Just found this rather nice proceedurally generated world.

[maaarcooose]

Talking of procedurally generated cities...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pR8jpK4 ... r_embedded

Was going to be used for Intoversion's new game.
Apparently it not only creates the street layout, building and such, it also does the specifics in the layout of each floor too.

Also, if you've not played Darwinia yet, you should.

!m!

[Selezen]

That is awesome. Could watch that all day. Again, though, could expand the planetary experience of Oolite (or similar). Procedurally generate the planet using a fixed seed, then generate its cities the same way as you approach them.

If (and I know it's not feasible) it was feasible to get out of our ships and wander about, then there could be the possibility of assigning a role to a building and generating an interior layout based on a template as you passed through the threshold.

Generate a planet, generate its cities and towns and generate the interiors of the buildings in each city.

Now all that needs to be done is generate PEOPLE!

[Selezen]

Found this interesting article on procedurally generating cityscapes.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940

[CommonSenseOTB]

What, scale discussion again?

You know it's rather ridiculous to talk of walking around on planets when we can't even walk around the station or the ship. That would be the first step. That is where the action is. Even Rustybolts understands this with his side project. Yet in previous discussions the consensus when I suggested that walking around on stations would enhance the gaming experience was" That would kill the game for me, I use imagination to fill in the blanks, which makes the experience better for me,etc" or something like that.
The good scripters on this board can script 10x better than I and I believe this is doable, at least as a test anyway, as an oxp. If you can, just do it man, or I will try when I have the loose ends of my scripting understanding tied up.
But, as an oxp, it will not be 20% as good as it could be in hard code, more like a proof of concept really. Why not just make it the mission of the devs to improve the one part of oolite that needs improvement, the human side, the personal side, the side that does most of the story-telling on most games and is usually the side that gets the majority of development in todays new games?

Sorry to interrupt, continue with your discussion.

[Selezen]

Found this interesting article on procedurally generating cityscapes.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940

Interestingly, a certain "DaddyHoggy" commented on the last page.

About the "getting out on a station" - I still think this is eminently doable. Design a station layout (standard box shape with some internal structure) and populate it with stuff. Press a key to exit the ship and then the program hands over to another library (DLL, maybe a sub-application) that switches to an FPS mode. Yeah, it'll be a lot of work but as you say the talent is here. It's just whether or not they feel it's a worthwhile addition and whether they can spare the time.

I was playing around with a 3D engine a couple of years back and manages to create a little world to walk around in and wrote the code to manage the walk cycle and it only took a week. It was in VB.NET, so sadly my skills aren't up to the ObjC task of doing this in Oolite.

I think this would be a cool addition, and would instantly take Oolite BEYOND what even the official sequels achieved, never mind an open-source homage!

[Switeck]

If your ship isn't designed to land on a planet, how about taking a Shuttle from the station to planet?
Maybe only for purposes for securing special contracts and/or more immediate trade goods?

[Selezen]

Didn't I just say that??

Even more simple solution: not all ships are atmosphere capable so every pilot has to dock at a station and "rent" a surface-capable vehicle, like an Adder, Shuttle or Transporter.

Why, yes I did!

[CommonSenseOTB]

About the "getting out on a station" - I still think this is eminently doable. Design a station layout (standard box shape with some internal structure) and populate it with stuff. Press a key to exit the ship and then the program hands over to another library (DLL, maybe a sub-application) that switches to an FPS mode.

What would you say if I told you it could be done without handing over to another library? I'll let you think on that one for a minute.

[Cmdr. Maegil]

What would you say if I told you it could be done without handing over to another library? I'll let you think on that one for a minute.

As long as we could get out and talk to NPCs, I wouldn't mind if it was done in the Wolfenstein 3D engine. Heck, make the ghosts non-hostile, and I wouldn't mind if you used the Pac-man engine...

[Selezen]

What would you say if I told you it could be done without handing over to another library? I'll let you think on that one for a minute.

i think i would get overexcited and have to change my pants again. ;=)

[Frame]

You could with some effort do it rather easy , but it would never be feeling like FPS walking. you could even spawn a very large model and have frameCallbacks tie the player to the floor of the station and orientate him correctly so that it would feel like he was in a station. However, it would require that either the player buys a new ship that can be manipulated and contains a charachter, that as sub entities can be animated, and that the main ship model would be moved out of the way.

While it would be all very very smart and clever, the result would be very disappointing for a Commander i think.

This should be hard-coded if it where to be done right. There are plenty of code lying about on the net, but it would still take
a very very long time to implement right, and the benefits would be small. Along with that people would want to be able to create their own characters, and i would expect they want more than what a Mee on a Wii looks like.

[Killer Wolf]

i'm surprised any of those kind of procedures would be workable, given the collision detection woes of Oolite.

[ClymAngus]

A mathematical solution to the scaling issue.

Due to the nature of the fluidic space found around large bodies in the oolite universe; the space away from gravity wells becomes stretched. This has a interesting effect on the absolute scale of ships travelling through it rendering any conventional principle of "scale" utterly irrelevant. Relative scale, IE ship to ship within the confines of normal space however still applies. Golden bullet or what?

I like this. Even without the technobabble, it would be interesting to see how it feels if the game was able to stretch distances on the fly – whether the player would notice, even.

I've been thinking about scale a bit of late ... generally the universe is too inconveniently large for a first-person pilot game to be set in a realistic-scale solar system. From Earth to Venus it's somewhere between 2 to 15 light-minutes; to Saturn, around 60 light minutes; to Neptune, around 240 light-minutes. With these sorts of distances it makes it very difficult to find a ship speed that isn't either too bewilderingly fast close in, and too tediously slow further out. However, if a star's gravity well had a similar slowing-down effect on a ship's drive – i.e. if in-game the top speed out around Neptune's orbit was far, far higher than the top speed close in (but still slowing the player down as they neared the planet) – then it might be possible to give the feel of a full-scale solar system without the impracticalities.

The important thing is after all not dull realism (or "realism with spaceships", at any rate), but fun. Space is big, but most of it contains nothing of any interest whatsoever: the trick would be to give the impression of awesome scale without rubbing it in ...

You see I like that, it's simple and efficient. The entire point of science is the search for an explanation that can underpin the phenomena we sense in our interpenetration of reality.

Why could not such a principle apply to oolite? Come up with a hypothesis and have it dis-proven by a better one.

I propose that oolite suffers a separation of space and time. This would allow gravity to affect space without necessarily effecting time. ie planets seem smaller when viewed from space, entering the atmosphere reduces the size of your ship due to the spacial compression emanating from the planetary gravity well. Stations get a double effect due to their mass + location next to planets.

Space is massively stretched away from gravity wells, massively increasing the size of ships so reducing the relative distances between worlds.

It's like a face on a balloon, let the air out it's a face, blow it up it's a face more over the features tend to stay relative distances to each other because of the equal amount of force action on the balloon.