PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

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Plains might be a better sub biome of the wasteland, helping to blend the harsh change of scenery.

It could include splat hills with grass on top but rocky looking cliffsides. (and a verions of those could go in the wastelands as well to add some much needed interest.

Kind of like mother nature is taking back the outer edges of the wastelands.

If the biomes are dithered between each other in like early a17, you would get some nice random blends almost making the blended zones looking like even more biomes.

That replaces some of the world diversity we lost.

Wetlands could also then could be a sub biome of the forest.
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I hate how the wasteland has these hills and mountains made out of broken brick, which are not actual piles of brick but just hills and mountains with a top layer on them. It does not really make sense for it to look like that. I would say a wasteland should be a sub-biome of any other biome instead. This way you could find mostly flat subbiomes with piles of brick and other debris there and these could even mostly be on the same spots where cities could spawn so some cities would be ruined ones and only get ruined buildings because of this sub-biome.

O the dreams of having actual working biomes and sub-biomes in the game that made sense and looked visually pleasing..

 
I hate how the wasteland has these hills and mountains made out of broken brick, which are not actual piles of brick but just hills and mountains with a top layer on them. It does not really make sense for it to look like that. I would say a wasteland should be a sub-biome of any other biome instead. This way you could find mostly flat subbiomes with piles of brick and other debris there and these could even mostly be on the same spots where cities could spawn so some cities would be ruined ones and only get ruined buildings because of this sub-biome.

O the dreams of having actual working biomes and sub-biomes in the game that made sense and looked visually pleasing..
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That makes entirely too much sense. Roland is sure to pop up and give some pompous reason why you can't say things like that. Lol

 
At the end of the war that destroyed everything ammunition was very scarse which resulted in the remaining city-states firing entire buildings at each other.

(may not be entirely canon... pun intended)

 
...suggesting that we might remove plant life underwater (I know...it was just added) and replace with a river/lake bottom rock texture as an alternative to help with frame rates. It's not like we gain anything by harvesting plants underwater.

 
I agree 100%, more remnents of freeways (POIs?) and more signs of more dense population (more apartment buildings, Malls...like Hernan's No Hope Mall) could be a thing in the wasteland/radiated biomes.
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The problem is there is no intelligent placement system, its 100% random. It should have a spline or road trajectory like bridges and put them together for it to look good. Randomly select which ones.

 
Yeah but in witcher, skyrim etc you have ♥♥♥♥load of them with larger variety and it works fine.
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Skyrim has 1/4 the trees on screen we do, they intelligently place them near mountain bases where you can't have a lot in view at once or a lot of over draw (trees in front of more trees). We place things procedurally so there is variety, but its not as optimized with that approach. They use a ton of rocks and mountains and winding roads to limit a lot of stuff viewed at once and minimize overdraw and maximize occlusion. Several people worked on that ONE map for 4 years and optimized it, and its all static meshes you can combine all the objects for draw call optimizations. Like a whole building is a single mesh, not 5000 objects like in our game. Then you teleport inside, everything is fake.

Our game would run super fast if it was that way, but then you couldn't dig or break anything.

You might as well be comparing real life to a video game, the technology for a voxel game is completely different.

 
What gets me the tree’s still don’t have a base mesh and any tree that falls you see a hollow trunk which I can’t stop thinking on a visual graphical level looks cheap and tacky.
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Those will get fixed at some point.

 
...suggesting that we might remove plant life underwater (I know...it was just added) and replace with a river/lake bottom rock texture as an alternative to help with frame rates. It's not like we gain anything by harvesting plants underwater.
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That isn't going to help.

 
That isn't going to help.
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Yeah the bit of grass under the small bits of water are not really going to do much when removed. Though I recently discovered that To Much grass is a thing and causes the stability calculator to go crazy and throw Stack Overflows causing either a client crash or the ChunkGenerator to exit (which means falling through the world). So they do have an impact on the performance of the game.

 
The underwater plants form voxel "cavities", which likely also draw on the performance to an extend (additional polys).

And they make an ugly looking box underwater.

I would also make the water less translucent, and have a very heavy muddy fog (only like 20 meters visibility) when the camera is inside the water.

Currently the underwaterscenes look very unrealistic, with much too long range visibility.

 
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Yeah the bit of grass under the small bits of water are not really going to do much when removed. Though I recently discovered that To Much grass is a thing and causes the stability calculator to go crazy and throw Stack Overflows causing either a client crash or the ChunkGenerator to exit (which means falling through the world). So they do have an impact on the performance of the game.
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That sounds like a separate issue, and did you experience this in a vanilla game?

 
The underwater plants form voxel "cavities", which likely also draw on the performance to an extend (additional polys).And they make an ugly looking box underwater.

I would also make the water less translucent, and have a very heavy muddy fog (only like 20 meters visibility) when the camera is inside the water.

Currently the underwaterscenes look very unrealistic, with much too long range visibility.
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I haven't really seen it too much. No reason to go underwater yet. Decorations shouldn't change the terrain, maybe it needs the proper xml settings.

 
I haven't really seen it too much. No reason to go underwater yet. Decorations shouldn't change the terrain, maybe it needs the proper xml settings.
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My guess is that the procedure that fills the water voxels will leave gaps where there is a plant.

I also had the occasional drop-box land in the water, which made it necessary to dive down.

 
My guess is that the procedure that fills the water voxels will leave gaps where there is a plant.

I also had the occasional drop-box land in the water, which made it necessary to dive down.
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Oh yeah there could definitely be bugs with water yet. That should go away when water is revisited.

 
That sounds like a separate issue, and did you experience this in a vanilla game?
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Nope, it was modding related, hence I did not report it as a bug. But I thought you should be aware. I spend 5 hours trying to find the cause of this, it only appeared in one of my biomes and only nearby POIs. I removed all deco and then the issues stopped, when re-added the grass I got the errors again. When I reduced the amount of grass total in the biome the bug also stopped from appearing.

 
Faatal

I have a layman's compound question. Re: Rendering

If you had Sectr Complete stream rendering set at 1024 for area of influence.

So rendering and physics is only 1024 meters within a 70' arc.

Added a culling camera 70' to to first person point of view.

Then set the origin shift point, on the first person camera position

to coincide with the terrain rendering shift. Would that always keep

the 0,0 position for rendering and physics focused on the player point

of view? Or is this too convoluted?

For the moving objects ie. animals, entities, other players. Using a

resource pool of objects set at 100 to allow full screen activity without

having to constantly calculate\render everything, only what is in first

person point of view. For moving objects out of point of influence ie.

greater than 1024 meters save x.y.z. position until they are within 90'

or fps focus plus 20.

The abstract thought is looking for a hybrid rendering procedure that

combines procedural rendering and culling applied to a pregenerated terrain.

So at any given point the game is only rendering 70' 1024 meters ahead, yet

is still a full 8192 by 8192 or greater sized terrain pregened.

Pools: decor,entities,pois increased to amount of pois in prefabs folder, etc.

 
Oh yeah there could definitely be bugs with water yet. That should go away when water is revisited.
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Many of us don`t mind them yet, you guys gave us so much cool things to do on ground already and keep adding, have your time.

Btw, my personal wish for the water thing is to make us say "I was ♥♥♥♥ing eaten by something down there, again" many times :p

 
@4sheetzngeegles The game is not rendering everything anyways.

There is a certain area that is currently active on the client. (the loaded area-chunks)

The distant terrain and low poly POIs (imposters) are used for anything outside that area.

Areas (chunks) you have left, will get its changes stored on disk, and then discarded.

No need to store the whole map (entities, voxels) in memory. And thus no need to render them.

Whats basically kept in memory are the textures defining the distant terrain / the distant terrain mesh, and the imposters for POIs.

The terrain topography is not procedurally generated in real time (thats the world generation before), whats generated is the mesh based on the world files.

And the local terrain mesh based on the voxel-data.

Whats procedurally generated on demand is the decoration (tress, rocks) etc when entering a new chunk.

 
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