New Universe Structure Suggestions

[Lenier]

So I heard rumors floating around that the universe structure is about to be rewritten. I don't know how severely the structure is going to be changed, but considering FTL and super small sectors and real dodecahedron planets and helmets and new base designs, I have some suggestions!
EDIT: some thought that this sounds demanding, and I apologize! These are suggestions, not demands. I love this game and schema too!


I will try to keep this short!

1. Universe map
I will leave this subject to its thread, but what I am about to describe necessitates something like this.

2. Gas
I think this is probably planned already. I want REAL gas. I want gas that is on a per-block basis, not some shape or cloud model. This means planet atmospheres that burn up fast moving objects, spaceship life support, short-range oxygen for player helmets, and an entirely new space battle strategy and ship design system. Pressurized chambers.

3. BIG sectors
I want the sector size to be massive. This is not to say that I want it to not be optional, but it would be great if the norm was more than twice what it is now. This would give some purpose to FTL while making gameplay much more expansive and much less of the same thing.
EDIT: There is some confusion about what I mean here. I think the starmade universe structure should be redesigned with bigger sector-defaults in mind. The current system gets very boring when sectors are enlarged (no offence upholders of the current system) so I thought that this suggestion made sense. Hopefully this helps!

4. Hyperspace EDIT: this section was uninformed! My bad!
I don't know how FTL is going to work, but I think it would be interesting if there were more than one way to use it. Teleportation is not nearly as cool as navigating hyperspace beacons through wormholes. Maybe this is too difficult, but at least make more than one level of warp-drive.

5. REAL planets
I know, we now have cooler planets, but I still would love to see planets that take up an entire sector, and load seamlessly in chunks slowly getting more detailed, and look awesome from far away, and have expansive biome networks, and can have more than one player base on them, and are almost impossible to destroy, and have gravity that pulls ships towards them, and can have satellites and stations orbiting them. That would be just so cool! I know that it is EXTREMELY difficult to make large things not laggy, but I am sure that schema can work something out that renders the planet surface realistically, but not entirely accurately, until you get close enough to see it. Maybe a blur factor using the same fractal used for the surface generation as a generated texture. Seamless ground to atmosphere to space transitions are arguably the coolest thing next to realistic space battles. I want to have nothing to do with planets until they are planet-sized.

6. Accurate storage
This again may be planned, and I will leave it to its thread.

That went longer than I hoped. Any ideas/improvements/other universe structure points?

 

[takethispie]

2. starmade is not aimed to be realistic, and most players don't want to have to worry about running out of gas or oxygen (but it will maybe come later as an options)

3. you can change sector size in config

4. if you don't know what's planned for FTL (most part being already in the devbuild and going to be in the next update ) why are you talking about it ? there is going to be 3 different FTL systems , you should read the informations about FTL on the forum ^^

5. Schema is a great dev but he is not a superhero he can't go over computers processing limits , if you want sector sized planet go get a double CPU motherboard with 64Go ram and 4 GTX titans in SLI and change the planets size settings

p.s: "I want" is not really friendly, it sounds like an order

 

[Fiddlejam]

I wouldn't want a whole sector planet, but I have to say that the current planets are awfully small. Maybe at least make one of the dodecahedron's sides as big as the top of the half-planets of before?

 

[Lenier]

I am sorry for sounding order-ish! That was not my intention!
Sorry about the FTL thing, ignore that bit! C:

I am not sure increasing planet size would really be that impossible. It may require modifying how planets are generated/displayed now, but it certainly would not be impossible.

1. If the ground generation/load/storage is sector based and is optimized, then the generation lag could be low.
2. If the ground uses fractals to generate, it should be a simple matter to prerender and save fake images of the planet surface.
3. If the current atmosphere display system is augmented by an actual block based atmosphere then you have your atmosphere
4. If there is a point at which you enter the atmosphere, there could be a slight blur or atmospheric transition effect as the atmosphere fades and reappears rendered from the inside, making the atmosphere transition nice.
5. If the ground begins rendering during this transition, then the ground would not appear suddenly
6. if it is saved well, then it should not take up more room then a minecraft world.

I don't think its impossible! anyway, I definitely think that an air/gas system would be an improvement. Given that a helmet exists, I imagine Schema is already on this one.

 

[NeonSturm]

Gas and liquids don't need to be blocks.

They should be abstract things that just have volume, density and mass. their density should increase as their volume contains more blocks. and their volume should increase as density is high enough to defy gravity influences.

I am in favour of a system which uses layers (bottom to top) which counts volume - obstructed volume per layer. thus make density/volume calculations as easy as updating values in an 1-dimensional array once a value exceeds it's allowed boundaries (bigger value range = more inaccurate, less calculations on frequent updates).

 

[Lenier]

hmm. My only concern would be making pressurized chambers work well with lots of moving ships if the gas is not actually part of the ship itself.

 

[NeonSturm]

hmm. My only concern would be making pressurized chambers work well with lots of moving ships if the gas is not actually part of the ship itself.

Explain your heretic opinion! :D My idea was for planet atmosphere and sea level!

It could affect only your movement / air supply if you are aligned to the planet, not a ship (for lag-freeness) or are outside the boundary box of it (if you are within boundaries
It doesn't really matter as the hull can have suit-refill stuff or you can recharge and go back but it would be too boring to enforce this on players, thus it is just skipped.

Was mainly an idea to simulate the ocean and atmosphere (not really possible to have natural things baring atmosphere).


For gas clouds, a per-block would be a waste of memory, except each 32^3 bit block only occupies less than 1 bit (still 27 MB memory per 10km^3 sector)

 

[takethispie]

If the ground uses fractals to generate, it should be a simple matter to prerender and save fake images of the planet surface

it's already the case when you look at a planet from far away it's prerendered

an air/gas system

I think oxygen and everything about survivability will be only an option, in the futur because it's totally useless right now

it's already very optimized , and as you don't have access to the source code you can't say how it work and if it can be optimized further :D

 

[Lenier]

My idea was for planet atmosphere and sea level!

Ha, ok. I can agree with that. I still think that ships should be able to have pressurized chambers. It would be sooo cool to have an airlock/life-support system that can get damaged in battle! Yay for systems based battles!

EDIT: more posted!

I am okay with having the player need air be optional, but it would be cool to at least have the systems in place to use it!

Also, I can't see the sourcecode, but I know that games have accomplished things like this in the past. I assumed that seeing the current system getting better and better my suggestion might be possible!

 

[jayman38]

It would also be neat to have explosive depressurization as a game mechanic. It would be a great showcase for a simple but effective short-term particle fountain to simulate decompression effects.

Imagine you have boarders who have hacked your airlock and are entering the ship to kill the crew and take the ship. However, you have a time-delay trap on the airlock system, triggered by hacking attempts. The invaders have just enough time to take off their helmets and unsling their guns when suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, the airlock on the other side of the room slams open, and the invaders, caught unprepared for such a trap, are blown out into space. Bonus points for placing sharp, pointy spikes at the open airlock, to impale intruders before they tear off and continue their unwanted evacuation, now with freshly torn holes in their suits and bodies.

Explosive depressurization could also be an alternative escape-pod-launch or fighter-bay-launch mechanic.

 

[NeonSturm]

the invaders have just enough time to take off their helmets and unsling their guns when suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, the airlock on the other side of the room slams open, and the invaders, caught unprepared for such a trap, are blown out into space.

Unrealistic.The air flow in most air-locks stop before enough inertia is applied to a human body - especially with artificial gravity and spikes that may slow you down or something you can grab. Do you know how much surface area is required to stop a free fall how much bar your body is exposed to while falling at maximum speed?


You can just have spikes coming out from the bottom to pierce suits and open wounds and then de-pressurise something that is usually kept as small as possible.


But if you think it is cool, I don't want to ruin your fun building area-triggered sidewards-gravity air locks that throw peoples out and have guns that shot at the hackers.

 

[Valiant70]

2. Gas
I think this is probably planned already. I want REAL gas. I want gas that is on a per-block basis, not some shape or cloud model. This means planet atmospheres that burn up fast moving objects, spaceship life support, short-range oxygen for player helmets, and an entirely new space battle strategy and ship design system. Pressurized chambers.

Per-block gas is too CPU intensive. It would have to be handled by proximity to planets. Some highly-simplified aerodynamics might be possible with some clever coding. Aerodynamic characteristics would have to be calculated while building based on surface areas of different sides.

• Each side would be assigned a drag value.
• Upon entering an atmosphere, three trigonometric calculations decide what percentage of these is applied to the direction of travel.
• These percentages would then be multiplied by the drag values for each side of the ship and by atmospheric density.
• Wing or lifting body lift force should not be simulated. It isn't necessary and would add more calculations to an already intensive process.

Even this might not be feasible due to the number of calculations and the frequency in which they must be repeated for each vessel flying through an atmosphere.

Another possibility might be per-chunk gas around planets with drag that does not take aerodynamics into account but still feels sensible.

5. REAL planets
I know, we now have cooler planets, but I still would love to see planets that take up an entire sector, and load seamlessly in chunks slowly getting more detailed, and look awesome from far away, and have expansive biome networks, and can have more than one player base on them, and are almost impossible to destroy, and have gravity that pulls ships towards them, and can have satellites and stations orbiting them. That would be just so cool! I know that it is EXTREMELY difficult to make large things not laggy, but I am sure that schema can work something out that renders the planet surface realistically, but not entirely accurately, until you get close enough to see it. Maybe a blur factor using the same fractal used for the surface generation as a generated texture. Seamless ground to atmosphere to space transitions are arguably the coolest thing next to realistic space battles.

I agree. Seamless planetary flight is really amazing, and what you describe would make Starmade an incredible game.

This should be possible at least to some degree with some clever coding. Whether or not it is feasible I don't know, but I hope it is. If a planet surface could somehow be handled somewhat like Minecraft's chunk loading with a sort of distance filter that renders hundreds to thousands of distant blocks with a few polygons... I think it could be made to work. The problem would be the file size of such large planets. Planets would have to be made rarer AND some form of file compression would be necessary. To make any of this possible would require some real innovation. If anything prevents this in the long run, it'll probably be Scema's atrocious choice of language (Java, an interpretive (non geeks read "slow") language).

2. starmade is not aimed to be realistic

I'm sick of hearing this. Starmade is "unrealistic" enough for warp drives, ships made of little blocks, and fictional materials. It should still make sense by not committing impossibilities that cannot be easily imagined away. Such impossibilities break immersion and make a bad game. For a proper example of acceptable unrealism, please refer to my discussion of aerodynamics above. Remember, things should still feel sensible.

 

[Lenier]

Per-block gas is too CPU intensive.

Maybe. Although per-block gas for spaceships may not be too bad.

This should be possible at least to some degree with some clever coding.

Maybe chunks on planets only save if they have been modified. I say this assuming that the planet geometry is generated from a map-seed and a method of procedural generation or fractal formula. Just regenerating the surface if it hasn't been edited would make it pretty cheap storage unless you travel across the entire planet shooting missiles at it or something stupid.

 

[Valiant70]

Maybe chunks on planets only save if they have been modified. I say this assuming that the planet geometry is generated from a map-seed and a method of procedural generation or fractal formula. Just regenerating the surface if it hasn't been edited would make it pretty cheap storage unless you travel across the entire planet shooting missiles at it or something stupid.

You could even have a config setting not to save changes made by weapons fire so that idiots wouldn't pointlessly increase file sizes. My concern then would be the CPU load from generating all of those chunks every time.

 

[Lenier]

Well, if the chunks remain as shallow as they are now, I think that could be optimized to perfection! Minecraft has a generation system for massively tall chunks that generates relatively quickly. Its possible! maybe!

EDIT: worse case scenario it works as badly as it does on my computer now!