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Over mining causing ugly planets?


ghostookami

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I say do not let the world regenerate and lets see how long it takes the starting planet to look like Cyberton. A cored out world surrounded by layers of player made structures. Of course you wold prolly want some system for alternate starting world once more of them become heavily populated.

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I do like the sound of a cored out world surrounded by player made structures.

 

It's funny just last week i was lost for something to watch on tv and ended up re-watching some Star Trek TNG.  The episode where they discover an abandoned "Dyson Sphere".  A theoretical structure that surrounds part of a solar system to capture the suns energy, invented by British vacuum cleaner mogul James Dyson.  Ok i might have made that last part up.   :ph34r: 

 

I like the idea of a Planet being completely covered or even replaced by buildings and technology.   But i hate to see what would happen to the planets that are stripped of resources and no one sticks around to build anything.

 

Could a planet break out of it's orbit or even into pieces if enough of it was removed?

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I'm hoping worlds will eventually begin to look like swiss-cheese, after we deplete them of resources... that will motivate players to move to new worlds.

And ensures that the game does not become stagnant.

Hopefully, we would also later discover that NPC factions, perhaps like the Borg, have terraformed and assimilated those abandoned worlds into there empire(s), thereby providing reasons for humanity to return for new adventures.

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I don't think that would actually be a BAD thing to be honest. Overmined barren planets in certain parts of space would simply add to the whole aesthetic aspect of things. Might even be awesome of this idea is expanded on further and planets eventually "die" after they get mind out completely, turning into large hollow asteroids devoid of all life. Kinda like if you take out all of the water and trees from Earth and drill it full of holes. 

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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.

 

And what if the players have dug to build a city in the hole ? And it's not realistic.

I think regrowing grass could be an idea, like on old coal "towers" (I didn't find the right word sorry) in the north of France who were black at the beginnig and now green because grass has grown. The landscape stay shaped but not ugly.

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I doubt ugly-mining will be a huge problem, because of technical reasons.

Planets are 30km radius. This means 11309,4 km2 surface area. That extends 1 km down. That's just one planet.

Also, terraforming will probably be reasonably accurate, or it's use is questionable.

If terraforming is readily available, almost everyone will do some defacing of starter planet. Lets say, 100k players. Average one will deface is... eh... no idea, but you get my point.

 

What I mean is, with readily available terraforming, gigantic landscapes will end up man-made, with accuracy that looks fine from 2m standing person. And not just continious territories, it will be random mix of default generated and edited.

Storing all those changes is possible. Layering player changes over default generation, building LODs, and then constantly providing lanscape data to many many people traveling near and on planet, on the other hand is not. I don't believe it can be done with reasonable user network at all.

 

Another problem, over course of the game there will be many many planets. And many many players. Each player in his life will make great many changes. All those changes off all players must be stored... somewhere. Server costs would be tremendous.

 

All in all, I don't think we will get 'easy' and constant terraforming like in Minecraft or Space Engineers. It will probably be prohibited so that not many people will use it, and not much territory will be changed. Or in such way, that it is wide are, but restricted in finesse, so it doesn't cost much data. And small changes nobody visits will probably be erased.

For this matter, I don't think mining will involve destroying terrain in small pieces.

 

Cheers!

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-----------------

 

And what if the players have dug to build a city in the hole ? And it's not realistic.

I think regrowing grass could be an idea, like on old coal "towers" (I didn't find the right word sorry) in the north of France who were black at the beginnig and now green because grass has grown. The landscape stay shaped but not ugly.

 

NQ has said that building will take place inside some kind of limited "building zone" maintained by a player. 

 

So my guess is that there would be two ways of making changes to the existing landscape.  Inside of a building zone, change would be permanent, but outside of them it would just be temporary.  That's just a guess though.

 

I feel like Nyz described the building zones better in another post i can't find now, but they are mentioned here.  https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/14-voxel-tools-pre-alpha-game-design/page-3#entry1799

 

It would be cool if all the changes made just by mining were permanent.  Especially if there was erosion over time and grass and plants grew back.  But i don't know if that will be possible.

 

Pantydraco makes a good point about how hard it would be to store all those individual edits to planets building up over time.

 

My guess is that there would have to be some limit to the amount of permanent change each player can have.  And those changes would have to be maintained by protecting or powering the "core unit" that creates each building zone.

 

I don't know though maybe NQ has far better solutions for all this then i can even imagine.  I can't wait to find out!

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I have to say I thought about this too but the universe will be so big if it comes down to it just move on.  I'd like to make a planet a big emoji ...  imagine flying by a planet that looks like :D to brighten up your flight

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  • 3 weeks later...

There is another solution to the mined out spawn zone problem. Simply add restoration tools to the tool range and mine restoration to the "quest" list. Make money fixing spawn.
People go out with tools they have crafted and a small amount of resources and smooth, fill, repair the Terrain. Mine restoration and forest replanting are a real thing in the real would. Whether it resets ores or simply resets the terrain to seed without ores will be a question. If this is a player built world and a player mined world, why not a player repaired world? 

Also helps with that hidden base. You don't want the mining giving the game a way. 

In minecraft anarchy servers I'm the guy that goes back with dirt and saplings and replants spawn. It really confuses people. 

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Planets shouldnt regenerate, it would make the unvierse fell less alive. Also some people mentioned that abandoned mining planets would make freat shady hideouts and i agree *points at signature* :ph34r:

The Players should be able to MAJORLY influence the game world to nearly any extend and regeneration mechanics would work against that.

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I also am against planets regenerating. I can picture my self 10 years from now flying past our starting planet and being amazed at its broken empty crust and massive cities. That is what a truly immersive sandbox is all about. Those are our decisions and actions effecting that planet and effecting everyone who visits it.

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I'm also against planets regenerating.

 

In the GrayStillPlays interview JC mentioned that one way of defending your stuff is to bury it underground in an underground base 1km beneath the surface. 

 

If planets regenerated how would they distinguish between holes and deformed terrain that was done on purpose and terrain that needs to be regenerated for aesthetic reasons? 

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Make it rather block based or entity based, than area based. That way you can have specific things regenerate or even decay. For example things could slowly overgrow or just fall apart. Correct me but that seems to be the best way.

 

This could also just affect blocks or entities that are outside and exposed to the elements. That would mean that outside structures could actually look decayed after a prolonged time, if left abandoned and of cared for. This would serve vital gameplay feedback or input, too, rather than everything looking brand new or pristine all the time for eternity. We could talk about a simple visual change to "blocks" or even damage to insulation or quality.

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Is it Voxel Farm under the hood or something else? If so all the tools are there. I even talked about flowing water and erosion on that blog. It can be done but you need drain blocks and drainage rules.  The one thing minecraft missed or fudged.  :huh:

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Is it Voxel Farm under the hood or something else? If so all the tools are there. I even talked about flowing water and erosion on that blog. It can be done but you need drain blocks and drainage rules.  The one thing minecraft missed or fudged.  :huh:

well its hard on the servers to do as they have to store all that change and there is easily an entire galaxy so its not really possible to store that data even if you only did it for one planet that still a ton of change as the whole surface would be changing (or at least some of it would be).

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Is it Voxel Farm under the hood or something else? If so all the tools are there. I even talked about flowing water and erosion on that blog. It can be done but you need drain blocks and drainage rules.  The one thing minecraft missed or fudged.  :huh:

 

There won't be flowing water, except for maybe localized "flow" that stops when players move away from it.

 

On this same topic there won't be physics for cave-ins or similar things, so if you managed to dig under a mountain it wouldn't just collapse, it would stay there in the air. 

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There won't be flowing water, except for maybe localized "flow" that stops when players move away from it.

 

On this same topic there won't be physics for cave-ins or similar things, so if you managed to dig under a mountain it wouldn't just collapse, it would stay there in the air. 

 

Am I the only one who is bothered by this? Floating islands are cool in concept but if it is the norm on mind out planets it seems like is would be really weird looking.

 

I guess this could be avoided by having resources deeper in the crust such that mining under entire mountains wouldn't be frequent. 

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Am I the only one who is bothered by this? Floating islands are cool in concept but if it is the norm on mind out planets it seems like is would be really weird looking.

 

I guess this could be avoided by having resources deeper in the crust such that mining under entire mountains wouldn't be frequent. 

well do you want crashing servers or ridicoulous floating islands? i choose the later

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There won't be flowing water, except for maybe localized "flow" that stops when players move away from it.

 

On this same topic there won't be physics for cave-ins or similar things, so if you managed to dig under a mountain it wouldn't just collapse, it would stay there in the air. 

If you know minecraft you know that the water fits the above description, if you get far enough away it stops flowing. Most don't know that. In DU the distance would just be much shorter.

Technically there are Four water levels/ types possible:

Static opaque water ; old technology, (Everquest, Cube 2,) cheap on server. muddy or foamy water, very useful. Often forgotten. Can do rapids and water falls.  

Static translucent water; available in engine as indicated above, In many games. No lag. 

Short limited dynamic flows: Described above by yamamushi. No harder than growing trees or mining terrain: doable but should be very limited, (minecraft, Terraria.)  

Full persistent flowing translucent water with volumetric flow changes: server crashing lag machines. But some minecraft mods do this using chunk loaders which are cloud servers running only the chunk. Tricky, not necessary.  

All have Animated texture but freeze if the player is any distance.

 

As for falling hanging blocks. It's the same problem as the ugly spawn problem.  Add a mesh clean up tool in the mining tools. It should be no harder than mining out the whole hanging hill top and spawning in a pile of rubble below. But it is not a job for DU, it is a job for voxel farm, etc. They may get to it soon. One mine craft mod has a tool that does this. Aim it at a voxel it mines the top voxel it can find of that type. No falling blocks needed. 

This no cave-in except where you specifically do them as a mining act.  Ie it is not a block property that the server tracks, or physics but an active and local targeted mine and place scripted into a clean up tool.  Smooth down. 

 

Technically if you have explosions that effect the terrain you have the same lag problem. Erosion is just a slow explosion. 

 

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Well just like in real life mining can ruin a landscape drastically there one was a small mountain at the end of the las Vegas valley then back in the 80s people started mining the zinc deposits and now to this day the entire top half of the mountain has been mined off and it ruins my view of the city :(

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Well just like in real life mining can ruin a landscape drastically there one was a small mountain at the end of the las Vegas valley then back in the 80s people started mining the zinc deposits and now to this day the entire top half of the mountain has been mined off and it ruins my view of the city :(

 

We have a nice sized scar in one of our mountains here in Colorado Springs too.  It's in view of the entire city.  Horrible :-( 

 

The only solution I know to keep this stuff from happening is to pay as much attention to your local elections as we do the national ones.   I suspect this will be the same solution in the game too.  If the people who live nearby allow this to happen, it will.  So it will be up to those same people to stop it and/or keep it from happening too.

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