Not to be that guy, but I call bullcrapola on them having planetary ecosystems anytime soon (meaning anytime in the next couple of years, at least). The planetary shots in that article look about the same as the voxel (?) rendered terrain we’ve been seeing in a few games of late. That recent one that had the kickstarter that I can’t remember the name of right now, for example. It looks like the typical sort of noise map thing.
The faces look good. Is that the fellow from Game of Thrones?
I haven’t even checked in on Star Citizen for many months to see the state of things. Guess I should give it a look. Somewhere my imaginary starter-level spaceship sits unused and feeling a bit sorry for itself.
It is indeed Liam Cunningham.
I thought it would be interesting to compare screenshots from recent space sims that feature procedural planets:
Space Engine
http://en.spaceengine.org/_ph/8/778754893.jpg
No Man’s Sky
Empyrion - Galactic Survival
Space Engineers
Infinity: Battlescape
Elite: Dangerous
http://www.frontier.co.uk/docs/images/srv.jpg
Star Citizen
Star Citizen (2)
Infinity: Battlescape (2)
Space Engineers (2)
habibi
3247
Awesome work putting these screenshots to compare and I must say No Man’s Sky stands out for me. Perhaps it’s the bright colour palette or perhaps they are almost production ready. Infinity Battlescape come to a close second.
No, it’s obviously Davos Spaceworth.
Nice comparison. Just curious: how many of those are bullshots and how many are “in-game” renders? Do you know?
They all strike me as being reflective of the actual procedural tech based on looking at a number of screenshots for each game. The No Man’s sky shot seems the most staged due to the animals conveniently roaming in the middle of the shot, but the actual terrain seems authentic based on other material we’ve seen.
That said, some of these shots were taken from press sections of official game websites.
I wasn’t really happy with the first Infinity: Battlescape shot because it was a desert, whereas the other pictures are more rocky. Here’s what appears to be a more rocky volcanic region:
And here’s a more appealing shot I found of Elite: Dangerous, even though the one I originally posted was from their press kit:
By the way, I highly recommend clicking on all of these images to view them in high resolution.
I personally feel that Star Citizen and Infinity: Battlescape are in a league of their own. Infinity: Battlescape didn’t reach their stretch goal for volumetric clouds, whereas CIG has purportedly started implementing it already, although I haven’t personally seem any up-close shots of Star Citizen’s clouds yet.
Infinity has been in development for a really long time now, with several false starts. But their procedural tech has always been top notch, imho, even 12 years ago when the project started. there’s something about their atmosphere rendering that makes everything feel very real. Back then, tbheir tech demos and videos were outstanding, and the fact that they still are says a lot.
But, as suspect as SC development is, this is an even riskier project imho. I would love to see it succeed though, but not just the current incarnation, but with the scope of the original project.
Oghier
3253
The NMS shot is the only one with life. Exploring lifeless rocks isn’t likely to hold much long-term interest.
KevinC
3254
Do not underestimate a developer’s ability to turn even a life-filled planet into grey monotony, when it comes to procedural generation. :)
Oghier
3255
Yep. This is what is stopping me from pre-ordering (well, that and the fact that work will keep me too busy to play much for a while). I love the idea of a massive universe with cool stuff to explore. I’m just not sure how cool the stuff will be :)
KevinC
3256
I hear ya. I actually love procedural generation and it’s one of the only things that can give me a true sense of exploration in a game (even in something like the Elder Scrolls, somewhere in the back of my mind I’m always thinking that I’m not really discovering this, some world designer carefully place this stuff here for some people to find).
Thus far, I feel like game developers only get halfway there, though. To use Elite: Dangerous as an example, I wouldn’t expect all however many billion stars to be unique snowflakes but it largely has the same problem Minecraft had: it’s well and good to have this amazing world/galaxy generated but they fail to tie it into the gameplay loop in any meaningful way. In Minecraft (at least back in the day when I played), Diamond was the best resource. To get diamond, you’d just dig down. Sure, there was this awesome terrain generator and it could come up with some really cool landscapes, but there was no connection with the gameplay loop, no reason to actually go out there and explore it. If each Biome type produced really important unique resources, it would have given it a very different feel to build a boat and set sail in uncharted seas. As it was, though, why not just dig down on the spot where I started?
Elite has the same issue. You can explore just to put your name on stuff (or just because you like to) but there’s little to tie it into the game. I know it’s outside the scope of the game, but I’d love to be able to build my own outposts like you can in the X series of games. That would get me excited to go out and explore, looking for the resources I needed for my industry, or finding a terrific system with a super-hot star and rich asteroid belts where I could build solar arrays and mining facilities. Or how about the deeper I explore in the galaxy, the more dangerous it gets. I want to run into alien civilizations, or even alien ruins that I can get down on my SRV and loot for artifacts/technology.
Uh, didn’t mean to go off on a tangent like this, especially in a Star Citizen thread. Sorry guys. I’ve just been frustrated recently with how a lot of games do a bunch of hard work in coming up with incredible algorithms to generate a world/galaxy but then fail to do much of anything with it.
To be fair, this is sort of coming into the game now. I’m not going to claim it’s particularly tied into the core mechanics yet or anything though.
The screenshots I selected were meant to serve as a comparison of the terrain rendering and level of detail, going off of what BiggerBoat was talking about.
You are correct that out of all those games, No Man’s Sky is the only one that currently has fauna. Unless you count the thargoid probes in Elite: Dangerous.
Space Engineers has fauna of sorts. It has weird alien spider things, if you check an option box and allow them.
meeper
3260
KevinC
3261
How long has Space Engineers had planets? I only played it a little bit a long time ago, but I didn’t know there was much else besides space and asteroids and stuff!
meeper
3262
Late 2015 if memory serves. They’re a fun addition and make a survival start on them more interesting. The only downside is that meteor strikes on their terrain really increases save file size so meteors have to be disabled on servers which removes a ton of the early risk.
This is embarrassing, but that Space Engineers screenshot I posted was actually from Empyrion - Galactic Survival. It came up in the image search results and I was unable to tell it apart. I now regret having posted this sentence:
They all strike me as being reflective of the actual procedural tech based on looking at a number of screenshots for each game.
I went back and fixed the label, and added two screenshots that are definitely from Space Engineers. Empyrion also has procedurally generated planets, so I left that screenshot up.
I was not aware that Space Engineers has alien lifeforms. I’ve been meaning to try it myself for quite some time.
