Another reason for the Ogre backend - this looks ace

For collaboration on developing the mod capabilities of VS; request new features, report bugs, or suggest improvements

Moderator: Mod Contributor

safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Post by safemode »

if you bothered to read it, i never mentioned rendering offscreen. It's about simulating. In this setup, features in the mesh are created (exposed) as you get closer to the planet. This would have to happen to NPC ships as they approach a planet, or the game is going to behave completely different for the player than the NPC's. Also, when a player approaches a planet where ships are already near the planet, what happens then? The game will have to move the NPC ships around as the mesh warps and mutates into the highly detailed mode? What happens if this happens during complex dogfighting?

There is a big difference from rendering and simulating. Rendering should only care about what's on screen, simulating gets done whether it's on screen or not, and working with the correct mesh is necessary. We fully simulate multiple systems based on a config option.

There are ways around it, but they're hacks. Make the ai never go near a planet's surface except direct to bases. Make the mesh detail inward, rather than up, and only return to normal when all ships are out of it's area when the player leaves the LOD range. etc etc. I'm not saying it can't be done, but simulation doesn't stop at what you see on screen, collisions and ai and such all have to be considered.

But the main reason why am against planetary flight is that I dont think it will ever be possible to offer really good eye candy without extremely nice texturing and various new shaders given an atmosphere or not etc along with altered physics, and I dont think it can really offer much in terms of gameplay. People already complain about the travel time speccing away from a planet after launch, now imagine being on the surface... add another 3 minutes at least now , then what kind of missions would involve planet surfaces? who's gonna like spending 20 minutes trying to find a pin needle of a base on a planet's surface to attack, or even worse, a ship. I just dont see how we'd be able to accomplish this in anything but a hacked sorta way and it's only real draw being eye-candy, that seems a very far stretch.

You see a nifty feature, I see a whole lot of complexity for what will probably amount to bad eyecandy that is going to be extremely hard to make look anything close to realistic or believable that a month after it gets implemented people will ask how to just skip it so they can get to Point B faster. I'm looking at the thing in logistical terms of gameplay, and i just dont see any positive value in it. Suggest a way of having this level of detail get readily utilized by some future campaign, that's the real issue.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
2asueekim
Hunter
Hunter
Posts: 95
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2008 6:43 am

Post by 2asueekim »

Do what is done with fighters and happeninings in not-curretnly visited systems: abstractly simulate it. "Some fighters are fighting near the world.... one dies". You don't simulate it too accuratly and surely don't actually spawn fighters in the planet's atmosphere untill there is a player close enough to observe it. This is not an issue.

You only generate the meshes once the player is near them and only spawn the ships when the player is near them in the atmosphere etc.


safemode wrote:if you bothered to read it, i never mentioned rendering offscreen. It's about simulating. In this setup, features in the mesh are created (exposed) as you get closer to the planet. This would have to happen to NPC ships as they approach a planet, or the game is going to behave completely different for the player than the NPC's. Also, when a player approaches a planet where ships are already near the planet, what happens then? The game will have to move the NPC ships around as the mesh warps and mutates into the highly detailed mode? What happens if this happens during complex dogfighting?

There is a big difference from rendering and simulating. Rendering should only care about what's on screen, simulating gets done whether it's on screen or not, and working with the correct mesh is necessary. We fully simulate multiple systems based on a config option.

There are ways around it, but they're hacks. Make the ai never go near a planet's surface except direct to bases. Make the mesh detail inward, rather than up, and only return to normal when all ships are out of it's area when the player leaves the LOD range. etc etc. I'm not saying it can't be done, but simulation doesn't stop at what you see on screen, collisions and ai and such all have to be considered.

But the main reason why am against planetary flight is that I dont think it will ever be possible to offer really good eye candy without extremely nice texturing and various new shaders given an atmosphere or not etc along with altered physics, and I dont think it can really offer much in terms of gameplay. People already complain about the travel time speccing away from a planet after launch, now imagine being on the surface... add another 3 minutes at least now , then what kind of missions would involve planet surfaces? who's gonna like spending 20 minutes trying to find a pin needle of a base on a planet's surface to attack, or even worse, a ship. I just dont see how we'd be able to accomplish this in anything but a hacked sorta way and it's only real draw being eye-candy, that seems a very far stretch.

You see a nifty feature, I see a whole lot of complexity for what will probably amount to bad eyecandy that is going to be extremely hard to make look anything close to realistic or believable that a month after it gets implemented people will ask how to just skip it so they can get to Point B faster. I'm looking at the thing in logistical terms of gameplay, and i just dont see any positive value in it. Suggest a way of having this level of detail get readily utilized by some future campaign, that's the real issue.
2asueekim
Hunter
Hunter
Posts: 95
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2008 6:43 am

Post by 2asueekim »

People want planetary flight, you are not all seeing and can make the decision "hey they don't know what they want". You are against change. Please stop putting up roadblocks. There is a programmer implementing planetary flight now, please don't block his contribution to VS.

Not everything has to be realistic, players could choose to quickly auto-dock with the main spaceport on a planet in space or they could choose to bring their ship all the way down and check out the rest of the planet, maybe even get out of their ship (alot of textures and player models can be taken from the Fully GPL game Nexuiz if desired).

People wan't expansive universe. Sure you'll say "well they better not be looking at VS for it!" because you are in love with the limited game that it is and has been since I stumbled over it 4 years ago (and very little other than art has changed in those years). You are a connosure etc, and arteeests.

Everyone else just want's space GTA + trading + do whatever they want.
(the last part is why everyone loves to hack VS rather then playing the game... from the begining)

Please let planetary flight come.
2asueekim
Hunter
Hunter
Posts: 95
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2008 6:43 am

Post by 2asueekim »

This post seems to have been already split up into a separate thread
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... hp?t=11431
-ace123
I think VS needs to be forked because it has gone nowhere in 4 years (other than nice art updates) do to luddites pooh-poohing the most desired features for the game.

You see new features as unfortunate new amounts of "work" you'll be required to do. I suggest getting a real job instead since coding for OSS games isn't enjoyable for you anymore.

Auto-generate cities on some of the surfaces of the planets (oh and yea and OSS programmer offered to do this since he allready had city generating code... was blown off by one of the luddite devs then too (same guy?) and allow people to leave their ship and you'll have a use for planets.

The problem with a fork would be keeping momentum.

How bout:
Vegastrike-Extended as a forks name
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Post by safemode »

nobody has a single say in what gets adopted into the game or not. In fact it's mostly a vote, and i've always been stating my opinion, not "our" opinion as a developer. The fact that the feature hasn't gotten seriously worked on in over 4 years of people requesting it should say at least one of two things. Either A. it's really hard and other things are more important. and/or B. It's really not going to fit well with the game and would see extremely limited usefulness.

There's no one dev, no group of devs, that keep any particular feature from reaching the public. If it was really that great of a feature, there'd be people working on it to get it in the game. Nobody is gonna stop someone from working on what they want. We may want to dictate when it gets included, but that's a different story. So you can vilify the devs all you want to explain why all your favorite features aren't getting included, but in reality it comes down to the fact that either nobody else thinks so who knows enough to program it or it's really not that high up on the list of things to get done that need to get done.

But to call for a fork would imply that someone actually has the code done, and everyone else looked at the great code and said no. That doesn't happen. We'd have no reason to do that. What we do get to do is hear requests for us to make changes, some of those are good, some of those aren't in line with what the game is intended to be. But like i said, nobody is stopping anyone, or roadblocking anyone. If anyone wants to write they can write, and if it's good, it's extremely unlikely it'll be turned down.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
safemode
Developer
Developer
Posts: 2150
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:17 am
Location: Pennsylvania
Contact:

Post by safemode »

2asueekim wrote:I think VS needs to be forked because it has gone nowhere in 4 years (other than nice art updates) do to luddites pooh-poohing the most desired features for the game.
What you dont see, because you're not bothering to look, is a ton of changes that dont drastically effect gameplay. 0.5 is a base version where a metric ton of code is getting refactored and streamlined for very cool features coming along in 0.6. Basically 0.5 is the genesis of the Ogre backend, new audio and video subsystems, new shaders, mesh LOD's. Content creation tools, unified build system, new configuration program, new collision system, etc etc. A lot of code, and a lot of slate cleaning for 0.6. But no, that's going nowhere, because it's not working on what you want. Nobody is stopping anyone from working on what you want, just remember that when you complain about why it's not getting done yet.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
2asueekim
Hunter
Hunter
Posts: 95
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2008 6:43 am

Post by 2asueekim »

When the orge backend is done can you hit this man up for his code: http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... c&start=25
(He said he'd OSS it)

It needs a bigger scale but it will work.

For further out just sample the top-level LOD (least detaled) into a texture and project it on a sphere, then when getting close to the atmosphere of the planet switch on the planet generation code.

As for helping out, I dunno I'm a perl and python scripter, don't know if that's any use in VS.

Is orge in 0.5 allready (also 0.5 seems to crash fairly often).
ace123
Lead Network Developer
Lead Network Developer
Posts: 2560
Joined: Sun Jan 12, 2003 9:13 am
Location: Palo Alto CA
Contact:

Post by ace123 »

If you have a gigabyte or less, it might crashes more often because it uses up more memory, and you might run out--try setting the memory settings down. Failing that, the developers would be interested in the output logs and backtrace.

No, 0.5 does not use OGRE. Indeed that was one of the main reasons for releasing 0.5. As you said, the project had not seen a release in 3-4 years, and OGRE port had been going slowly, so we decided instead of waiting indefinitely for the OGRE port that we should try and pick up momentum by actually releasing (and indeed a lot has changed lately).

And 0.5 would also then be a good branch point for something like ogre.
bgaskey
Elite Venturer
Elite Venturer
Posts: 718
Joined: Wed Mar 07, 2007 9:05 pm
Location: Rimward of Eden

Post by bgaskey »

It needs a bigger scale but it will work.
How do you know it will work. And even if it does work in the end, it many take many man-hours to integrate, and if the developers have other priorities (ingame or in real life) who can argue with them because in an open source project, they can always retort: go do it yourself if you want it so much.

To his credit, safemode has been rather attached to his roadmap, and while I completely agree with him, we must all be open-minded.

You can tell that this is a serious post because it doesn't have any emotes in it :wink: 8) :D :wink: :lol:
2asueekim
Hunter
Hunter
Posts: 95
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2008 6:43 am

Post by 2asueekim »

bgaskey wrote:
It needs a bigger scale but it will work.
How do you know it will work. And even if it does work in the end, it many take many man-hours to integrate, and if the developers have other priorities (ingame or in real life) who can argue with them because in an open source project, they can always retort: go do it yourself if you want it so much.

To his credit, safemode has been rather attached to his roadmap, and while I completely agree with him, we must all be open-minded.

You can tell that this is a serious post because it doesn't have any emotes in it :wink: 8) :D :wink: :lol:
Well if the devs aren't committed to the project enough to even intergrate allready made code... we'll... heh... then there are huge problems with the dev community of this game.

Safemode and klauss may be the only code devs committed to this game.
Maybe you need to recruit some more programmers.
There were other demos of seamless, procedurally generated flight, one was of earth. You need to contact those peeps and ask if they could help you out.

I'll be doing that.

I suggest you do too.
bgaskey
Elite Venturer
Elite Venturer
Posts: 718
Joined: Wed Mar 07, 2007 9:05 pm
Location: Rimward of Eden

Post by bgaskey »

why would we 'need' to be contacting these people. we don't 'need' planetary flight. If you want to actually contribute by trying to cantaact these people, I would be shocked, but by all means feel free.

but you still seem to think that integrating code will be easy. it will not. VS has a mess of ten year old source that is not especially readable. it may take as much time to integrate your planetary whatever engine as it did to write in the first place.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

2asueekim wrote:Well if the devs aren't committed to the project enough to even intergrate allready made code... we'll...
Which code is already made? I went to the ogre forum myself to ask the author to realease, already; and he said that it's going into a commercial game; and that "it wouldn't be wise releasing it before"... In other words, it will be years before it's open-source, if it ever is, if it's ever completed; which are a lot of IF's of increasing magnitudes. Besides, you don't dictate the agenda here. Safemode already told you he's not interested. I'm interested in it for my mod, PU; and if some useful solution comes up, --a real one; not a mirage-- I'd like to know.
klauss
Elite
Elite
Posts: 7243
Joined: Mon Apr 18, 2005 2:40 pm
Location: LS87, Buenos Aires, República Argentina

Post by klauss »

I think that rather than "not interested", safemode is simply very much aware of the amount of work it entails.

I believe safemode has a really accurate sense of reality, a sense that lets him set achievable goals in the short term because, lets face it, anything long term is likely not to get finished in this kind of project, where people only contribute if they have enough free time to dedicate to VS instead of, say, sleeping. Or even watching a movie, or being with his girlfriend/her boyfriend. Or simply resting.

Besides, any big undertaking takes 10 times the amount of effort it would take for a lone programmer, or a commercial engine. Things in this kind of OS project get discussed to death rather than implemented or prototyped. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it kind of hinders any effort towards big, long-term endeavors.

Hence his answer. He said, in perhaps harsh words: none of the current developers is able to delay his current work enough to take on that project. If you want it done, better do it. And, clarifying the bolded phrase, it means "yourself or get someone to do it", it means "rather than speaking about it". Such a big task will never get done if all we do is speak about it. And sadly for those that desire such a feature, none of the developers is enthusiastic about any solution that has been discussed to date.
Oíd mortales, el grito sagrado...
Call me "Menes, lord of Cats"
Wing Commander Universe
klauss
Elite
Elite
Posts: 7243
Joined: Mon Apr 18, 2005 2:40 pm
Location: LS87, Buenos Aires, República Argentina

Post by klauss »

I've already downloaded and skimmed his paper. Pretty interesting. It's a must-read. But I still don't see how he calls that "realtime". I guess I'll have to read it thoroughly to find out.

In any case, interesting stuff. Interesting stuff.
Oíd mortales, el grito sagrado...
Call me "Menes, lord of Cats"
Wing Commander Universe
ace123
Lead Network Developer
Lead Network Developer
Posts: 2560
Joined: Sun Jan 12, 2003 9:13 am
Location: Palo Alto CA
Contact:

Post by ace123 »

You posted about ad-astra a few days ago--Indeed, it looked like it was modelled on planetary flight, hence why that aspect of it is so polished.

It would be cool to have some GPL source code (I'm not entirely sure whether Steve would do that, considering that someone could theoretically make a 'libplanet' library the moment it has the GPL.)

A lot of things, even simple, can sometimes require a rewrite of a lot of code, simply because doing something in certain ways was never even considered at the time code was written. And doing planetary flight properly is by no means a simple task.

However any respect we had for you when you started posting about this has completely drained away, and although I will consider looking at this in the future, I have other things higher up on the priority list. I have looked at the papers and though the algorithm can be described, there is a lot more to it than an algorithm for dynamic generation... not including adding it into vs.
chuck_starchaser
Elite
Elite
Posts: 8014
Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2003 4:03 am
Location: Montreal
Contact:

Post by chuck_starchaser »

klauss wrote:I've already downloaded and skimmed his paper. Pretty interesting. It's a must-read. But I still don't see how he calls that "realtime". I guess I'll have to read it thoroughly to find out.

In any case, interesting stuff. Interesting stuff.
Is this the p-bdam paper?
Post Reply