloud density there.  After which the galactic bulge was added which was similar to the galactic plane except that the bulge glow colour was added based on the distance to a point in space rather than a plane.  Additionally the galactic plane cloud colour was modified where it intersects the bulge to darken it and make it contrast against the bulge itself.  Then I added a random scattering of point stars and varied their probability of appearing such that they tended to group together in bright sections of dust and towards the galactic plane to make them look more natural.  And finally a sparse layer of dark dust matter was added towards the darker regions of space to add more interest.







(Edit:  The images are better viewed on my website so they dont cut off the edge of the screen, there's a gallery embedded into the blog post.  Does anyone know how to links as thumbnails for here?  I think that would be better. (PS - just found a way to scale the images)) 


In the end I think it turned out pretty nice, I’m quite pleased with the results.  In addition all the various parameters controlling the generation of the noise used and the formulas for compositing the layers are tweak-able such that it’s possible to randomly create different variations.

Unfortunately the only issue is that in order to look good requires the generation of high quality noise samples which takes a lot of time for these high resolution textures.  After first completing the skybox generator, the generation time was a hefty 80 or so seconds!  Even after doing a fair amount of optimisation I was only able to drop that down to about 30 seconds which still feels like it will be too long for my purposes.  If I want the player to be able to freely explore the universe, jumping between different systems, I wouldn’t want them to have to wait 30+ seconds each time.

Sure I could be gradually generating new noise textures in the background whilst the player is busy with activities in their current system, such that the next skybox is then immediately ready when the player jumps to a new system.  I’ve no way of knowing which system they’ll want to move to however unless I put in a contrived method to limit the players travel choices such as jump-gates which I’m not sure I want to do.  Also I’d like for each system to generate the same skybox each time so the different systems would be recognisable since they’d have a unique but persistent look, so I can’t just generate random results and apply them to whatever system is travelled to.  Therefore I need to be able to quickly generate these skyboxes as and when they’re needed.  Fortunately I think I’ve fathomed a way to do just that which is what I’m now working on.

Thanks for reading.

 

Dan.

[RichMakeGame!]

sounds like you got it covered, but what about having a library of different pre-generated textures you can randomly distribute about? kind of like how in photoshop you can have one brush stencil but create a lot of different images based on how you use it (size, scattering, overlay modes etc)

PS, the results look great! i hope you're going to experiment with some wilder colours

[motorherp]

sounds like you got it covered, but what about having a library of different pre-generated textures you can randomly distribute about? kind of like how in photoshop you can have one brush stencil but create a lot of different images based on how you use it (size, scattering, overlay modes etc)

PS, the results look great! i hope you're going to experiment with some wilder colours

Thanks for the encouragement.  Indeed, this is more or less what I have in mind, although I figure I could also additionaly use a layer of fast noise generated on the fly as a kind of phase rotation to increase the possiblities even further.  I don't want to give too much away and spoil the next post though .

I definately need to play around with different settings aswell to get nicer colours and arangements, but with the current slow generation times that's painful which is why I selected something 'safe'  .  I have that covered too though and am working on a way to get real time tweakage feedback.

[Paul Jeffries]

Gorgeous space scenes, although the dust clouds look a little too dark and opaque to me - surely the dust would have to be so dense as to not really be dust anymore to be quite that black?

[Mikademus]

Please make a physical space fighter simulator! Pretty please! 

[motorherp]

Gorgeous space scenes, although the dust clouds look a little too dark and opaque to me - surely the dust would have to be so dense as to not really be dust anymore to be quite that black?

Thanks for the feedback, and yes I agree with you.  In those screen shots the dark-matter colour was set to pure black which is a bit too extreme.  Also, although I wanted something which would contrast and stand out against the rest of the scene, I think they're still a little too sharp edged at the moment and should probably fade in a little more gradualy.  I should have real time tweakability for this stuff soon though so I should hopefully be able to fine tune it to perfection 

[motorherp]

Please make a physical space fighter simulator! Pretty please! 

Do you mean as in realistic physics based control methods for the ships?  So far I haven't given much consideration to how the player will be able to interact with the game but I'll keep this in mind for when I get that far 

[nihilocrat]

Generate the skyboxes in the background, and save them to files inside of a PlayerGeneratedUniverse1234/System1234/ folder. Go ahead and save any other procgen content that should not change each time the player boots up the game.

I would suggest each time the player enters hyperspace, you kick off the background process. Play some kind of cool hyperspace sequence as you generate skyboxes for systems that the player will be able to jump to when they enter the new system. At 30 seconds a skybox, that's still pretty hefty, though.

You might want to remove a bit of variety in exchange for speed: precompute one or several of your noise filters / masks and use it for all skyboxes.

Currently my skill at procgen textures does not go beyond pasting, coloring, and masking pre-made textures, which is so fast it doesn't really require any performance considerations. Kudos to you for taking on a much more difficult task. I have wanted to make skyboxes for my space game but just don't have the time and especially skill to make cool procgen ones ... I will probably settle for making several beforehand and coloring / compositing them at runtime.

[motorherp]

Unfortunately due to the size of the skybox textures and the hopeful immensity of the game world I will create, I dont think that saving off the results of each skybox for future reference is really an option.

I'm working on a modification to the system now which like you say will use a bunch of pre-generated high quality noises packed into textures and then lower quality quick noise generated on the fly which will be combined in various ways to modify the results and create lots of variations so hopefully any repetition wont be noticeable and I'll still be able to generate unique looking scenes but much faster.

[Mikademus]

Please make a physical space fighter simulator! Pretty please! 

Do you mean as in realistic physics based control methods for the ships?  So far I haven't given much consideration to how the player will be able to interact with the game but I'll keep this in mind for when I get that far 

That's exactly what I mean, yeah. Keep us posted, because this might well be a project worth watching!

[motorherp]

A sneak peak of a work in progress of the new skybox system.  It's not finished yet, for example there's no stars for a start  , but I think it's showing some improvements and this one is using the new system which generates textures far faster during runtime.

(for a better view, right click the picture and choose 'view image'.)

[motorherp]

Another quick work in progress shot.  I'm getting close to being finished on the skybox generator for now.  I wont be able to do anymore on it for the next couple of days at least, but when it's done I'll make another official devlog entry. 

(again, right click and choose view image for a better look)



I'm currently messing with the idea of having radial glow points, I'll need to change the flare texture though, the red ring doesn't really fit.  Also there's a bit of an issue with the point star blend since in the really bright areas of cloud the point stars end up being silhouetted which isn't right.

[Mr_Goober]

But yes, the spacebox looks very nice, though it feels like it needs a little more detail. I suppose the whole deal is not to have it grab the user's eyes, as it is... y'know, the blackness of space.

[motorherp]

Hehe, I loved that bit  .  Yeh I know what you mean, I will try and work more finer details into it but it's not so easy since they need to be randomly generated whilst maintaining a reasonable texture budget and instruction count.  Hopefully the lack of finer details might not be so apparent anyway once I have foreground elements in the scene too.

[Pemanent]

Looks really good man! Also very nice blog! I shall be following this intently.

[Dion]

Go for it! There are not enough people with ambition if you ask me. Anyway, these skyboxes are looking very good. I hope you can get an idea of the general structure of the game soon. And get something playable of course! I would be a shame to see this turn into a look-don't-touch like Infinity: The Quest for Earth (which it still is sadly).

[brothers74]

i didnt read your lonhg posts but the space game i scool nnot enough space games now

many shot games. many desert fames. space largely not so same

good luck

[motorherp]

Cheers for the replies folks.

@Dion:  I really love the Infinity project, that guy is legendary, amazingly good.  I do know what you're getting at though and although there is a certain amount of technology that must be completed before any gameplay can really begin, my intention isn't to try and be as cutting edge or as technically competant as Infinity.  As long as the game looks pleasing and works well enough to play I'd definately like to start carving out gameplay as soon as possible.  My ultimate aim isn't really to create the most stunning or advanced engine possible but rather to focus more on appealing to my boyhood space fantasies and trying to re-create those feelings I used to get when playing these sorts of games as a child.

[Dion]

Believe me, I know how madly awesome he and it is! But yeah, you get my point. The best of luck!