The SE planets require a godawful amount of system resources--I'm running a lower end box (though the several members of the SE forums call me a PC Master Racer for saying so) with 16 gigs of RAM, and after building some small structures on a planet in the Solar System start it's gobbling up 10 gigs. Now we put that in StarMade, with planets closer together... and more of them... and you're gonna have a bad time.
Probably because the game is in development... And the planets aren't optimized...
The SE planets run terribly right now (though are pretty cool), and when you dig too far down your stuff starts despawning so you've got maybe 200 meters to play with of depth...
Ditto.
So sure they're prettier, but they're also buggier than what we have right now in Starmade. They're also not procedurally generated--the three planets and moons we have right now were all hand-made (part of the reason it took so long to release the update).
Current bugginess isn't really a measure of how the planets would work; SE in general is far worse optimization-wise than StarMade, and seeing as the planets were just released it's even worse. As for the planets, procedural generation is entirely possible seeing as the planets are made from voxels; games like... well,
StarMade... have pulled it off before, and there are plenty of tech demos for smoothed voxel terrain generation out there, if not full games. (And if not, they're definitely coming.) I think the SE team just wanted to get the current planets out then work on procedural planets.
In any case, the current, pretty-but-terrible-acting planets in SE, with all their bugs (which, being bugs, are just
issues to fix almost by definition) have far more potential to become immersive, decent-looking places to go than StarMade's current planets... Once all the derpy bugs are gone, of course. But knowing SE, they'll continue to perform terribly, even with tiny ships, not because that's a limitation of the planets, but because that's a limitation of
SE. Or it may just be that they're trying to get the game feature-complete before optimizing at the end, which may or may not be a good idea depending on who you ask.
This absolutely
I actually just spent the past few days playing SE exclusively just so I could authoritatively talk shit about the planets and performance. SE planets are probably an apt analogy for the entire game. They look pretty, they really do. But they run like ass and they are glitchy as hell.
Very true, but this just kinda proves my point.
It's hard to see in videos but the voxels are literally always shifting. It's bizarre. The slightest contact with anything will cause deformation. To test I landed a small fighter on a flat patch of land. I left it for three days and came back to find the land had deformed around it, even though I had powered down the reactors on board and there was no reason for physics calculations to take place. The same thing takes place with stations.
That is a collision engine bug that occurs with all their voxel structures, it seems. We don't have it and it's not really a concern for us seeing as we don't use their odd voxel deformation system. It also happens to have absolutely nothing to do with their planet architecture in particular, as you said yourself.
Honestly, it'd probably be better if you actually did more research beyond a youtube video before making a topic like this.
The planets are "better." Hell, a few of their
other concepts are "better" too. The problem is that the physical, programmed game isn't, at least in its current state.
