The world: Realism...

If you are on a planet,can there be erosion and such? And if so,is it possible to create a Pangea? (If you dont know what is is,google it) And if so,would there be hypercanes and would the hypercanes be availeble to the God Mode/Tools?

zotobom wrote:

If you are on a planet,can there be erosion and such? And if so,is it possible to create a Pangea? (If you dont know what is is,google it) And if so,would there be hypercanes and would the hypercanes be availeble to the God Mode/Tools?

Actually, you can't do anything yet. Erosion would be very difficult to implement, as would continents. When you have a sphere of vertices, what do you propose to do?

Pangea would come around with continental drift, and I think this is going to be simulated.

The Uteen wrote:

...going to be simulated.

Care to clarify?

well, it is a major player in the fluctuation of evolution variables, since shape, size of the landmass and temperature greatly influence you and all animals

I realize it's importance, I just want to know how you propose to do it.

by moving the landmass you are not in, slowly and in background. making a collide into b is the same that b into a. if pangea then make cracks in areas and then move em

That's not exactly what I mean..

I was looking for:

Landmasses are large groups lists of vertices on a planet. Each generation, they're rotated around the planet.

The only problem now is to handle the collisions in between continents.

roadkillguy wrote:

The only problem now is to handle the collisions in between continents.

It should be something simple, like comparing X/Z position, and if they intersect, do earthquake and eruptions over A years on collision position + some random.

..Or simply create mountains.

This will definitely matter more once we have an actual creature stage

roadkillguy wrote:

zotobom wrote:

If you are on a planet,can there be erosion and such? And if so,is it possible to create a Pangea? (If you dont know what is is,google it) And if so,would there be hypercanes and would the hypercanes be availeble to the God Mode/Tools?

Actually, you can't do anything yet. Erosion would be very difficult to implement, as would continents. When you have a sphere of vertices, what do you propose to do?

Actually, Bashi has an idea for erosion, continental drift is very easy to do, really.

eumesmo wrote:

by moving the landmass you are not in, slowly and in background. making a collide into b is the same that b into a. if pangea then make cracks in areas and then move em

And do you realise how complicated the mathematics involved in doing that is?

i was imagining so....

Bashinerox wrote:

eumesmo wrote:

by moving the landmass you are not in, slowly and in background. making a collide into b is the same that b into a. if pangea then make cracks in areas and then move em

And do you realise how complicated the mathematics involved in doing that is?

Easiest way is to throw plates at each other while you're not looking.

Over the course of any one Organism's life it would be impossible to see any large movements from the Continents, so this would occur between each individual Organism that the player controls. If each continent is a collection of vertices, then depending on their prior placement, force calculations would apply and the continents would be forced under or over eachother (forming mountains and a crevice), or a downright collision (also forming large mountains) would occur.

Xenon wrote:

The best solution would probably be to make the continental plates move when evolving, so they wouldn't directly move as you are standing on it but only when it loads a new generation in evolution (or anything like it).
When plates collide we make the program generate a mountain chain and maybe volcanoes at that location, and if it separates we would have it, generate a sea/river or a canyon.
It doesn't have to work just like real world. as long as it just looks as if it does

I don't really know if this is possible to script, but it's an idea.

this gives me an idea.

I could treat plates as hugely viscous fluid bodies, and use density values on a scalar field to convert to a heightmap representing the surface. maybe modify a fluid solver to take into account flocking of "fused plates" in order to produce a mercury-like fluid solved in extreme-slow-motion?

I'll have to think hard on this one..

Bashinerox wrote:

this gives me an idea.

I could treat plates as hugely viscous fluid bodies, and use density values on a scalar field to convert to a heightmap representing the surface. maybe modify a fluid solver to take into account flocking of "fused plates" in order to produce a mercury-like fluid solved in extreme-slow-motion?

I'll have to think hard on this one..

Well, just worry about the OE for now.

In regards to this, I would imagine that the computer would have plenty of time to calculate! xD

Really though, this will only ever make a noticable effect when the player jumps foward in time, so it'd fit in with the breaks for evolution.

Tenebrarum wrote:

Bashinerox wrote:

this gives me an idea.

I could treat plates as hugely viscous fluid bodies, and use density values on a scalar field to convert to a heightmap representing the surface. maybe modify a fluid solver to take into account flocking of "fused plates" in order to produce a mercury-like fluid solved in extreme-slow-motion?

I'll have to think hard on this one..

Well, just worry about the OE for now.

In regards to this, I would imagine that the computer would have plenty of time to calculate! xD

Really though, this will only ever make a noticable effect when the player jumps foward in time, so it'd fit in with the breaks for evolution.

Is jumping forward in time a god tool as well? We need a thread to keep track of all of the god tools we're coming up with...

The Uteen wrote:

Tenebrarum wrote:

Bashinerox wrote:

this gives me an idea.

I could treat plates as hugely viscous fluid bodies, and use density values on a scalar field to convert to a heightmap representing the surface. maybe modify a fluid solver to take into account flocking of "fused plates" in order to produce a mercury-like fluid solved in extreme-slow-motion?

I'll have to think hard on this one..

Well, just worry about the OE for now.

In regards to this, I would imagine that the computer would have plenty of time to calculate! xD

Really though, this will only ever make a noticable effect when the player jumps foward in time, so it'd fit in with the breaks for evolution.

Is jumping forward in time a god tool as well? We need a thread to keep track of all of the god tools we're coming up with...

Can I suggest that time travel, if it's going in the game, could be in an add-on? Since I have a belief that time travel is impossible.

You will always have the option to jump forward in time (Possibly only pre-sapiance?) so as to allow evolution to happen.

Tenebrarum wrote:

You will always have the option to jump forward in time (Possibly only pre-sapiance?) so as to allow evolution to happen.

Well I was talking about the time travel in god tools, not the fact that you could fast forward time to make evolution go faster.

Bashinerox wrote:

Xenon wrote:

The best solution would probably be to make the continental plates move when evolving, so they wouldn't directly move as you are standing on it but only when it loads a new generation in evolution (or anything like it).
When plates collide we make the program generate a mountain chain and maybe volcanoes at that location, and if it separates we would have it, generate a sea/river or a canyon.
It doesn't have to work just like real world. as long as it just looks as if it does

I don't really know if this is possible to script, but it's an idea.

this gives me an idea.

I could treat plates as hugely viscous fluid bodies, and use density values on a scalar field to convert to a heightmap representing the surface. maybe modify a fluid solver to take into account flocking of "fused plates" in order to produce a mercury-like fluid solved in extreme-slow-motion?

I'll have to think hard on this one..

Definitely keep that in mind.

How will the planet surface data be encoded? Will it be a complex and "true" 3d model (or perhaps a voxel dataset?) or a sphere with a displaced surface? If we opted for a sphere with 2d height data applied upon it, erosion, plate tectonics and all such effects become way simpler. It comes with a couple of limitations, but I beleive it'd be the simplest workable model.

Perhaps extra terrain data (such as soil/rock type and etc) could be encoded (or mapped if you prefer) via separate parameters which would be also altered as the geology progressed. Dwarf fortress does that and has quite a rich geology to play around.

One thing that I'm not holding my breath for is dynamic feedback of plate tectonics activity with dynamic textures. Most 3d engines can't handle recomposing several layers of textures on real time.

Tenebrarum wrote:

You will always have the option to jump forward in time (Possibly only pre-sapiance?) so as to allow evolution to happen.

Wait, should we really have something that has the level of effect of a god tool that early?

You really shouldn't need to jump forward in time at any point in the game, you should be enjoying playing around with the game as your creature evolves, not skipping ahead in time going
"ROFL LOLS!!!! I GUNNA GET DA GODS MODE IN 1 MINITE FLATTTT!!!!!111!!!1".

And if you really didn't like your creature or wanted to get to sapience without bother, you could just leave it for a while in observer mode...

But we really don't want to encourage jumping forwards in time, if people get in a habit of jumping forward, they will just jump further and further each time until they eventually get bored of the entire game. I really think this is not a good idea... In god mode, yes, but that is only at the end of each game, you'll be moving onto another save or something by then.

And in response to the post above, we had something to do with using cubes... Maybe.