I like the concept, and Space Engineers really need some concurrence.
But you use Unity3d, which is a huge turn down. How are you going to make the transition between planets to terrain ?
Because planets seem to be nothing but a local cluster of flat map loaded as you walk around.
I am afraid of the same thing going on with Empyrion.
Pretty sure if KSP can do it, Planet Nomads can as well.
They've already said you can (or will) be able to build something and then walk or drive all the way around the planet and return to your first base. Plus, one of their main goals with their engine (Sandy) was to permit optimized LOD and the ability to seamlessly go from the surface up into orbit. Right now, in SE, they've tried to do that but it's still too heavy for modern systems, so you get screen freezes as it loads in more data as you get closer to the ground. We'll have to see if PN does orbit to ground better.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind some loading animation for transition between planets and space if it will untie developers hands a little to do other cool stuff in the game.
@FuzzyWuff What other software/engine other than Unity3d would you suggest for a better transition between planets to terrain? Just curious.
Even games that use a custom engine like Elite Dangerous: Horizons suffer from these sort of issues. That game has a (sometimes noticeable) pause when transitioning to orbital flight, though I will admit that might be the game trying to contact the servers on my shitty internet, even though it's in single player mode.
KSP uses a really interesting LOD mechanism to achieve the transition between planetary bodies and space, so I think Planet Nomads can definitely achieve the effect.Originally Posted by McyD
Why do you think Craneballs chose Unity?
Probably out of familiarity. That's my guess, at least.
What engine/software is most fit for these types of games?
None really, you have to code the solution yourselves regardless of engine. Most people think unity is a really weak engine because they see it used so much for mobile work but under the hood it is actually a very capable engine which you can do a rather remarkable amount of work it. Problem is people think creating game engines is easy, its not and something like UE4 or even cryengine would also require all those involved in the project on planet nomads to essentially train themselves with it before they could even start work on the game which isn't something you want to do when your on a budget.
Please bear in mind that while we use Unity the procedural terrain generation "engine" (Sandy) is our own and that gives us a lot of control over it. We spent good amount of time playing around with one other commercial procedural terrain generator and even tried Unity competitor. At the end we decided that Unity + our own stuff will give us the best results.
Indeed, and now with Unity 5 it comes with a lot more features "built in" which I'm assuming are properly optimized, saving developers time and resources.
Also from what I've seen, being as popular as it is there's a ton of documentation available.
I think the IDtech 3 engine (the one that ran Doom 3) was about half a million lines of code. At least if my memory serves me correct. That's a lot of code to write, test, debug, and organize.
Unity has amazing documentation, at least of their API. How exactly to build a game in Unity leaves a bit to be desired, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It encourages programmers to craft their own solution instead of following a template that may be limiting in some circumstances.
I agree with what's been said, and would like to point out that none of these engines have planet-to-space transition in them by default. That is what Craneballs has stated that they were looking for from the beginning in an engine and ended up writing something themselves to facilitate it. (A terrain/planet LOD engine within the graphics engine of Unity) Also, most engines used to be 'level' based, where a sky-box and terrain needed to be created, and that is quite limiting. Not that you can't have a moving sky-box, but what do you do when you want to fly high or go all the way to orbit? It's a tough challenge because computers are not yet capable of even containing the solar system while also giving you half-meter resolution of everything in that system.
Space Engineers started with a sky-box system before they had planets, and then transitioned to a more generative system for the solar system. No Man's sky solves this with generative systems. To render a view, algorithms are processed to build the sky, clouds, distant planets, terrain, vegetation, and so on. It mostly all comes down to math as far as sky and terrain is concerned, so no hand-built terrain or sky-box was ever created for NMS. That's an engine that you have to write yourself, since CryEngine or others aren't going to provide that for you.
I don't know a great deal about CryEngine, but it's strength has been outside environments, but I'm not sure it is even the most suitable for a planet-to-orbit transition --which would still require extra coding to tweak the LOD handling and programmatically-generative elements, I'm sure-- or for a block-building game, either.
Here is an example of CryEngine transition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBYRIZA44Eg
But it modificated version of Cry Engine, special for StarCitizen, same and "Sandy" engine - modificated version of Unity for Planet Nomads. I belive, that devs can made this.
what is wrong with the engine they use, I am not tech minded so I know nothing about it
There's nothing inherently wrong with the engine they're using. Unity just gets a bad name because it's easier to use than some other engines and so you get new developers producing low quality games with it. Not to say that's a bad thing, everyone has to start somewhere.
"And so I close realizing the end has not yet been written" - Atrus, Myst, 1992
I have a problem with unity , is its management of complexity.
Most of the time, everying that's not 'if this then that' cause a lot of trouble with unity, including IA, multiplayer server and terrain generation
Plus it requires an huge cpu load to have server (thats why we wont have big servers, not only because the phyisics are complex, but also because unity can't simplify phyisics to be half-client half-server based)...
That's why you'll never see a AAA game running on unity. The biggest games i know uner unity are KSP (And its ton of buggy mess) and Cities skylien( Which runs really nicely, but it's less complex than PN...)
But hey, the trailer looks awesome, and you guys seems very motivated so i guess i'm gonna wait ahppily for every new or video ^3^
Last edited by Pokexpert; 26-02-2016 at 03:53 PM.
Just out of curiosity did you take Amazon Lumberyard into account when you decided which game engine you'll use?
I think amazon lumberyard came out after they started development
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