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Caves?


Violet

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I couldn't find any posts on here talking about this but I really hope that the world generation includes explorable cave systems in the same way that mine-craft does.

 

I've played a lot of voxel based, resource gathering games and the real difference between mining being a chore and it being a fun activity in itself has been the adventure of exploring underground cave systems. Minecraft obviously has the best, its such a core element, the danger of getting lost and being in the dark is exhilarating, space engineers also had it in asteroids which adds a whole other dimension when you are in zero g and you have no sense of "up".

 

On the flips side, I have been playing Empyrion recently and mining in that game is booooring. You follow a way point and then put on a podcast or something while you grind away at a massive sphere of iron just below the surface. Same with eve, boring as hell.

 

Given the multiplayer nature of this game, you need to make people spend significant amounts of time mining to create value can we at least have it be fun

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I think caves would be a cool idea. Could be a way to hide a small base, deep down in a cave. As long as there aren't too many of them, giving too much ease of access to rarer minerals. 

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Don't see why not, almost every voxel based survival game I've played has some sort of underground/mountain based cave system. I do hope they are a thing as people standard for a night on a planet could make a ghetto home in one.

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If there is ever going to be a reason not to do this, it is going to technical. That being said, if we can procedurally generate mountains and planets, why can't we do caves?

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I think I already heard in an interview that there was going to be caves but I can't find the source...

JC has said they are going to do their best to make caves happen. There is some technical stuff behind making it work.

 

So for now its something they want.

 

 

And there are so many youtube interviews, articles, AMA answers etc. Its really hard to keep track of all the sources.

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If there is ever going to be a reason not to do this, it is going to technical. That being said, if we can procedurally generate mountains and planets, why can't we do caves?

 

It really depends on how they're doing the terrain generation on if they'll be able to get "usable" caves. Here's hoping.

 

I'm thinking one of the big issues they're going to run into, is that from what I gathered (though I could be wrong), there's going to be physics on the voxel objects. If that's the case, then each voxel is going to need to know about what's around it, and that could cause issues with collapsing when caves are dug out during generation.

 

i.e. Here's the terrain, now carve out caves... and gravity pulls the ceiling down

 

-M

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It really depends on how they're doing the terrain generation on if they'll be able to get "usable" caves. Here's hoping.

 

I'm thinking one of the big issues they're going to run into, is that from what I gathered (though I could be wrong), there's going to be physics on the voxel objects. If that's the case, then each voxel is going to need to know about what's around it, and that could cause issues with collapsing when caves are dug out during generation.

 

i.e. Here's the terrain, now carve out caves... and gravity pulls the ceiling down

 

-M

Nope, you are wrong.

JC said that calculating that would cost too much. Imagine having to recalculate the entire structure if you make a change. And that for every possible construct and planet in the game.

 

The example he gave was that when you have a mountain, cut out the middle, the peak would float in the air.

 

:)

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Nope, you are wrong.

JC said that calculating that would cost too much. Imagine having to recalculate the entire structure if you make a change. And that for every possible construct and planet in the game.

 

The example he gave was that when you have a mountain, cut out the middle, the peak would float in the air.

 

:)

 

Cool. That would make it easier then. And yeah, I know the processing cost would be outrageous, but they've already said their doing some of it with the higher LOD levels for when terrain is modified so large changes are visible further out. As I said, it's going to boil down to the specifics on implementation.

 

If voxels are independent, then it'll probably just boil down to a cave generation algorithm that they're happy with.

 

-M

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