Shattered Horizon

[beni]

I just wanted to show you this game, which is a first person shooter in free space. Maybe some of you can use it as inspiration or even buy it to help the sci-fi genre of video games: http://www.shatteredhorizon.com/

[x3n]

looks awesome

[beni]

They say the hardware requirements are inhumane...

[greenman]

that's what i thought when i watched that clip

[1337]

Since we're talking about Orxonox genre games:
http://www.ogre3d.org/2010/04/05/alien-dominion-release

[x3n]

i think i already posted some screenshots of eve online here, but inspiration is always good, so here we go:

[solex]

Hey guys!
I posted the following here, but maybe a thread for all games with relating themes to orxonox would be more adequate.

So I just stumbled upon this one:
http://www.infinity-universe.com

Infinity is a massively multiplayer online game set in a persistent futuristic universe, currently in development.

I think it looks very impressive even without considering that the developers are independent.
Maybe for some more inspiration

They use a procedural programming approach to be able to generate a massive universe and seamless planetary zoom. But see for your selfs:

Tech Demo Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7eREddMjt4&hd=1
Tech Demo Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3muhlQYFgLE&hd=1

Quite the atmosphere with full screen and HD...

[1337]

Hmm, I get the impression that the planet is only about one hundreth of the earths size (or the ship is extremely large). When looking at the surface of the planet from outer space, you can compare a piece of land with one of our own (e.g. Great Britain). Then imagin the ship within that country. Something then doesn't add up.

But you don't really notice this. And you don't really care at all.
So, what about making planets in Orxonox very, very small? They would still be very, very large compared to ships.
Note: A 13m ship is one million times smaller than the earth when camparing with the diameter.

[Mozork]

I agree, seeing how awesome this is, nobody would really care about the missing magnitudes of scale.

I have absolutely nothing against making the planets in Orxonox small. They were tiny in Spore and I didn't care either.
But wouldn't implementing this procedural stuff mean some major changes to Orxonox?

[1337]

I never said this was even possible in Orxonox now

[beni]

I agree basically.

I don't mind if we have to change some things and neglect some realism in favor of fun and experience. Yet planets may also seem VERY tiny. If you remember Freelancer, which was an amazing game, the planets were much too small. I don't know how to create a good effect, but as long as it's fun to play and reasonable (not boring etc.) and doable, we should do it. Who cares about realism if no realism is more fun?

I know the infinity project for some time now and the tech demo looks amazing. I'd love to see something like that in Orxonox. I don't know if we or Ogre can handle it.

[x3n]

There's a demo in the Ogre showcase with a similar effect. So yes it's possible, but needs quite a lot of work. However I think we should focus on other things first, like making Orxonox a really cool game that's worth playing. If we later can add new features like these planets, it will be even better - but planets are nothing worth without a game.

I heard about Infinity some time ago and since then I'm wondering what they mean by 'procedural programming' - basically that's just the opposite of object oriented programming. But there's nothing you can do with procedural programming that isn't possible with object oriented programming, because it's just a different programming style, but in the end both boils down to simple machine code. While reading their description I get the impression they're thinking stuff like randomization, paging, and LOD isn't possible with object oriented programming - but of course it is. In fact that's the state of the art. So have fun programming the rest of your game with a procedural approach, Infinity crew!

[beni]

I agree, while this is a very nice feature and extremely fun to implement, it doesn't make the game at all and is mostly eye candy.

I'm not sure why procedural programming is so amazing, but look at the city engine, by procedural. It at least suggests they are using procedural programming . Procedural is a spin-off from the BIWI, btw.

[x3n]

Yeah I know CityEngine, pretty cool stuff However they don't claim to use procedural programming, but rather procedural modeling - generating a city based on a few parameters, instead of manual modeling.

Maybe that's also what the Infinity devs are talking about, but then again this would mean it's just a simple random generator, no special graphics programming.

[Mozork]

From what I've seen a large part of what they're doing seems to be procedural modeling.
That's the beauty of it. if you generate most of your models and textures using some random algorithm, you can create huge universes and using the random seeds as identifiers you can reliably create the same thing again if need be.
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infini ... &Itemid=27 is rather fascinating.