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[nova++]

Wow, I will certainly check that paper out!

I am starting to think that you jumped the gun on the giant refactor a bit?

Maybe a bit. It was kind of necessary, though... the old one was going to be seriously difficult to insert the terrain into. It's just all been too long of a sprint without working on other areas. I know that once I get the game properly reintegrated, I'm not touching the terrain or celestial mechanics etc for a damn long time. Nothing but interior and player and ship stuff. So nice and simple...

[nova++]

Hey hi I'm working on it again and- [screaming]

[Schrompf]

Keep going. You are doing cool stuff.

[nova++]

Okay, it looks like poop. But it's working poop.



Terrain is now correctly loading and unloading, with no coordinate errors, all the leftovers between resets have been cleaned up (as far as I can tell) and the stutter from loading a new body has been removed (was 1-2 seconds before, for more complicated/larger objects)

Next will come the distant textures. In the test project they were just always generating at a fixed resolution, but for the proper implementation I'm doing now, it will be based on the object's current size on your screen. The actual logic behind that will need tweaking to get good results, but the result is the same - if you first see a planet from far away, it will only have perhaps 128x128 textures. Get closer, and it will progressively generate higher and higher resolution maps, pretty much manual mip-mapping. It'd be pretty stupid to generate a whole solar system's worth of 4096x4096 textures and keep them around at all times, sooo... I won't. Also, beyond a certain distance, it will just show a star (calculating the brightness of that star, taking into account phase angle and actual brightness and everything will be... fun... )

I'll probably keep the textures in memory until you move far enough away from a given body. Probably once it drops to the 256x256 or 128x128 level again. Waiting until it switches back to a star would probably allow WAY too much memory buildup; think of how much would need to stay cached in large gas giant moon systems...

[nova++]

Okay. That's enough for today, before I drop dead. Distant maps are pretty much fully implemented now, but they need some optimizations. Who could have guessed generating a 4096x4096 texture via complicated noise sampling each frame for 6 frames would be a performance bottleneck...

[Zireael]

Okay, it looks like poop. But it's working poop.

:D :D

[nova++]

Heck, I completely forgot to post the other picture. I was trying a different crater shape with sharper edges, also. Sometimes the overlap can look a bit obvious, but it looks nicer overall. Eventually I would like to let different bodies pick different crater curves, as well as fade from one to another as they get smaller. In real life, you can look at large craters vs small craters (like, 100 km vs 1 meter) and the smaller ones tend to be very soft-edged.

[nova++]

A video of flying around a little...

[nova++]

Finally getting the ship-reintegrated. And now it can finally interact with some of the new features, like new types of objects, which are far easier to add now with the new systems

[nova++]

Doing a bit of screwing around. It's quite a bit of mental gymnastics to land on a rotating structure, but the physics does work out!





New cockpit mesh, too. I was getting tired of looking at the old one...

And a new font for the UI, as well. I've been changing the UI design to something simpler and more vintage looking. I like the idea of this hyper-advanced spaceship with artificial gravity, hyperdrive, and augmented reality systems still having an interface that looks like an IBM PC from the 1980s.

Here's an experimental menu I made to get a feel for the theme:



Still just a preliminary layout, but the style has grown on me quickly.

[Zireael]

I like that interface style, too <3

[szczm_]

Just learned about your game and it looks amazing. It also seems like you're doing well with lighting. Definitely gonna keep an eye on this project! Have you played Space Engine and if so, how much were you inspired by it?

Also,

Hey hi I'm working on it again and- [screaming]

<3

[nova++]

It also seems like you're doing well with lighting.

Sortakinda. Shadowing over this sort of massive distance is an absolute nightmare and I honestly dunno what the solution is yet.

Have you played Space Engine and if so, how much were you inspired by it?

To some degree. Although, honestly, a lot of the inspiration is inverse - there's a lot of things space engine does that I know I don't want to do.

[ChrisCorr]

Galactic interior decorating is one hell of a premise! :D

[nova++]

Galactic interior decorating is one hell of a premise! :D

I do still need to get to that part. A lot of stuff is re-implemented now thankfully, and I'll be able to get back to the interior interaction stuff soon enough.

[szczm_]

Sortakinda. Shadowing over this sort of massive distance is an absolute nightmare and I honestly dunno what the solution is yet.

Let me know if I'm oversimplifying, but I'm thinking like this:

1. You're not interested in small objects (spaceships, comets etc.),
2. You're not interested in other stars/systems/galaxies,
3. You're strictly focused on the planets (and stars maybe) in the current system,
4. Small variations like craters and hills are not visible on that scale,
5. Shadows on this distance rarely scatter, so (not necessarily) mostly hard shadows,

and so we're talking about a limited set of (mostly simple) shapes, maybe few ("point") light sources and a "binary" solution (umbra/antumbra).

This may be just my "area of expertise", but I think ray tracing/marching could do very well in this situation. If done correctly, this would save you the headaches of texture resolutions. It should also be sufficiently fast if you only need to analyze occlusion, especially if done on GPU. Furthermore, scattering/soft shadows are also doable with these.

What I'm talking about is also something called shadow volumes I believe? I think the last time I've read about them was like 10 years ago. What I mean is this method of generating occlusion volumes on the fly and then decide what's lava and what's not. I'm guessing if you don't have volumetric shadows/scattering in your game already, you will probably have it anyway, anywhen. Then it's just a matter of scale.

III don't know. Don't know how Unity's shadows would work with these methods, but I guess it's also doable. Have you already considered any of these solutions?

[nova++]

Sortakinda. Shadowing over this sort of massive distance is an absolute nightmare and I honestly dunno what the solution is yet.

Let me know if I'm oversimplifying, but I'm thinking like this:

1. You're not interested in small objects (spaceships, comets etc.),
2. You're not interested in other stars/systems/galaxies,
3. You're strictly focused on the planets (and stars maybe) in the current system,
4. Small variations like craters and hills are not visible on that scale,
5. Shadows on this distance rarely scatter, so (not necessarily) mostly hard shadows,

and so we're talking about a limited set of (mostly simple) shapes, maybe few ("point") light sources and a "binary" solution (umbra/antumbra).

This may be just my "area of expertise", but I think ray tracing/marching could do very well in this situation. If done correctly, this would save you the headaches of texture resolutions. It should also be sufficiently fast if you only need to analyze occlusion, especially if done on GPU. Furthermore, scattering/soft shadows are also doable with these.

What I'm talking about is also something called shadow volumes I believe? I think the last time I've read about them was like 10 years ago. What I mean is this method of generating occlusion volumes on the fly and then decide what's lava and what's not. I'm guessing if you don't have volumetric shadows/scattering in your game already, you will probably have it anyway, anywhen. Then it's just a matter of scale.

III don't know. Don't know how Unity's shadows would work with these methods, but I guess it's also doable. Have you already considered any of these solutions?

For the very-distant objects (like, say, planets shadowing one another), I definitely can do some sort of raymarched or shadow volume solution - probably raymarching. Shadow volumes are nice, although they always have perfectly sharp edges which isn't super ideal for planetary shadows, which always are going to have penumbral effects.

The real trouble is shadowing over the 100+ km ranges that are required for things relatively close by. It can be done with cascaded shadow mapping, but getting the parameters just right is a serious pain.

[nova++]

Speaking of lighting: nnynyyggh



Trying to work out lighting for distant bodies and it's going... questionably

[nova++]

Aaaand fixed. In a kind of stupid way. I don't really know what was wrong. But in the end, to paraphrase a long and confusing explanation, I just bypassed the usual Unity light stuff entirely and started feeding it some light position and color data directly, and iterate through them, and that works just fine. It bothers me that I don't know why the simpler method wasn't working, but oh well I guess.



I know it's too early to worry about lens flares and such, but having a simple white orb with no glare to it is kinda bugging me.

[Beyond]

Why does it have to be conflict in games? And movies? It's always made me wonder. Why can't it just be a piece of art, without conflict?