Let's dig into the work done of the upcoming terrain technology!
The new terrain will:
- unify asteroids, space habitat and planets under the same tech
- be fully deformable, which means mining and terrain sculpting to make ground bases.
- be integrated into the brick entity rendering system for better performance (GPU culling and batching for the tech savvy)
- be integrated to the collision system too, for better performance.
At first this new tech will replace the current asteroids, introducing mining. Then a bit later it will replace the current space habitats terrain, while planets will take a bit longer to be introduced as they require more work to generate good looking and varied terrain.
New Asteroids:
The new asteroids will be more varied and will features several ore to be mined.
Some larger big asteroids are also spawn on top of the usual field of asteroids.
Here is a preview of mining (just terrain deforming for now, I will add vfx and better mining experience).
I havent spent much time on the look for things for now and have instead focused on the technology, so no worry it will look much better!
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The technology uses an octree: an asteroid (and later a planet or habitat) first render a single chunk of geometry at a low resolution. Once the player gets closer that chunks gets subdivided into 8 smaller chunks of half the size. This continue as the player gets closer up until the minimum size of 1m per voxel has been reached.
Several challenges arise, like how to stich the gap between the geometry of two chunks at a different resolutions. You also needs to deal with the transition and blend between the geometry of the two resolutions when a node gets subdivided.
You can see the whole thing in action here. Please not how the geometry gets subdivided as you get closer:
Tech wise it has been very challenging as several systems are now dealing with tens of thousands entities rather than a few thousands like before. It is a good news for the long term as it will also improve performance overall and allow ships with many many children entities / doors to run better.
Stay tuned, and thanks for supporting the game!
Francois