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Over mining causing ugly planets?


ghostookami

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Something I thought about the past few days. We know that the planets can be morphed and changed by players. But my question is will planets ever be reset. Because I'm dreading the day when we have multiple planets with huge chunks missing from them due to mining or just whatever.

 

If anyone is familiar with minecraft online servers then just think about some of the big ones that become hideous due to all the holes and a lack of resources because its all been mined, which is why they reset the world seed every so often to start fresh.

 

I'm not saying they have to restart the whole game but I'm hoping there is some sort of way to prevent planets from becoming super ugly pitted spheres.

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That's a good question. The chances are factions will make their capital worlds "pretty" and neat, while destroying others so they can build even taller skyscrappers and even more ships.

The planets are quite large, about 35 km radius to 100 km radius, and they are procedurally generated, so, you could have a significant amount of worlds, therefore, your worrying in unwarranted good sir. Plus, ugly planets make for the best hideouts for pirates or outlaws, so, everyone wins. And panets will be minable about 2 kilometers deep, so they won't be THAT ugly :P

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I highly doubt there will be resets. If we exhaust a planet of its resources we'll just have to move on and find another planet to exploit. Personally, I'd be really cool to see planets carved out and a giant fleet hanging over it in orbit.

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From my experience only the very core areas on minecraft servers are destroyed while once you go a pretty small distance from the spawn the world returns to what would otherwise be considered a normal world. It's definitely going to happen, especially on the spawn planet. Players will disperse rapidly as people move further out and the issue wont really present itself strongly.

 

And in my opinion I think it SHOULD be an issue, something for the player base to manage as a whole. Dual Universe's climate change.

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This is actually very topical!

 

I would love to see if the devs can figure out a sensible way to implement erosion.

 

It's actually rather obvious when you really think about it - just erode all naturally occurring underground materials.

This would make lining your underground walls and tunnels with an erosion-resistant material, such as concrete, a necessity, just like real life!

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The effect would be less noticeable (and "prolonged") the bigger the planets and playable universe are.

 

If you look at Minecraft and the Civilization Server (Civcraft), I bet the same map or build I briefly played on many years ago is still in use and it doesn't look ugly. Then again that had a map size of about 15 x 15 km I think. In MC terms that is quite large and you have to resort to public transportation to get across the regions in a timely manner. 

 

Of course in DU there may be more "void" than usable or transformable hard material, but if the numbers above are correct for planets, it could become a non-issue.

 

You can still think of something if this turns bad after years. An option would be "recycling" or ways to obtain certain materials in a more "green fashion" so you do not have to dig up the ground as much. Another option would be randomly generated asteroids that fly around space so you could resort to utilizing space rocks rather than planetary materials.

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The effect would be less noticeable (and "prolonged") the bigger the planets and playable universe are.

 

If you look at Minecraft and the Civilization Server (Civcraft), I bet the same map or build I briefly played on many years ago is still in use and it doesn't look ugly. Then again that had a map size of about 15 x 15 km. Of course in DU there may be more "void" than usable or transformable hard material, but if the numbers above are correct for planets, it could become a non-issue.

 

You can still think of something if this turns bad after years. An option would be "recycling" or ways to obtain certain materials in a more "green fashion" so you do not have to dig up the ground as much.

The devs could add a "heal" function in the algorithm for areas not claimed by players for the ground to heal slowly with time, but that would cause problems if players were to be connecting two areas with underground pipelines, using one site as a mega power plant that powers an entire planet worth of settlements.

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The devs could add a "heal" function in the algorithm for areas not claimed by players for the ground to heal slowly with time, but that would cause problems if players were to be connecting two areas with underground pipelines, using one site as a mega power plant that powers an entire planet worth of settlements.

 

For these precise reasons I'm against this. There's an easy fix that won't net you the materials that were once there, however: players have to fix it up themselves or at least make it look nice on the surface if they dislike it.

 

But this in turn provides gameplay and concept opportunities for player groups. Think of "Greenpeace in Space" or just some state or private restoration project. I saw the same in Minecraft once already.

 

In the particular server community, there was only one safe space: the city all new players spawned in. Beyond the walls you were either in no man's land or faction territory. The immediate area around the city looked like a mess so we had a private restoration project to make it a bit more green and look less like a (used up) minefield.

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For these precise reasons I'm against this. There's an easy fix that won't net you the materials that were once there, however: players have to fix it up themselves or at least make it look nice on the surface if they dislike it.

 

But this in turn provides gameplay and concept opportunities for player groups. Think of "Greenpeace in Space" or just some state or private restoration project. I saw the same in Minecraft once already.

 

In the particular server community, there was only one safe space: the city all new players spawned in. Beyond the walls you were either in no man's land or faction territory. The immediate area around the city looked like a mess so we had a private restoration project to make it a bit more green and look less like a (used up) minefield.

People hardly care for the enviroment in real world good sir, let alone in a virtual world :P

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players have to fix up the shit themselves or at least make it look nice on the surface if they dislike it

I would have to disagree with you on this count.

 

The way erosion works is it moves nearby voxels around, without necessarily introducing new material.

It also does not have to happen over-night. 

 

The Devs have mentioned creating a voxel smoothing tool before the Alpha release. It almost seems like a no-brainer to apply a smoothing operation to all surfaces that are not consisting of man-made materials such as concrete on a set period, every 24 hours, for instance. This would gradually create undulating grassy terrain where once grand mining operations have taken place.

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But such locations have uniqe look, very "climatic"... and it will be good system to drive players to exploration - you deplete one planet, and you must move to another to expand. And abandoned mining colonies are perfect places for secret military/pirate bases, magazines of illegal goods and areas for any kind of shadowy operations...

 

Look at this... and tell me that you do not want such map in game :D (and it will be 100% made by players!)

aba684af-64d4-4349-ae2a-38605ce34661.jpg

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Great pic above. I'm a noob here, so I'm not sure how the game is going to be made yet. Are there going to be fully realised solar systems with many planets like our one? If so, I was wondering if there would be asteroid mining as well as planet mining. I've not seen anything mentioned about that yet. It would be nice to have asteroid belts in solar systems, plus Oort cloud objects that we could mine.  

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I would have to disagree with you on this count.

 

The way erosion works is it moves nearby voxels around, without necessarily introducing new material.

It also does not have to happen over-night. 

 

The Devs have mentioned creating a voxel smoothing tool before the Alpha release. It almost seems like a no-brainer to apply a smoothing operation to all surfaces that are not consisting of man-made materials such as concrete on a set period, every 24 hours, for instance. This would gradually create undulating grassy terrain where once grand mining operations have taken place.

Indeed. Tear snd erosion could fix any exposed surface, giving a trigger effect after the server detects player editing taking place. It's viable and emergent. And yes, if you could put an alloy that resists erosion, that could trigger the server's cellular system to tell the terrain that there's no more erosion beyond the point it connects and "hugs" the construct. I can see possible glitches emerging, namely, texture clipping through walls, but it's nothing that can't be patched later on in developement.

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What would happen if someone wanted to build a moat around their home or city, would it have to be lined with something to stop it from slowly filling in?

Yes, it's called water :P (or lava, it's your moat :P )

 

Any liquid is treated like a voxel, therefore, the server would not detect any reason for erosion to occur.

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What would happen if someone wanted to build a moat around their home or city, would it have to be lined with something to stop it from slowly filling in?

 

We don't know how water will work (and neither does NQ or at least they didn't when they last talked about it) however they did mention a minecraft type system for liquids and a more realistic one though the more realistic one may take to much server computational power to implement in this kind of MMO

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We'll be able to make permanent change inside of the building areas that we will be able to define.

 

But outside of those areas i would bet that any changes will reset themselves after an hour or so, maybe less.

 

It would just be silly for the damage to be permanent.  Players would destroy a planet in a few weeks.

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We'll be able to make permanent change inside of the building areas that we will be able to define.

 

But outside of those areas i would bet that any changes will reset themselves after an hour or so, maybe less.

 

It would just be silly for the damage to be permanent.  Players would destroy a planet in a few weeks.

That's the point of colonialism sir. As Agent Smith said it :

 

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 Players would destroy a planet in a few weeks.

 

Yeah, and this is whole point of "persistent world". If you deplete planet, you must either rob other players to obtain resources or colonize other planet. boyh things generate conflict and move economy - and both are generators of content. If planets will "respawn" we will get some kind of theme park, not a emergent game-play.

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I'm so used to the age old "It can't be done, it's too expensive for the server" that erosion sounds unlikely to me. But if possible, some sort of reclamation by nature would be neato. If after X amount of time, it ran the previously mentioned "smoothing algorithm" and holes get filled in with dirt. Then if the ground is "smooth enough", grass begins to grow again! That'd be awesome. I just don't see how it would be efficiently added in a way that doesn't hurt performance. The algorithm would have to check every bit of ground that has been altered by players would it not? Perhaps if the chunks of changed ground were added in a sort of queue then the code would only need to check the most recent stuff.

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I agree with @nietoperek. It can look very cool !

 

If you want to keep your planet like you found it, just dig underground, without contact between mine and surface ! (I don't know if the floor is going to fall if the mine is too large)

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It will be interesting to see how they solve this.

 

I think it would still be possible for terrain to heal itself over time for the sake of aesthetics and still have resources be depleted.

 

Landmark does something along those lines but on a much smaller scale.  Resources like minerals spawn proceduraly and won't necessarily respawn in the exact same spot for quite a while.

 

I think it might be fine for resources like minerals to never respawn and things like trees and plants to take a long time or maybe require cultivation eventually.  So as the population on a planet increases it would eventually require resources from other planets to continue to grow.

 

It would be cool if changes didn't heal in the exact same way, or were eroded in some way.  But with permanent change from mining and no erosion i'm afraid the worlds would basically all end up looking like swiss cheese.

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