Infinity - My word!!

Awesome stuff, pretty tough challenge though. Ultimately the big problem is the scale. What many games which involve any sort of interaction with planets suffers from is the fact that they end up just being way too small. Having geometry and texture data for a whole planet represents a colossal amount of data, so I'm intrigued by how he is intending to solve this particular problem.

I mean seeing that video the planet is still very small, but I'm hoping that this is simply a case of putting something together for the pre-alpha demo :p


-browses further-
 
Now imagine if you cold go into planets like that on Mass Effect <3

I'm definatley going to keep an eye on this.
 
That does look very nice. As has already been said, it will be interesting to see if the scale of things matches up. It's the first thing that popped into my head when the ship went into the atmosphere of the planet, it seemed a bit off.

Will keep an eye on this aswell me thinks.
 
Impressive scale certainly and will keep my eye on this. However, there is more to a game than scale and technical achievement so I think some of the youtube comments are little premature :p
 
This has been around for a long time in various incarnations and most of the previously published videos have been found to be pre-renders so don't get hopes up too much yet.

Also that level of tech - while very pretty in the video - is relatively simple to pull off - why people haven't done it before is because it gets very complex when you start doing things like physics, zoning each planet so you can have more than just terrain, etc.
 
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That's the power of procedural content for you. I'm curious to see how he actually plans to make a game out of this. Sure it will look amazing and will keep you entertained flying around for a few hours but as soon as you start recording data about even just 2 or 3 planets, buildings placed on them manually and such then the data cache needed will become colossal.

At the moment each planet is just represented by a seed value which is fed into his random generator which creates the entire planet from scratch each time you visit it. Impressive but like I said I can't see how it can be used for an actual game atleast not with his idea of billions of planets.
 
PianoBasher said:

How much GPU/CPU power will that need with tarted up graphics? :eek:
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I like the top rated comment:
"Just one single puny little galaxy of 200billion stars? But ill finish exploring that in a little under 20,000 years!!! Wheres the rest of the universe!?!? What about parallel universes!?!? What a rip off! This game is too small!!!!"
 
They're certainly not lacking in ambition, but I'm not sure they can pull it off. I've read the FAQ on their website and it sounds like one hell of a tall order for a small indie dev team to do in any sort of reasonable timeframe.

If it works, it might well be too big. They appear to be planning to generate an entire galaxy including planetary geography, resource mining, building construction and economies. Ignoring technical issues for the moment - how are you going to play a game with a hundred billion star systems? If you played all your life, you'd never see more than a miniscule fraction of it. You could have a million players online at once and they'd barely interact. One player every 100,000 star systems - you could play for months and not see anyone.

On the other hand...you could nip off to a quiet corner and become Emperor of a Thousand Stars. That has a ring to it.

But the technical things...OK, generating star systems procedurally is well proven, but on that scale it's a whole new ball game. Also, how are they going to acquire the resources to host it properly?

I don't play multiplayer and I don't play anything I have to pay a subscription for, but I'd make an exception for this.
 
I don't see the point... 200 hand crafted, well designed systems with a handful of planets each would be infinitly more fun than 200 billion procedurely generated worlds.

Procedural generation of content never works well for video games except for niche usage such as trees/vegetation, designing your entire game around the concept WILL fail.
 
Rroff said:
I don't see the point... 200 hand crafted, well designed systems with a handful of planets each would be infinitly more fun than 200 billion procedurely generated worlds.

Procedural generation of content never works well for video games except for niche usage such as trees/vegetation, designing your entire game around the concept WILL fail.
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I disagree, having need for interaction and a decent sized player base can work, slap in some AI opponents and it could be fun for many.

I could see myself picking a random direction and cruise for a few hours/days(1 week?) and setting up my own base of operations/mining etc to bring back to heavily populated areas.

Imagine being able to research and build (for an insane cost) warp gates that you could charge people a fee to use. Rather than an eve style fixed location the player base expands and makes it's own travel network.

It could be destroyed, but why would an enemy destroy such useful travel links, but then some people might! An open world like this couldwork.
Being certain it will fail rather than "could fail" is the wrong approach to think.

Rroff said:
I don't see the point.
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The point being you can't dream up or imagine the possibilities.
Think a while!
 
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