How far can you go?

You guys do realize that alternate galaxies wouldn't be taxing on CPU unless you were currently in them right? We cannot simulate the entire universe in one go, much less one BIOME.

It would only be taxing in hard drive space.

Hey, point your pointer somewhere else, roadkill. I've got the biomes packaged up tight. They're like little data bombs, waiting for your hard drive to trip over them...

Can we just find a sutable answer to this thread, that way it can be locked and I, er... we can get back to more important things.

It has been answered, as it has been two forums ago. We have one galaxy. No more. We can have some visible in the distance for cosmetic purposes, but they are only pictures, not in game objects. I won't lock this thread, but that is the end of this discussion.

To future readers, please read the contents of this thread before posting.

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

Hey, point your pointer somewhere else, roadkill. I've got the biomes packaged up tight. They're like little data bombs, waiting for your hard drive to trip over them...

It doesn't matter how much memory the biomes take up... That memory is negligible at runtime.

What I'm talking about is CPU. NPC's will take up CPU. Landmass deformation will take CPU. Rendering will take most of the CPU. Galaxies won't be iterated or even mentioned by the code unless you're actually in them. You can't simulate the entire universe in real time, much less a single biome with ~100-200 organisms.

Also, the biomes you've packed are still in text form no? That's one byte per character, so pay attention to the filesize. Data values will eventually need to be parsed and stored as numbers, not strings of characters. We can't be constantly be reading characters from files during runtime.

We will need to write a parser that saves it as a .biomes file or something, so we wont even load from a text file every time we run the game. It's faster just to read binary data, and not actively parse.

This has a chart for minimum and maximum values for different variable types about 2/3 of the way down.

The overall point is that: multiple Galaxies would be pointless, it wouldn't accomplish anything.

Quote :

It has been answered, as it has been two forums ago. We have one galaxy. No more. We can have some visible in the distance for cosmetic purposes, but they are only pictures, not in game objects. I won't lock this thread, but that is the end of this discussion.

To future readers, please read the contents of this thread before posting.

Isn't this thread specifically on how far you can go in the Galaxy? If it is, then technichly it hasen't been answerd. If it isn't then sorry.

Gorbachof wrote:

The overall point is that: multiple Galaxies would be pointless, it wouldn't accomplish anything.

Quote :

It has been answered, as it has been two forums ago. We have one galaxy. No more. We can have some visible in the distance for cosmetic purposes, but they are only pictures, not in game objects. I won't lock this thread, but that is the end of this discussion.

To future readers, please read the contents of this thread before posting.

Isn't this thread specifically on how far you can go in the Galaxy? If it is, then technichly it hasen't been answerd. If it isn't then sorry.

Ah, I appologize. I was more refering to the inevitable question of other galaxies, which seemed to be the current question. I think that starting in a cluster or smaller area would be a good start, and we could enlarge the area if that proves to be too small, and we would cut things off at the whole galaxy. Thoughts?

My point is, there's no reason not to in the code.

Poisson wrote:

Gorbachof wrote:

The overall point is that: multiple Galaxies would be pointless, it wouldn't accomplish anything.

Quote :

It has been answered, as it has been two forums ago. We have one galaxy. No more. We can have some visible in the distance for cosmetic purposes, but they are only pictures, not in game objects. I won't lock this thread, but that is the end of this discussion.

To future readers, please read the contents of this thread before posting.

Isn't this thread specifically on how far you can go in the Galaxy? If it is, then technichly it hasen't been answerd. If it isn't then sorry.

Ah, I appologize. I was more refering to the inevitable question of other galaxies, which seemed to be the current question. I think that starting in a cluster or smaller area would be a good start, and we could enlarge the area if that proves to be too small, and we would cut things off at the whole galaxy. Thoughts?

So, kinda like Minecraft?

Quote :

My point is, there's no reason not to in the code.

There's no reason to do it either

roadkillguy wrote:

Also, the biomes you've packed are still in text form no? That's one byte per character, so pay attention to the filesize. Data values will eventually need to be parsed and stored as numbers, not strings of characters. We can't be constantly be reading characters from files during runtime.

We will need to write a parser that saves it as a .biomes file or something, so we wont even load from a text file every time we run the game. It's faster just to read binary data, and not actively parse.

This has a chart for minimum and maximum values for different variable types about 2/3 of the way down.

Yes, they're text, as Calli can't program her way out of a paper bag. Right now I'm mostly trying to stuff all of the conditions for determining them into a set of algorithms. Then I'll doubtless be pestering you all as to what I should do about all of the tags and attributes. Current filesize is weird because I'm in Excel... but atm it's 41 KB. I see where you're getting to on that... my guess is each biome is going to end up, in text, about 3-5 KB... which is ridiculous given the number of biomes that we're likely to have.

By all means, write the parser (whatever that does...)

A parser decodes human written text files, and the program will do different things based on what it has read.

An exell file won't give you an accurate reading at how many characters there are. To get an accurate reading, as well as to be parsed, you should convert it to a basic .txt sometime. (Decoding proprietary files is tough at best)

roadkillguy wrote:

A parser decodes human written text files, and the program will do different things based on what it has read.

An exell file won't give you an accurate reading at how many characters there are. To get an accurate reading, as well as to be parsed, you should convert it to a basic .txt sometime. (Decoding proprietary files is tough at best)

Not to go even more OT, but if we're coding a biome by the variables we have for it now, what's the most efficient way to store the biome? Meaning easiest access and least memory taken up by the file.

How funny is it that were talking about biomes in a space thread.

OT is OT. And biomes are the project du jour.

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

OT is OT. And biomes are the project du jour.

Ok, Sorry.

The Uteen wrote:

Ooh, I know how to stop them leaving the galaxy!

Maybe if you go far enough, you start seeing faint green lines making cubes outlines (imagine blackpaper with vertical and horizontal lines, making lots of squares on the paper. The same thing, but 3d with cubes), and as you progress into them, they get brighter. After going through 10 or more cubes of the big cube wall, the green reaches its most distinct. Now the black of space is begining to turn green, too. Your engine stutters, and stops. You float onwards. Eventually the whole of space becomes green, a cyber (computer) green, and all you can see is your ship, floating through a void of green. the green fades to white. The whole of space turns white, and your ship turns cyber green, and explodes into glistening fragments.

Once you respawn (or go to your closest living relative, or whatever we use), The game resumes as normal, but after about 30s, you see  green wire meshes over a few objects (like a chair), suggesting it is a computer generated model. More and more things go like this over the course of a minute, until everything has this. Then the world shatters, and you see a message in green letters: SIMULATION TERMINATED. You go to the menu, and you see your save game planet is a green mesh. Load it, and you resume traveling out of the green mesh, towards the galaxy.

So yeah, that could happen when you try to leave.

Also, I am serious about thinking this is a reasonable idea. The programming could be a pain, but you'd come out of it thinking, "Wow! Cool! I'm not doing that again."

I love this Matrix idea. I think it would be a good idea to implement it in the final game, like an easter egg.