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wesbruce

Alpha Team Vanguard
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Posts posted by wesbruce

  1. I said No because there are some contexts where that would render a project impossible. However I have already suggested way to package raw materials as generic cargo that pays people on delivery only,  so the courier cannot steal it profitably but anyone stealing it from him still has to deliver it to the designated destination to collect any loot. 

  2. Wow ... some great feedback guys.

    Did someone say Unigine! ... I love that engine, their Heaven demo makes me want to build an MMO in that world!

     

    I'm not looking to rock the boat like maybe ... BlueDrake42 or whatever his name is ... but I do want to understand what it is that NQ is saying they have here.

     

    For example ...

     

    Procedural generation 

    I know that Voxelfarm worlds are procedural and look amazing but my experience in a shard based world was poor when using a real world MMO solution built on the engine.

    The alternative is something like no mans sky that did not meet expectations at all and both didn't save the players chances (no mans sky didn't even allow any changes).

     

    Voxel Technology

    Oddly enough I have been talking about doing exactly this for a couple of years now but couldn't find enough support from a seasoned developer community to get help with this idea of using Voxels on this scale because I had developer after developer tell me "it's impossible on todays tech without breaking the laws of physics"

    ...

     

    That said ...

     

    I am believer in the technology and do feel it can scale, using procedural in combination with static data and compression / bit packing techniques for the transmission brings the scale in terms of raw bytes in to the possible but it does come with a few "negotiations" you have to make. 

     

    As I said when I started this thread, the raw numbers of Voxels that represent a large object are just insane and with something like a space station or a large ship you simply can't start from a procedural base so every Voxel has to be considered a change.

     

    Given that "fact of how Voxels work" you can then take a data source containing any number of voxels and generate a mesh from that data easily enough and using some pretty common programming techniques known by many today construct meshes at varying "qualities" for use in game.

     

    So in short ...

     

    My question really wasn't "Using this number of Voxels is impossible right?" it was more something along the lines of ...

     

    Given that I as a keen user of the game spend say 2 hours per day for say 10 days in a row editing Voxels I could as a single player build a pretty hefty space station looking at the tooling available here it's reasonable that I could build one of those space stations.

    Looking at the raw numbers I presented before, lets assume my space station creation was something like 10 million Voxels, that's 10 million individual Voxels that 1 player has created that the server has to process and store and hand out whenever someone looks the right direction from the right spot on the game.

     

    I am however, only 1 player ... so lets scale that up ... add another 999 players and we have 1000 x 10 million Voxels that are all entirely non procedural and could be reasonably constructed on the game server.

    even if those ridiculous number of Voxels are not right next to each other that's still a lot of data to be managing and processing.

     

    For an MMO that's a tiny number of players and for a single shard that's an insane amount of mesh data being handed around, the previously mentioned "developer community" tell me this is not possible.

     

    So how I see it ... 

    This is either being massively over sold or there are some "gotchas" that are still being overcome (and I seriously want them to be) but these guys must be on to something that through years of digging around and researching this particular technology (Voxels) I have not found anyone that can do this or anyone who even remotely has an idea how to do this on this scale. 

     

    That on it's own raises questions does it not? 

     

    I really don't want another no mans sky ... but I do want to know that this stuff really is possible so a little insight in to the tech would be really nice to have if the devs over at NQ are in a sharing mood (just a little technical peek ... please!).

    That's not how you save a voxel construct. The simplest way is to save the voxel type and number. log the position of the constructs and the important voxels.  Mesh over the majority non air voxels to get the surface mesh, Whats visible. That's the first thing you see from a distance. Lod reduces that further. You do not need to record the location of all air voxels unless the air voxels are a small minority. Likewise if the construct is mostly rock you don't need to log the location of every voxel of rock just everything else that is not air and rock. The size of the save will depend on the diversity of the voxel type and complexity available. 

     

    Another compression trick is to take a cross section though the ship. Compare that to several other adjacent cross sections; If they are all the same you can log that as a repeating plane and only record the number of repetitions. Then log any exceptions to the rule. Also if the ship is built with a symmetry setting on you only need to record and save one side or quarter and the number of planes and the exceptional asymmetrical objects. 

     

    Thirdly there is a key compression possible for plumbing and electrical's. Pipes only connect to pipes, power to power so the first level of save only needs to log it as a power/ pipe system without saying which. The engine can work out the type from the connections. 

  3. They bake their voxel constructs as a single mesh when built to reduce the load...

     

    Your numbers are not taking into account occlusion... that's hiding what you can't see, like, the inside of a planet, or a ship, or a moon...

     

    Also, you are seeming to not be familiar with LOD... that's the detail of an object when it's far away being lower, which is what they use on constructs far away... which are baked already.

     

    Also, I don't know what Voxelfarm engine you speak of, Landmark uses ForgeLight . 

     

     

    Planet side and H1Z1 use forge light but landmark uses voxel farm. They are trying to merge the two at daybreak but its hard. I also have a copy of voxel farm but it's not the same version. Generally twerks right and TehWardy is out of date.

    DU and Voxel farm are close but not the same and both are 2 generations beyond the limits set by minecraft almost a decade ago. The limits that TehWardy is talking about are also broken easily by some minecraft modding tools and the newer optimisations. . IE minecraft bakes the top surface of a chunk in some mods. 

    World gen is three things. The seed, the biome library, and the chunk system. 

    All major voxel worlds use these, and all bake a set of mesh's at the surface. One serves as collision, one occlusion, there are lighting and in some games, placement meshes, pathing meshes, hazard maps,etc. What you see is created by a lot of things that your computer sees but never draws for you.   

     

    The next stages of voxel evolution will involve:

    1. Localised seeds. I.E. a different seed for part of a planet to the other. Send 3 to 5 continental 'plate' seeds per planet. Giving more diversity than a single seed planet can do. 
    2. Reversing the seed. Taking the player builds in and area and reversing the seed algorithms or searching seed algorithms and seeds for a close match too them saving the seed and any voxels that differ from that reversed seed. Both humans and computers are only pseudo-random. 
    3. Hashing a build. Getting a hash does not save the detail of the build, it's a lossy compression, but it may allow some long term saving off line or client side of a build detail with only the hash stored centrally on a server or in a blockchain to prevent tampering and ascertain value in the case of compensating a build error. Comparing two hashes verifies that the data is the same or has changed since two hashes of identical data are always identical. 

    A 100 kilometer world is not a big file.

    Vladimir Romanyuk's Space Engine stores the entire known universe with to scale planets, Galaxies, asteroids, comets, nebula using a few public databases and some nice world generation code. It is not a game yet that's planned. However you can fly around the universe in ships already.  

  4.  

    One question about the constructs and DPU devices... Where will they be executing?  On the user's local machine if they are in the area, or is there a hosted cloud / server service for processing all of these DPU events?  
     
    My question is largely because if run locally, the effectiveness of DPU code would be higher on machines they have stronger CPU power, giving a possible advantage to more powerful machines as they theoretically can run more DPUs at once without lagging down the game.

     

    If you had any early experiences with Second Life then this scripting architecture is relatively familiar. It's a big improvement on linden labs original LSL but many of the features that people are debating have been in the linden scripting language for 8 years.  Home computer processing power is not a major variable. The scripts in many cases, even the turret attacking you, is running at your end.  The fun starts when either a script is out of date or does not load at all.  The protections and permissions systems is not easy but not new. 

  5. Structure cores define a specific volume. Length, breadth, height  parameters the cores come in 5 or 6 sizes. Smaller structures may be able to nest in available space in or on the edge of larger structures. Or they may exclude each other. That defines any city geometry.

     

    The other factor may be the need for streets, landing pads, parking. We will have people that want to walk, run, use hover vehicles that probably can't go more that 1 or 2 metres high so we will need roads. Landing vertically is hard so many flying craft will need skyways, highways in the sky. Like the jetsons, star wars or 5th element. We may even need speed limits. Horror! 

     

    The orgs may lay out at the very least flattened terrain, stone roads or marked roads. White engineered stone perhaps. Most will build along them. I've played in a few games where sandbox building occurs; second life, minecraft servers, wurm online. Make a road and you find most people honour and build out from the resulting informal design. 

    We will have shanty towns in some places but even that will be a style choice.

     

    One question is what happens to the structures resources when you deactivate a structure core to pack it up and move. Do the resources despawn back to your inventory? If it does then there is no problem. Shanties will clear as people move; structure cores are expensive. If not the resources walls floors etc would be unprotected and would be mined out by either the owner or others.
    I'm not a dev so I'm just going on the existing published game design. However I'll be making roads where I need to. 

  6. The ship core units come in five sizes with known length, breadth and height. Even if you don't put voxels in that volume that volume defines the ship and it's collusion volume relative to other ships of the same core class and landing on voxels of terrain and larger ships.  Thus we can define 4 or 5 door and hatch areas as the front face of the class for doors, or it's bottom face for hatches. I would be possible to add 5 elements for doors and 5 for hatch/elevators which would either spawn the door voxels or would control them. 

     

    You can do modular voxel doors of any size if you have a voxel that switches both texture and collision category on a signal. The question is whether you want to have that signal sent to all voxels in a volume XYZa to XYZb  or propagating though from voxel to voxel. The latter is harder. Animating the texture nor using a large macro texture adds complexity. 

     

    Ship elevators are also possible if you have a deck walk able voxel and a volume. Any thing in the volume is moved down or up at velocity n with the deck voxel moving with them. 

     

    You would either need an alignment field that pulls ships of the correct size into alignment. See No mans sky for that. It would bounce bigger ships.

    Or you would need to make the doors a little larger than needed for bad pilots. Most games do both. 

    Force fields are easier because in most cases they are just no collide voxels with a translucent texture. 

    The minecraft mods are on the curse list and on they're all on github. If you ask permission you may find you could read the code and quickly work out the C++ equivalent. Most static block tricks in minecraft should be doable with Dual Contouring. If it does not have an inventory or flow but just a state and texture swap it should be easy.  

    https://mods.curse.com/mc-mods/minecraft/238546-modular-force-field-systems-mffs

  7. Ramming is dead easy in ship combat. Just add a ram weapon that you add to a ship that does a huge amount of damage, adjusted for velocity, but has a 1 or 2 metre range. You automatically tab target any ship in range.  

     

    The real problem is the gameplay effects it makes big dumb ram ships too easy and kills all other ship combat options. 

  8. My question stems for the long term and short. And thats the fact that in the thousands of players that are going to join.  [Moderated]Unpleasant behaviors[/Moderated] will emerge. This is relevant in ANY sandbox game. I know you can assign permissions but what about things like ramming? Using the initial resources your given and wasting them on a ram would be detrimental to the resource economy! Speaking of it. What happens when the resource on the planets that we are given runs out? Will resource generate randomly? And what happens after the server has been up for so long? It'll look like the surface of the moon! And how would updates effect gameplay? New things and mechanics getting changed and added. And what about reloading into the game after being gone? How would you load all the changes to the voxels?

     

    Please awenser my questions. Thank you

    Ramming and easily blowing a hole in a ship is unlikely. Combat will be about knocking out ship systems and finishing with a boarding action and a hack to take the ship. 

     

    On resource limits a 100 km planet has 125000 cubic kilometres of rock. If it has only 1000 ore seams per km2  that's a lot of ore. So in a couple of years 20000 people will have to dig though every cubic km to find every ore seam. We are not going to find every ore seam. Australia has sites where the gold rush never mined out the ore. Easier and cheap mines were founds and so the miners moved on leaving some ore untouched. One is 40 km from where I live. It was reopened in the 1980's and is still being mined today 20 years later. 

     

    It should be possible to do planetary restoration on a grand scale. Repairing mined out landscapes can be a simple task if rock, dirt and grass are replaceable without a claim. It's easy to create an org to beautify spawn and repair the world. It's even possible to make a filling voxel cheaply to fill holes. It's a simple matter to make restoration an org project or a Nova Quark market NPC transaction.

  9. We do have a genuine problem with several countries where the currency is so low it makes it hard to buy 18 EU a month. The Russian Ruble is 0.014 EU. Average in come is 36525 RUB/Month. Minimum wage is 6204 RUB/Month. $A126.67 a month. A fraction of what I earn and I'm under the Australian minimum wage. 

    It's the same for many African, south american and Asian gamers. 

    If however these Russian and third world gamers can earn their DAC there is a strong drive to monetise the DAC. It's a problem no one has solved. The free to play is not a solution to the income problems of low productivity societies and low capitalisation in some economies. 

  10. Do you mean this? If so, then no, it does not answer my questions regarding voxel mesh size. If anything, those videos in specific imply something quite dishonest going on behalf of Novaquark, but as I've said, I thought to give them the benefit of the doubt.

     

    Specifically, this video seems to be an unmistakable example of non-voxel based terrain masqueraded as voxel based terrain generation. Would you like me to explain why that terrain isn't voxel based, why non-voxel based terrain is a terrible design decision(for Dual Universe), or what dark scheme I think Novaquark could be up to? It's obvious that either I'm missing some major feature of development, or NovaQuark isn't being honest with development, and that concerns me.

    Mathig your out of date with how voxels work now. You can generate that terrain mesh quite easily in a voxel engine. That's just a voxel terrain, relatively smooth, with decorations; the rocks. I can't see why you think it's a non voxel terrain. 

    There  many other worlds: rising world, Landmark, Life is feudal or Wurm online all of which look similar. They have slightly different resolutions. Wurm is the biggest and oldest grading down to landmark which is 20 cm. You can take any terrain mesh and plug it into a voxel engine to get most terrain. Even real world digital elevation meshes can be used. Procedural engines just mix them as grey scale textures beforehand with various weighting algorithms. Voxels don't need to be blocky. Minecraft, blockscape, vox and cube world are blocky as a style.  

    Here is a youtube of me in another voxel world. Rising world.

    It's not using Dual Contouring and I glitch though the world plane once. It has a lot of grass but it definitely is the kind of thing most voxel engines can do today.

    DU is doing some innovative things but the basic terrain you see is the easy bit.  You can make that terrain in Unity, Blender, etc.  

  11. Look at the edge of the voxel deletion in the terrain in the gameplay video the edge of the 4 Sphere deletions tells you the scale. It's clearly the same as the constructs 25 cm with some smoothing. The dual Contouring Allows multiple levels of detail. The limit is memory. Any change made by the player must be recorded somehow and integrated into the  chunk save that is shared by a server to all. The building core units can probably record some fine detail with rock, dirt grass etc. The seed world generation can be 25 cm because a seed interacts with the terrain to subdivide it while sealing any holes with added vertices. Solve the save memory challenge and you can do any size.  http://www.frankpetterson.com/publications/dualcontour/dualcontour.pdf

  12. The next question is how the heck do we make that work will 10000 people on the server. 

    Multi channels will be needed: Local, Ship, Org/system, org wide. or maybe just local and team with an invite mode.  

    Perhaps org battle mode which auto invites all regional org members on activation. 

    You would also need a trade channel ideally local only and an off topic channel so you can be told to take it some where else. 

    Throw in a GM management and voice help channel and that's 7 or 8 channels. Are there plug and play voice middle ware that can do all that yet? 

  13. I'm the guy that suggested mock lootables. This means that if a pirate or bandit player attacks and kills another player the player victim does not lose his stuff (he may lose a percentage of ores/ parts etc) but he and his ship is 'insured' as in eve. The loot the pirate gets is generated by the game and is in some cases proportional to his inventory or it could be a saleable loot item.

    There are three advantages to this:

    • NQ can toss in a few DAC's to attract more players. In this case the pirate gets a DAC but the looted player does not lose one. But these free DAC would reduce income to NQ. All lootable DAC's must cost someone money somewhere. 
    • The looted players don't cry and demand compensation from NQ or lawyer up.
    • If NQ finds that the world gen is running out of resource X they can fix that by bumping the supply of X up in loot.

    This will be one of the few game with no lootable NPC so that makes control of resource balances harder.

    Remember world gen ores and resources will be locked by seed. They can adjust undiscovered planets but not Alioth or discovered planets. If exploration lags the economy there could be a problem. The key points for fine tuning are Loot or adjusting recycling, there is a disposal machine in the art work. A DAC in a loot chest in a ruins would encourage exploration if that is lagging expectations. 

  14. I voted option A all DAC are safe because many will enter the game without reading any warnings a will this get robbed. This would produce thousands of appeals to NQ for refunds and probably more that one lawsuit. If you want to be robbed sell a DAC in game load up with valuable cargo and go get robbed.

    Everyone knows that this whole debate is driven by the pirate players that know that they can't earn DAC playing pirate only. They will need to find a fence to make a DAC earning profit and any civilisation would hunt down both the fence and the pirate. Any civilisation would hunt down or ostracise known DAC thieves. This is a game, yes but this is also a civilisation building game. Civilisations eliminate pirates or make them navy officers. Historically most European pirates were just navy officers who had come home to discover their king or queen dead. That's why Blackbeards ship was called Queen Ann's Revenge. Most muslim pirates are essentially just navy for some islamic state. Piracy was never anarchy or liberty. 

  15. Just as a test I just re installed Planet Entropia and fired it up. The debate about payments above is really about player loss if the leave the game for a while. Hence the test; I've been out of Entropia for 6+ years. My avatar was unchanged even though all the buildings around me were different. I went back to Port Atlantis, Got lost, got killed by a level one creature. All my skills, recipes, inventory and stored items were there. I did not own a room or landing pad etc but they are just another form of inventory. 

     

    DU would be only different because your base would be gone but that's sandboxes for you. And there is no 10 hit monster to kill you while you try to remember how to equip a weapon. Derp. 

     

    PS after 6 years the lighting glitch in the port Atlantis shops is still there! 

     

    The most recent change is interesting you have a special pill that allows you to become one of the monsters and go hunt the players. Yikes. Nice idea. I've already suggested a variant of that here without knowing they had implemented this variant of my ancient forum suggestion there. 

  16. If you can convert IRL currency into in-game currency and vice versa then that would make it technically possible to pay to win? if I can get in-game currency and buy an OP ship of some guy then that would seem unfair to others. Also, this can be implemented by a player business's it's not something that needs to be default in the gam,e. 

    My point exactly bitcoin is not a competing currency to the current mix of money technology. Bitcoin is a currency life boat to keep the internet going through a hyperinflationary crack up boom. The catch is there has been no boom or bust they have unintentionally busted the fractional reserves system instead. 

    To the 5th person to suggest this, please study the words Money Laundering and federal penitentiary on Wikipedia to know why game companies run screaming from the room when people talk bitcoin. 

     

    Block chain can do so much more than mere money. NQ should have a bitcoin account just in case. 

  17. Here are a few from me:

    1. A one shot solid rocket booster voxel that requires no power. Just chemicals. So if the enemy shuts down your power system ,or that alien energy draining space critter from Star trek gets you, then you can light a fuse and get out of the trap. 
    2. Rods, rebar and sticks. 2 cm by 2 cm by n cm elements that take on the texture of a voxel material their crafted with to make everything from chair legs, to hand rails, to guiders, the techno babble thing that holds your ship together when they have blown it in half. Undamaged by blasts and weapons fire so it seems to be holding you ship together. 
    3. Two types of ore native and oxides ore. Earth and Alioth will have both but with native ore rare. An airless moon will have more native ore. Processing the native ore requires less energy and less carbon.  
    4. Starter guns that are little more than muskets and hand cannon but are crafted easily: wood, iron, explosive powder. These are reloaded by the nanoformer; literally rebuilding the charge and ball in the gun. Low damage, low range but faster reload than the real thing. There is no way nova corps robots are going to hand out gun recipes. People would have to cook them up. And this is the simplest gun possible. 
    5. Later Guns that make their own ammo, a few rounds per minute so they are always slowly reloading. You will still need to carry ammo and reload in a prolonged fight. But of left in the holster they are reloaded in a few minutes. 
    6. A range of hacker weapons that cause personal shields and nanoformer etc to mess up: Shield blocks out going shots or deflect other friendly players; nanoformer starts digging the ground (not a construct) up from under you; nanoformer starts dumping rock etc around the hacked player; hacked jet pack fires your up into the air for all to shoot at. This gives the hacker some short range battle value. Needless to say there would be defences. Not quite a space wizard but close. 
  18. I'm not joining any organisations till launch. Someone needs to be the guy who is not in any org testing all the org lockouts work. I here that one of the Korean game companies did a game test where all their testers were in guilds and as a result they missed one of the security flaws. They all got looted two weeks after launch. Free guild bank slots for all the newbies who haven't joined the guild. lol.  

  19. Yeah, and I ... the power drops mid transit and there is no longer enough power to the CO2 scrubbers? Would they kick out and suddenly everyone start taking damage?

    That actually happened on Apollo 13 and they rigged a hand driven pump! It worked. There were lots of light weight crank handles on both Apollo and Soyuz space craft. KISS Keep it simple stupid. The ISS has a few hand pumps. 

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