Planets

[shenle]

Yes, planets. We're all drawn to them, yet they have so little to offer in the VS universe. Well, except for a spaceport here and there.

Should VS eventually include atmospheric flight and planetary surface exploring/landing? I think it should. I think it can only become better by having it. It's actually my post in the economy thread about mining that reminded me of it.

Here's an example. Another open source space sim that I'm following the development of is Pioneer http://www.spacesimcentral.com/pioneer-f35/
It started as an Elite2 remake, but it has become a lot more than that. They have been doing a great job at modeling planet surfaces that you can land on at random, collide with, find spaceports on the surface to land at etc.

Here are a few recent pictures from there:










Is this something that we want for VS? (I know I do) Let's consider the discussion open.

[klauss]

It is something we want, but it's very difficult.

Pioneer started development with the feature in mind, the design already included planet landing from the first draft. In fact, IIRC, the whole thing is centered around it.

Believe me, adding the feature to an already existing game that hasn't been designed with the feature in mind is orders of magnitude harder than writing it from the get go as pioneer did.

We have priorities, and atmospheric flight, mostly because of how hard it is to get right, is down there on the bottom.

But we all would like it if it happened for VS.

PS: really impressive screenshots - pioneer has advanced a lot since the last time I've checked it out

[Deus Siddis]

From what I have heard the (most) major prerequisite to it seems to be replacing VS' existing graphics code with OGRE. Presently strook is working on this OGRE integration, so that he can go on to implement this sort of planetary LoDs that other projects like Pioneer, Simerge and Infinity are doing.

Maybe someone could also begin to implement atmospheric flight physics like fluid friction (drag that is) or gravity models.


@Klauss

Would you say then that it would be easier to port over VS-specific features to the Pioneer engine than to build this feature into the existing VS engine?

[klauss]

Ogre is not a prerequisite.

Replacing VS's homemade rendering engine with Ogre will ease up maintainance since we won't have to worry about portability issues and all those complex tasks the Ogre team has already tackled (and continues to tackle).

In essence, using Ogre will free our time for other endeavors.

But it's not a prerequisite and it's not the only way to get planetary flight. In fact, planet LODs are so complex and custom as a technique that Ogre doesn't help the tiniest bit - it's not like features like shadows, imposters and occlusion culling, that are common and standard, and for which Ogre has scores of reusable plug-ins.

Planet lods are not an Ogre feature, and we would have to code most of it with or without Ogre. The plugins that already exist for Ogre are in diapers and really not that good or flexible enough - at least last time I checked.

About pioneer, I don't know pioneer that well. I wouldn't know. Probably not very easy either.

[Deus Siddis]

Planet lods are not an Ogre feature, and we would have to code most of it with or without Ogre. The plugins that already exist for Ogre are in diapers and really not that good or flexible enough - at least last time I checked.

What about ROAM? 1 2 3

By the time VS is using OGRE, they might be in big boy pants.

[klauss]

I see tons of videos and demos and no code.

I remember one of the more promising ones was closed source - is ROAM it?

Closed source = no good

But, in essence, that's the idea: reuse the effort of others

[Deus Siddis]

I see tons of videos and demos and no code.
I remember one of the more promising ones was closed source - is ROAM it?
Closed source = no good

Looks like it is supposed to eventually be open sourced:

Like I said before, I will release it when it is actually useful (as an alternative terrain plug-in or library), at the moment the engine works, but for an outsider to know how to use it, that would be hard. Quote

[shenle]

That doesn't look half bad.
I agree with the closed source/open source thing, otherwise we wouldn't be here having this discussion. But when/if this becomes open sourced with a compatible license, I think it could be just what we need.

[strook]

hi folks, another officially seamless flight thread?
ya development is going slow, al last i stucked on using mygui, but with cegui, development is going on.

didn't you remind the paged geometry feature of ogre?

with it sampled objects can be put into the scene about 100 times faster than with opengl.

and *yes* i have already the code for seamless flight. but it is buggy and it works only for opengl and very slow.

i have to inspect it when i'm done setting up a basic gui with ogre & cegui. also i have the code for loading in vs meshes.

but there is also a bit coding i'll have to set up a manualobjectloader or so for ogre for using the vs meshes.

also i have included the vs shader code, but i'll need it only to load the vs shaders, using them with ogre funcs.

also implementing the code on windows should be done.

if i have all done that, i could go over to seamless flight.

you may see no touchable efforts yet, just look on my hp on

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vegaogre/

to see the developement.

i give a commentary using svn ci -m "bla" but i don't see it, only the files which are changed... anyone knows how to see the commit message?