15 replies to this topic

[aersixb9]

I was just thinking about how the LOD problem makes it hard to render a solar-system scale map with small objects such as cities and people included on the planets. One option might be the 'blue ball' theory, where the sun-shields (sunglasses) on a space ship that filter out the sunlight the air normally gets to shift the relevant light into the human visible spectrum (also with "full" spectrum cameras and shifters and a computer), this caused the earth to appear different than in photos, with the air layer specifically appearing as a blue haze that obscured everything else, including the white cloud layer. A specific camera filter might get the air to be clear, however different camera filters peel back the layers and can add a few to the top as well, and can also highlight high density irregularities inside the softer high-elevation earth. The higher layers add blur due to irregularities that can sometimes be filtered with a computer.

[Hodgman]

I stand in want to accept such a cat.
This forum pets lovers?
I lack to purchase such a cat.

Who has this already exist?
What is the stock and what his character?

[ShawnCowles]

You might want to check out the game/simulation Orbiter. It's a fully realistic space flight simulator that includes buildings and structures on the ground, and the ability to fly to any planet (maybe some asteroids) in the solar system. From what I've seen of it, the game stops rendering buildings at a certain distance, and each planet has several textures which they switch between at different distances (adding or removing detail as needed).

With the earth being as relatively flat as it is, once you get to a certain height (orbit at least, probably lower), you can stop worrying about adjusting the planet's mesh for mountains, and just show it as a smooth sphere.

[aersixb9]

I clicked on orbiter, and it looks like a very impressive demo....not much of a game though. I wish I could be a pro game designer, will work for paypal online, anyways I love mmos but they're the hardest to make. That game engine looks like it's made for single player, so I'd start there, unless I had magic funding and lots of programmers. The key is to work with how the gameplay is, which looks like it's carefully simulated near-earth flight in the lower and upper atmosphere, and also near the ground. It's also probably single player and has no collisions with other players, ai, weapons, projectiles, that sort of thing. Games can always be 'rpg'd up', where you look at the gameplay variables, for space flight it's things like wing lift and thrust and mass, and tack on an item system where you pick a few items (equip them, or pay engineers to weld them to your spaceship....or bolt on if the parts are modular.) ... it's hard to make modular 3d graphics, although ships might work ok, although having a 'spaceframe' item that the other parts fit into and determines the model is an easy way to do it, then let the parts pick your thrust and whatnot, maybe scale the wings too, and one option might be a civil airspace taxi game, where the player starts out with a "cheap" frame/motor/tank/trunk/passenger area, and makes money by ferrying goods and virtual passengers by contract between waypoints on earth cities, spots in space, and maybe even space stations, asteroids, giant underground areas, inside asteroids, and mostly near the earth with maybe some optional geography aids and time limits on delivieries and rewards...maybe a leveling system too to unlock harder contracts with more weight and less time, trickier passengers, etc. Aerial weapons would be popular, with options for mercenary missions or pirate attacks. A racing game might work too, where multiplayer humans and/or AI race space ships in air and above air in something that resembles other racing games (maybe more realistic/sci-fi future) with or without multiplayer, and space ships might have limted fuel ( a huge cost and factor, fuel might also not all be equal, with engines being able to accept a numbered range of fuels, so nuclear fuel might be labeled 1x-550x, and a nub engine might work with 1x-3x and a good one 440 to 520, maybe some with a huge range but less fuel efficient, and higher numbered fuels are more expensive and rare...possibly with variability based on city location with some spaceports thrown in (near future), and some auction halls and goods shipping like eve online, space stations floating and on asteroids, with sstations providing fuel and repairs, parts, trade, and very limited storage space. Also food water & air, although it might be assumed those can be made from food/electricity. Moving goods around cities quickly via space ship might be fun too, especially trying to fly a big heavy hauler carrying a ton of 350x metal, which weighs more per volume than the 110x metals. Gun blueprints work with a range (as can all blueprints), or manufacturing could be modeled/abstracted inside cities on earth and by npcs in stations and on "large" asteroids. Jupiter should be nice too, a big planet like that should have the best mining in our system outside the sun, and I think a lot of people are looking at alpha centauri and seeing it's only '4' light years away, and not realizing we're two tech jumps away from going to another sun, we need to mine the shit out of jupiter and our sun first, then we can go to the next star to mine it and mostly ignore the planets. A game where a single or multi players colonize the solar system by making a "road" of space stations and hi-tech nav aids and whatnot, heading for large planets but also gaining value from random asteroids (most are worthless, some are awesome, larger ones are more awesome, note space junk is really hard to see with solar glare and all the random light colors in the distant background, so scanning the area around the ship is a huge thing, and also velocity is a big deal, although with current speed limits (are we 100% sure light goes 3x10^8 and not some other number???? Anyways assuming we only make it 5% of the way there in solar scale, that's a LOOONG road to the moon, and a huge crevasse/ocean between us and jupiter. Lots of space stations and hauling fuel out from earth would bring us there....and maybe make a neat epic single player game where the player is either or both a person space pilot, or maybe an earth king space leader with fast communications (model the 4 hour delay between us and mars for relevant commands?) and let them control all the cities of earth and roads and planet with their mining, research, spaceship production, other production, and try and get to the other planets,....in text, web, 3d, or whatever, and make a nice trail of different size space stations for the ships to fly between and fuel up, then work on trade between earth and the other planets, each of which has unique goods and appeal, some more than others, and also each of which has some resources with a max # based on radius and random, and those numbered resources can be mined with mining tools that have a weight and "powerfullness" that gets upgraded and gets mines producing more stuff faster, plus maybe make lots of planet-unique rare essential goods that are tradeable to ensure good trading between planets.

[aersixb9]

Also flying is intimidating to a lot of people, I mean about as many people fly as have tried the guns, but gun games are really common so people know what they're getting. I think flying is important, so even though flying games (also space, there's a connection) might be less popular, they can be tacked onto other popular game styles (like bad company 2 / battlefield series), and also it might be good to consider simplifying the controls when possible, and also to focus on providing popular free training programs to build up the market, for example a free demo version that features a beautiful tutorial that explains the game, marketing that shows the basics of the joystick, and maybe providing some joystick hardware (or coupons or whatever) to buyers to use the preferred hardware, or making sure it works great with what people have and you let them know. Flying might also work good on an iPhone or tilt platform, possibly with a more abstract and friendly theme to almost 'censor' the scary and deadly idea of flight, along with its historically censored nuclear connections and also war power that makes it a tricky topic. One way might be to make an iphone game where the player looks into the phone and holds it like a steering wheel, and the game starts out with turning left & right and a car theme (maybe tilt left & right to steer, but with maybe 30 degrees of total rotation for a full turn of the car wheel, or even adjust it for speed and let the AI help a little to guess what they want), then add up and down, and forget the third axis in that game and make it a fly through tunnels without crashing game, and make it slide around a bit like an airplane, maybe with a "slide %' that gives more points or goes up with levels and makes it more air-plane like and adds a virtual throttle, open flight, landing, fuel, etc, and also has a great free demo (maybe that plays mp3s and generates a looping hypnotic abstract track with obstacles that only affect points and resemble aerial manuevers, landing, stalling, etc, and be sure to consult pilots online or wherever, and fly as much as possible in addition to computer stuff, either commercial, air taxi, bungee, rentapilot, rentaplane, lessons, parachuting, helicopter tour, or even just free climbing or regular climbing up something high....also if you have a game that's a framework like orbiter, maybe make a game extension SDK and modding web site, or even an integrated mod browser, so players can download the game and learn the controls with the tutorial, then pick a popular or whatever mod, play & rate it, maybe with multiplayer options and being made as easy and/or powerful for the makers as possible....maybe even with cash reward options that are programmatic, so players that get lots of good scores from lots of players get an automatic upgrade from free mod to paid mod at minimum price, and also making them and getting good scores might also grant "mod dolars" that can be used to buy mods. The company can take a fair and open % or fee from the sales, and also might make the very best mods free and included with the base package, and also maybe allow demos of paid mods to be added too. Also try and make the additions be complete, so people can add all the resources and maybe edit the code, or at least add to the code, along with (or or if necessary) a scripting language that is much easier and specific to the engine, and ways to edit the included and other modded maps of earth, solar, other planets, asteroids, etc, edit their gen scripts, see how other people did it (also a way to connect them to the paid ones automatically, so if someone makes good models and someone else uses them, the modeler gets a fair piece of the end sale, maybe with 3rd party arbitration at a certain success & dollar amount, while the free ones with poor scores make no money but allow free play, and give nothing so need no effort or reward.....maybe throw in some lottery prizes too, and lots of freely printable virtual gaming currency, which maybe can be gotten by winning at the game....although making a peer-to-peer gamedev commercial money making system in itself might be awesome and powerful, along with not connecting it to any speicific c++ or c# code (or models, levels,scripts, etc), and allowing fair commercialization too might be powerful and amazing and also seeding it with good stuff too.

[ShawnCowles]

The enter button is your friend, some paragraph breaks would make your posts a lot easier to read than a huge wall of text.

Anyway, orbiter isn't a demo or even a game, it's really a simulation. It's key points are the realistic physics model and it's ability to be modified. People have modded in everything from airplanes to star ships with warp drives. I was providing it as an example of how to scale and display an entire solar system.

Since your posts seem somewhat schizophrenic, I'll try to reply as best I can.

Freelancer is a good example of an "RPGed up" space game (Altough the space ships fly like airplanes). It's much more accessible and entertaining to me than Eve, being more arcade-ish and action oriented.

I'm a bit confused as to why you're talking about mining Jupiter and the sun. Nothing we could make for the foreseeable future could survive mining the sun, and gas mining would be far easier on Saturn or the ice giants (less gravity to pull away from).

Yes, we're sure that the speed of light is 3*10^8 m/s. That number is now the modern definition of the meter, actually. But even at 5% light speed it wouldn't take very long to get to the outer solar system (only 14 hours on average to Juputer)

I agree that flight games aren't that popular, and I wish that wasn't so. I think it's a really under served genre.
To use freelancer as an example again, it's control scheme is much more accessible than your average flight game. It can be controlled entirely with keyboard and mouse. I've also seen a few android flight games that use the tilt sensors to steer. A problem I've seen with those, however is that I (at least) tend to try and make sharper turns than the game allows and end up turning the phone so much I can hardly see the screen.
If I was a console programmer, I would seriously look into making a flight sim for one of those platforms. After all, the controllers come with joysticks build in.

I don't see why a mobile game would have to be censored, there are plenty of not-for-kids games out there especially in the android app-store.

[aersixb9]

All of the media is censored, there is adult censorship labeled as "top secret" with 5 coded levels available to the government's employees, from ts-1 to ts-5, and there are rumors of a rare ts-6 that is un-affiliated.

Enter doesn't actually make words easier to read, you have been trained to disrupt natural communications flow in text to ensure maximum lie acceptance and propagation in defense of what has already been done.

How do you know the speed of light? Did you read in in the standard school textbook the lyin pigs kill you if you don't memorize, that is the same for all? They do not say how that got that number in those books or in the lies they reference.

[BCullis]

All of the media is censored, there is adult censorship labeled as "top secret" with 5 coded levels available to the government's employees, from ts-1 to ts-5, and there are rumors of a rare ts-6 that is un-affiliated.

Enter doesn't actually make words easier to read, you have been trained to disrupt natural communications flow in text to ensure maximum lie acceptance and propagation in defense of what has already been done.

How do you know the speed of light? Did you read in in the standard school textbook the lyin pigs kill you if you don't memorize, that is the same for all? They do not say how that got that number in those books or in the lies they reference.

I just...wow...just wow.
I almost want to rate this up for the sheer humor value. What's really awesome is your line breaks made it SO MUCH EASIER to read

[Tom Sloper]

I stand in want to accept such a cat.
This forum pets lovers?
I lack to purchase such a cat.
[picture]
Who has this already exist?
What is the stock and what his character?

Um... what???

[MartyrOfKharak]

Group: Banned

Dear moderators,

Thank you.

[Hodgman]

I stand in want to accept such a cat.
This forum pets lovers?
I lack to purchase such a cat.
[picture]
Who has this already exist?
What is the stock and what his character?

Um... what???

Thank you, well you helped me with their advice.
Here is my kitten, he would have me live.

[ShawnCowles]

How do you know the speed of light? Did you read in in the standard school textbook the lyin pigs kill you if you don't memorize, that is the same for all? They do not say how that got that number in those books or in the lies they reference.

I hate it when scientists hold a gun to my head until I memorize universal constants.

[Casey Hardman]

Seriously, Hodgman, what are you talking about with that cat? You've done that before, too...
Is that how you have 900+ reputation?

...Did you ever buy the cat, and if so what is the stock and what is the character, 'cause I might want one too?

[Khaiy]

I think that the point with the cat is that it's more intelligible and relevant to the forum section it's in than the OP, or indeed most of aersixb9's posts.

On the other hand, maybe he just wanted to share those pictures. It is a pretty cat...

[Casey Hardman]

I figured it could've meant something like that.

By the way, the more proper way of putting it would probably be

"Enter doesn't actually make words easier to read, it makes those who are putting their time into trying to help you go through less heartache.
It also makes you look like a more collected person who can do more with the information they are given by repliers. It basically makes you look like a more intelligent person, and therefore the desire to help you may be strengthened."

Anatomical desepreterial waves of neurotoxins - who cares about them? I much prefer the statement above.
Now I know why you have -34 rep (well -33 now that BCullis found your ignorance admirable).

[Acharis]

Group: Banned

Dear moderators,

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

Uff, finally... What a relief...