Realistic planet size like Infinity or Outerra?

Will PA's engine have or can achieve Realistic planet size like Infinity or Outerra?

For the people who doesn't know:
Infinity: http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php
Outerra: http://www.outerra.com/

Unlikely. Gas Giants being rendered to scale would be especially ludicrous.

It probably in theory "can", but it's certainly not designed (or has any need) to.

yea, I just asked the engine potential, not the gameplay design wise..

Super large planets(like 1:1 Earch sized) are one of those things people will assume to be great(because bigger is better right?) until they realize how long it takes to cross the Atlantic or Pacific in a plane.

Mike

Even if the engine is capable of doing it performance wise, it would require a lot of additional development time to iron out artifacts that come with planets these size, because of floating point accuracy and other things. Planets that are roughly 1/500th of earth's size already give an area that no-one is able to explore on its own.

Also I am not sure Outerra, infinity are even realistically scaled. Kerbin in Kerbal Spaceprogram is only 1/100th of earth's size and it is already quite daunting.

I am currently trying to do such thing and already run into these problems with a planetary radius of 10,000 meters, Earth has a radius of >6,000,000 meters according to wiki.

Especially the dynamic level of detailing would probably need a lot more work when they want to support this. Not to discredit Uber, I'm sure they could do it, dunno if it is worth their time though.

Why go for realistic size when small can be fun too?

For example: http://youtu.be/1MHErNkaKwY?t=50s (Populous: The beginning)

Outerra and infinity are realistically scaled.

But that would be absolutely zero fun in an RTS.

Not necessarily, you could scale up the experimentals to a ludicrous size. Just think Warhammer 40K Titans. These things are practically walking cities of death.



That could be quite fun watching them walk through a city just decimating the place on a realistic scale. so long as you simulate all the thousands of frightened citizens running for their soon to be crushed lives, mu ha ha ha.

Depends on numbers of players.

Possible, yes. Plausible, no.

Those engines are specifically designed around the concept of making real world scale planets, and likely makes a number of non-obvious concessions that look good but have potentially serious gameplay ramifications.

True earth scale is not a design goal for our engine. As we've said before, awesome over realism. Several tens of players with a million units is our goal, and planet sizes will be scaled appropriately to that goal.

Please please please be more clear that it's in specific relation to actual scale planets, we don't need another wave of this popping up as reasoning for bad ideas or to shoot down any well ground in reality ideas.

OR better yet change it to "Gameplay Over Realism", as that is the key issue here.

Mike

I can imagine it working if said huge planet is well populated with players or AI players.
I think the real issue here might be with performance. Could battles fought on such a large scale be done without major lags and server issues?

That only goes so far, what happens when you only have 2 players left? The gameplay doesn't scale well to that size, adding more players only works until the extra players you added are gone, then you're back to square one.

Mike

I really do see the issue here but id like to discuss this. Rather interesting. Putting a planet with realistic scales into PA. It would be the size of hundreds if not thousands solar system, huh.
So um. The bases of left players could be handed over to the AI. So they would continue to function and send armies so those who still had unfinished business there could keep on warin'. This could be a game-mode itself. People could jump in at any given time. Spawn at a nice clear spot that's within reasonable range of enemies.

Oooor.. there could be a hub region where Commanders spawn and can select their own spawn locations.

Actually no, they simply use a logarithmic Z buffer. It's somewhat more performance intensive but otherwise has no real downside that I know of.

The other thing of course, is the procedural generation both employ allows them to generate only the geometry they need. Whereas your approach seems a bit less LOD friendly.

Now i just want to delete my own post. I bet everything i write is pure annoyance to others, heh.

40 players on a single planet would be pretty rofl - also include full diplomacy options and shared victory so alliances could form.

that sort of thing is so customizeable too, you could give players objectives like "kill player xxxx" and if player xxxx is in an alliance with somebody else you could cut a deal with them etc. think mission risk but real time and with robots.

That's one of the kind of issues I was thinking of. We don't have the luxury of generating geometry in that way as the server needs all of it at full resolution for navigation purposes.

Fair enough.