Recognized How to fix planets

[Snk]

There are a lot of complaints people have with planets.

They're laggy and useless. I believe that encompasses most of the complaints. Here is how to fix them:

1. Cover them with an atmosphere you can't see through. This way, the planet doesn't lag the entire sector as you don't have any chunks to load until you get close.

2. Increase the size of atmospheres, like 6-7 hundred meters above the planets surface. The gravity well would be increased, obviously. Place a cloud cover between the surface and sky, with a projected surface between the clouds. This is to further limit the amount of blocks you need to load.

3. When you break the cloud cover, it only loads the surface of the planet, 3 blocks deep and only the segment you're facing and 1/4 the adjacent segments. Once you get to the planets surface, it loads those surfaces and the blocks underground in a 10x10x10 radius.

4. When you're in a build block, it would only load the segment you're on. That's the only segment you can edit anyways.

This would hopefully make it so planets can be much bigger in the future. As for usefulness:

1. Weapons should only be able go through 200m of an atmosphere. They'd explode when they'd reach they're maximum range. The only weapons that would be able to go farther would be amcs+beam effects. Here's my reasoning for that:

You couldn't wipe out a base from orbit in an instant. It would provide a new dimension to tactics, and give newbies a place to hide. You could slip into an atmosphere and radar jam, or just sit down on a planets surface. A new player could hide from pirates on a planet. It would promote planet bases, as it would provide them with a natural shield. It would be too overpowered as you could still attack it with amcs+beams.

 

[Mr.Steam]

Would you still be able to see ships in space from the planet surface? I like how you can see your ship above the planets surface. Nothing like a large battle cruiser hovering over your base to make you nervous.

I like the planets the size they are although they are currently really slow to load. The size seems good for battles and building without being so huge that they become a game by themselves or you can't find anything on them.

Right now it is actually pretty hard to find something with 12 sides to explore. I crash landed on a planet and did a start from scratch survival mode and didn't even realize there was a city on the other side of the planet until I got into space.

 

[aceface]

There are a lot of complaints people have with planets.

They're laggy and useless. I believe that encompasses most of the complaints. Here is how to fix them:

1. Cover them with an atmosphere you can't see through. This way, the planet doesn't lag the entire sector as you don't have any chunks to load until you get close.

2. Increase the size of atmospheres, like 6-7 hundred meters above the planets surface. The gravity well would be increased, obviously. Place a cloud cover between the surface and sky, with a projected surface between the clouds. This is to further limit the amount of blocks you need to load.

3. When you break the cloud cover, it only loads the surface of the planet, 3 blocks deep and only the segment you're facing and 1/4 the adjacent segments. Once you get to the planets surface, it loads those surfaces and the blocks underground in a 10x10x10 radius.

4. When you're in a build block, it would only load the segment you're on. That's the only segment you can edit anyways.

This would hopefully make it so planets can be much bigger in the future. As for usefulness:

1. Weapons should only be able go through 200m of an atmosphere. They'd explode when they'd reach they're maximum range. The only weapons that would be able to go farther would be amcs+beam effects. Here's my reasoning for that:

You couldn't wipe out a base from orbit in an instant. It would provide a new dimension to tactics, and give newbies a place to hide. You could slip into an atmosphere and radar jam, or just sit down on a planets surface. A new player could hide from pirates on a planet. It would promote planet bases, as it would provide them with a natural shield. It would be too overpowered as you could still attack it with amcs+beams.

yep , planets need to change in terms of what is loaded and how - because right now so many people lag like crazy at planets

 

[ToyotaSupra]

Well at least you didn't mention Instanced.

 

[jpf190279]

Having loading screens between space and planets is something a lot of us would like to avoid.

Interaction between space and planets should be seamless, that being said, at the minute the current system means players experience varying levels of latency when in proximity to a planet mostly due to massive server latency.

Covering the planets with an obscuring cover isn't ideal, it limits the visibility from the ground to space and from space to the ground.

I always thought it was odd that the game tries to load all the blocks attached to the planet, I would of thought loading the visible surface blocks would help cut the latency considerably. I also thought it was odd that my client didn't cache the data for a planet and then load it from my local cache rather than asking the server for the data each and every time I visited the planet which puts repeated stress on the server.
I also think we load planets wrong, rather than getting the server to do the processing, the server should generate a seed code which it sends to the client to allow them to use a procedure to generate the planet from their our local machine. This would free the server to do other things like deal with ships, players and the likes. This seed code could then be past to other players who also discover the planet saving countless cpu time of the server and distributing the processing load over dozens if not hundreds of client PC when it is needed. This of course works repeatedly well until the planets state is change i.e. someone deforms the landscape.

(Yeah I did watch the tech video on No Man's Sky - Good ideas to be stolen there) :P

You could go one further and use the seed in combination with a store of deformations to process the rendering of a planet, this way you have a simple seed code that says hey this was the initial size, shape, terrain of the planet looks like, and the deformation data can say and hey yeah that mountain at X, Y, Z is now a tower block. This would limit the amount of data being store and passed around and help speed up server responsiveness when dealing with planetary environments.

Just a thought.

I am making an assumption that NONE of what I have just said is already in the game, basing my assumption on observations only.

 

[aceface]

i really like this idea
Calbiri & schema PLS!

 

[Snk]

Would you still be able to see ships in space from the planet surface? I like how you can see your ship above the planets surface. Nothing like a large battle cruiser hovering over your base to make you nervous.

I like the planets the size they are although they are currently really slow to load. The size seems good for battles and building without being so huge that they become a game by themselves or you can't find anything on them.

Right now it is actually pretty hard to find something with 12 sides to explore. I crash landed on a planet and did a start from scratch survival mode and didn't even realize there was a city on the other side of the planet until I got into space.

I suppose when it becomes night you could still see things in orbit, but the objects in orbit couldn't see you. I like the idea of making planets real hard to explore, honestly. You could still fly around it with a shuttle that has stop effect.

 

[aceface]

I suppose when it becomes night you could still see things in orbit, but the objects in orbit couldn't see you. I like the idea of making planets real hard to explore, honestly. You could still fly around it with a shuttle that has stop effect.

this - i am fine with not being able to see ships from a planet, but at least be able to see the ships within the atmostsphere (similar to real life)

 

[The Wozard]

I like the idea of adding more of an atmosphere, one other thing I think need change is the functionality. Sure adding atmosphere dampening on weapons is great but then you might as well just fly away cause the stuff on the ground still cant move and will just take longer to destroy.

They should add some form of special mining or benefit for being on a planet, not just the same thing you find every where else. Something that makes a planet more useful.

 

[jayman38]

I would think that space object visibility from the planet (a.k.a. orbiting ships) wouldn't be a problem. It's just the visibility of a planet that lags stuff so bad. So I would think you should still be able to see objects in space from the ground. It would make sense to render the sky instead of the space background from the planet during the day. (Go ahead and just show the space background at night!) That should be an easy way to see both the sky as the skybox, but still being able to see orbital ships as if they were in the atmosphere. Seriously, that's how we see stuff in movies anyway, so it would be a good visual effect.

Assuming that titans could lag the server, maybe make the nearest X number of blocks rendered (server and client configurable? lowest number wins?) instead of the whole thing, so you can some of the titan, just not the whole thing, to help lower lag while in a planet atmosphere on lesser servers.

Additional idea: skybox and space background image-blending to create smooth in-betweener skyboxes during sunrises and sunsets. Edit: This in-betweener effect could probably be done on the client side to reduce the load on the server, and give the client a smoother transition, depending on their own computer's specs.

 

[hungrycookpot]

I don't think it's a good idea to make weapons useless against planetary targets, because this is not realistic. Lasers, of course would be diffused by the atmosphere and not be very effective, but a missile should be able to penetrate the atmosphere and hit the planet, as IRL.

 

[jpf190279]

i really like this idea
Calbiri & schema PLS!

If you like my idea, you could give it a thumbs up to help get it some attention.

In terms of atmosphere, my suggestion is more in tune with optimizing the games engine so it runs better for everyone, I don't really mind what effects the planet displays.

For reference, when a planet first loads or is loaded again I have noticed it hits the servers CPU like a freight train. If it is using a noise based algorithm then you can off load this calculation to the gfx card. At least this is what I have read when reading up on noise pattern terrain generation for games.

To be honest there are a million and one ways to improve the current issue with planets. I don't doubt for a second the great grey cat god of coding doesn't have something up his paw. *Please do not wipe this poor starmadian from existence with your salvage beams of doom. :D

 

[The Wozard]

I don't think it's a good idea to make weapons useless against planetary targets, because this is not realistic. Lasers, of course would be diffused by the atmosphere and not be very effective, but a missile should be able to penetrate the atmosphere and hit the planet, as IRL.

It depends on the missile. Some could very easily burn up in the atmosphere from the heat and turbulence of re-entry. I am not familiar with what Starmade missiles are, but considering they can be shot down suggests they are made of a material, and may be subject to problems with reentry.

That being said, should re-entering a planet with this change potential cause problems to ships. Such as hull damage on the side facing toward the planet to. Maybe only on larger ships would this effect take place so you can still get off a planet with a small ship with no shields.

 

[Snk]

Having loading screens between space and planets is something a lot of us would like to avoid.

Interaction between space and planets should be seamless, that being said, at the minute the current system means players experience varying levels of latency when in proximity to a planet mostly due to massive server latency.

Covering the planets with an obscuring cover isn't ideal, it limits the visibility from the ground to space and from space to the ground.

I always thought it was odd that the game tries to load all the blocks attached to the planet, I would of thought loading the visible surface blocks would help cut the latency considerably. I also thought it was odd that my client didn't cache the data for a planet and then load it from my local cache rather than asking the server for the data each and every time I visited the planet which puts repeated stress on the server.
I also think we load planets wrong, rather than getting the server to do the processing, the server should generate a seed code which it sends to the client to allow them to use a procedure to generate the planet from their our local machine. This would free the server to do other things like deal with ships, players and the likes. This seed code could then be past to other players who also discover the planet saving countless cpu time of the server and distributing the processing load over dozens if not hundreds of client PC when it is needed. This of course works repeatedly well until the planets state is change i.e. someone deforms the landscape.

(Yeah I did watch the tech video on No Man's Sky - Good ideas to be stolen there) :p

You could go one further and use the seed in combination with a store of deformations to process the rendering of a planet, this way you have a simple seed code that says hey this was the initial size, shape, terrain of the planet looks like, and the deformation data can say and hey yeah that mountain at X, Y, Z is now a tower block. This would limit the amount of data being store and passed around and help speed up server responsiveness when dealing with planetary environments.

Just a thought.

I am making an assumption that NONE of what I have just said is already in the game, basing my assumption on observations only.

"I also think we load planets wrong, rather than getting the server to do the processing, the server should generate a seed code which it sends to the client to allow them to use a procedure to generate the planet from their our local machine. This would free the server to do other things like deal with ships, players and the likes. This seed code could then be past to other players who also discover the planet saving countless cpu time of the server and distributing the processing load over dozens if not hundreds of client PC when it is needed. This of course works repeatedly well until the planets state is change i.e. someone deforms the landscape."

You are obviously much more tech savvy than me. I won't contradict your opinion on this. However, I feel planets could still generate their terrain a little more intelligently.

"Covering the planets with an obscuring cover isn't ideal, it limits the visibility from the ground to space and from space to the ground. "


Space-ground interaction should be limited, so you couldn't just pick things off from orbit. Ground to space interaction doesn't make sense during the day time, and at night you should still be able see ships between the clouds. Clouds also make the game look much better. It also makes planets more unique, as the cloud's altitudes could vary and stuff.

I like the idea of adding more of an atmosphere, one other thing I think need change is the functionality. Sure adding atmosphere dampening on weapons is great but then you might as well just fly away cause the stuff on the ground still cant move and will just take longer to destroy.

This depends on the situation. If you REALLY wanted to kill the guy on the ground, you could send down some fighters to take care of business. If we couldn't hide our player signatures by this time, you could use cannons + beams to penetrate the atmosphere, or lock onto anything that isn't radar-jammed. If it's just a troll chasing a newbie, then he'd probably fly away. Which is a good thing.

That being said, should re-entering a planet with this change potential cause problems to ships. Such as hull damage on the side facing toward the planet to. Maybe only on larger ships would this effect take place so you can still get off a planet with a small ship with no shields.

Eh. People wouldn't fly ships into planets because of the gravity well anyways.


Also: Some people are concerned about easily getting on and off planets. Well, for one, my faction has a shuttle with stop effect that really helps in getting on and off planets. Also, the less amount of people flying around in cores, the better. Also, space elevators.

I don't think it's a good idea to make weapons useless against planetary targets, because this is not realistic. Lasers, of course would be diffused by the atmosphere and not be very effective, but a missile should be able to penetrate the atmosphere and hit the planet, as IRL.

Gameplay>Realism.

 

[HerrColonel]

There are a lot of complaints people have with planets.

They're laggy and useless. I believe that encompasses most of the complaints. Here is how to fix them:

1. Cover them with an atmosphere you can't see through. This way, the planet doesn't lag the entire sector as you don't have any chunks to load until you get close.

2. Increase the size of atmospheres, like 6-7 hundred meters above the planets surface. The gravity well would be increased, obviously. Place a cloud cover between the surface and sky, with a projected surface between the clouds. This is to further limit the amount of blocks you need to load.

3. When you break the cloud cover, it only loads the surface of the planet, 3 blocks deep and only the segment you're facing and 1/4 the adjacent segments. Once you get to the planets surface, it loads those surfaces and the blocks underground in a 10x10x10 radius.

4. When you're in a build block, it would only load the segment you're on. That's the only segment you can edit anyways.

This would hopefully make it so planets can be much bigger in the future. As for usefulness:

1. Weapons should only be able go through 200m of an atmosphere. They'd explode when they'd reach they're maximum range. The only weapons that would be able to go farther would be amcs+beam effects. Here's my reasoning for that:

You couldn't wipe out a base from orbit in an instant. It would provide a new dimension to tactics, and give newbies a place to hide. You could slip into an atmosphere and radar jam, or just sit down on a planets surface. A new player could hide from pirates on a planet. It would promote planet bases, as it would provide them with a natural shield. It would be too overpowered as you could still attack it with amcs+beams.

Hello I plenty agree that's the kind of change I want to see in the game
Aditionnaly, I hope we can think about a feature (or an option) to increase the thrust needed to escape the gravity of a planet. I'd love to approach a fat gravity planet and being unable to launch my vessel back to orbit until manufactured more thrusters (In a RP point of view). So the gravity pull should be greater when in high alltitude (even if not realistic) so your vessel is not gravity glued in the ground while lower (so low thrust vessel can still hover a little).

But still, we should have a solution for big ships with low thrust getting stuck in a planet gravity ang causing a lot of lag (can happen with actual planet gravity pull). The game would need to "destroy" it in some way to save every other in the serv from the lag and prevent server restart in some cases.

Finnaly, I feel like starting a jumpdrive from the surface of an atmosphere is wrong. Maybe it should be disallowed

 

[El_Poulpy]

I think a part of the FPS drop near planets is linked to rendering.rendering planet progressively could help reduce this performance issue : https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HsskVpPskSc#t=54
watch till 1:18

the landscape is rendered progressively more and more precisely the nearest you are.

 

[jpf190279]

Jesus this site can be a snail at the best of times.

I was impressed with the Spacecraft video the first time I watched it. The implementation of the procedural terrain generator is very impressive. I suspect he has used a similar idea to the one I have suggested but added Level of Detail thresholds which the people passes through. Each LOD increases the detail of the render in the locale of the player till it is at the maximum detail level.

Thinking about cloud cover I like the thought of adding to the atmosphere of a planet but sorry I disagree entirely with the idea that players can not interact from space to the planet. It is already entirely possible in the RL world with our tech, let alone future tech allowing SSTO (single stage to orbit) tech as featured in StarMade.

ICBMs are a casing point see http://www.space.com/19601-how-intercontinental-ballistic-missiles-work-infographic.html

 

[Snk]

Jesus this site can be a snail at the best of times.

I was impressed with the Spacecraft video the first time I watched it. The implementation of the procedural terrain generator is very impressive. I suspect he has used a similar idea to the one I have suggested but added Level of Detail thresholds which the people passes through. Each LOD increases the detail of the render in the locale of the player till it is at the maximum detail level.

Thinking about cloud cover I like the thought of adding to the atmosphere of a planet but sorry I disagree entirely with the idea that players can not interact from space to the planet. It is already entirely possible in the RL world with our tech, let alone future tech allowing SSTO (single stage to orbit) tech as featured in StarMade.

ICBMs are a casing point see http://www.space.com/19601-how-intercontinental-ballistic-missiles-work-infographic.html

"Thinking about cloud cover I like the thought of adding to the atmosphere of a planet but sorry I disagree entirely with the idea that players can not interact from space to the planet. It is already entirely possible in the RL world with our tech, let alone future tech allowing SSTO (single stage to orbit) tech as featured in StarMade."

No. You could still interact from space to ground, just limited. Currently, you can destroy everything on a planet's surface without even lifting a finger. This isn't real life, gameplay comes first. Just because it happens in real life doesn't mean you can justify putting it in the game. You haven't even responded to my point from a game play point of view, you just use the fact that it can be done in real life as a justification. Space-ground interaction right now is horribly broken and needs to be fixed.

 

[HerrColonel]

Jesus this site can be a snail at the best of times.

I was impressed with the Spacecraft video the first time I watched it. The implementation of the procedural terrain generator is very impressive. I suspect he has used a similar idea to the one I have suggested but added Level of Detail thresholds which the people passes through. Each LOD increases the detail of the render in the locale of the player till it is at the maximum detail level.

Thinking about cloud cover I like the thought of adding to the atmosphere of a planet but sorry I disagree entirely with the idea that players can not interact from space to the planet. It is already entirely possible in the RL world with our tech, let alone future tech allowing SSTO (single stage to orbit) tech as featured in StarMade.

ICBMs are a casing point see http://www.space.com/19601-how-intercontinental-ballistic-missiles-work-infographic.html

Edit: I asked a stupid question you answered in your post, sorry for posting ^^

 

[Snk]

Hello I plenty agree that's the kind of change I want to see in the game
Aditionnaly, I hope we can think about a feature (or an option) to increase the thrust needed to escape the gravity of a planet. I'd love to approach a fat gravity planet and being unable to launch my vessel back to orbit until manufactured more thrusters (In a RP point of view). So the gravity pull should be greater when in high alltitude (even if not realistic) so your vessel is not gravity glued in the ground while lower (so low thrust vessel can still hover a little).

But still, we should have a solution for big ships with low thrust getting stuck in a planet gravity ang causing a lot of lag (can happen with actual planet gravity pull). The game would need to "destroy" it in some way to save every other in the serv from the lag and prevent server restart in some cases.

Finnaly, I feel like starting a jumpdrive from the surface of an atmosphere is wrong. Maybe it should be disallowed

If you are dumb enough to fly a large ship next to a planet it should go kabloom