Terrain Generator 3rd party

Discussion in 'Planets & Playfields' started by Bazslaz, Sep 6, 2020.

  1. Bazslaz

    Bazslaz Ensign

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    Are there any 3rd party tools you can buy to directly edit existing terrain maps by painting on them and sculpting how you want a planet to look that would work with Empyrion once you have a finished planet terrain. The current Terrain Generator tool really does now allow you to really change a planet all that much. I do not see any way to remove mountains from the central Regions of the Desert Playfield. Is it possible to edit or create playfields using 3rd party tools?

    Does Empyrion have any plans to ever allow players to create truly custom planets?
     
    #1
    Last edited: Sep 7, 2020
  2. jmcburn

    jmcburn Rear Admiral

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    Custom height maps (raw maps) were already in before (A8 or A10, don't remember exactly), but were taken out in favor of the current system with the random base map and random placement of height stamps. Mostly because of performance reasons and because you couldn't create truely random terrains with them, because - naturally - custom height maps will always look the same.

    Also, custom (=user created) won't really work for multiplayer, as those maps would need to be sent to all player client, which is very bandwidth hungry, as the large raw images had several megabytes each.

    @Kassonnade found a way to edit a savegame's planet terrain after it was created once and also managed to add his own stamps (and even a single stamp that could fill the whole planet, maybe you could use that approach), as far as I know. But to my knowledge there are no ways other than that to use a custom raw heightmap terrain anymore before or during planet creation (means to set it in yaml already).

    /jmc
     
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    Last edited: Sep 7, 2020
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  3. Kassonnade

    Kassonnade Rear Admiral

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    I am working on this presently, and trying various methods to cover all aspects of planet creation in a more controlled manner. We can edit the .raw map that is in the savegame's folder, but the textures will not fit terrain anymore and some POIs/ deco will be floating mid-air or get buried if terrain is modified under them, since they are only placed once at terrain generation. This also requires using a clumsy program to edit the .raw files ( ImageJ - free) and conversion between this program and other "regular" paint/ edition software (ex. Gimp) is complex but can be done by trial and error. Let me know if you are interested in this and I can give you more tips.

    I found it's much easier to simply use a paint program (I use an old Photoshop) to make either Groundshapes (that keep moving around at generation) or large stamps held in place by "fixed biomes". Only problem is that fixed biomes don't use the splatmaps (custom textures) tied to the heightmaps, but at least the terrain elevation can be totally controlled.

    I succeeded in making a somewhat "fixed" random stamp by constraining it by latitude/ longitude coordinates, but this requires toning down most other stamps to avoid "stamp invasion" that could deform terrain where we don't want to. There is also a small randomness left in the placement of the stamp, and if coordinates are made too tight the stamp will not spawn, contrarily to a fixed biome.

    So the obvious solution would be to fix the "splatmap" problem for fixed biomes, and we could cover all terrain with a few big stamps. I will continue searching for solutions as each day brings new ideas. Even with latitude/ longitude constrained random stamps, these spawn reverted/ mirrored randomly, making it hard to predict in what direction features will point. But the good part is that once it has spawned in a fixed playfield, it will always spawn in the same way, so we can "revert the drawing" to compensate.

    I posted many examples of what I mentioned here in the "What did you do in Empyrion today" thread, if you want to check some results. I started posting almost daily from that page :

    https://empyriononline.com/threads/what-did-you-do-in-empyrion-today.2826/page-1110

    There are still many things I did not try, and I think the best, "final" method to make completely "controlled" and personalized playfields will be a combination of many tricks.We can't expect to fill a 64 km by 32 km planet "by hand" with trees, plants and rocks, and all cracks and crevices in terrain. But we sure can get more control over all that than what the actual "terrain generator" throws in.
    .
     
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    Last edited: Sep 7, 2020
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  4. Bazslaz

    Bazslaz Ensign

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    Really good explanations, although I dont see downloading modded planets as a problem. Think about the game counter strike. It has been around for years, people modded sounds, graphics, voices etc and when you joined that server you downloaded those special textures / sounds one time. yes it did take some time back then to do that but it was a one time thing. I mean we live in an age where we download movies from iTunes, we download games that are massive in size, I dont think downloading a custom planets would be all that bad. Even if server owners put links to the custom planet files on their servers people could manually download and place them. If a server is good with rich content I would have no issue doing that. That being said I want to thank both of you for explaining the challenges as of today for doing this. My hope is that over time Empyrion will at least provide a way to remove a mountain range that is blocking desert views on a desert planet. For my purpose removing a quadrant of mountains and replacing them with desert would be helpful. the current method only allows me to replace all mountains with desert or lower all mountains to the same low height. Think about Tatooine, much of that planet is desert. When you look out of your base you should see desert not mountains in the distance. There were mountains on Tatooine, just not all over the planet. I was able to create the double sun effect over the planet and I must say it looks very cool.

    Thanks again guys for the help and your work .
     
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  5. piddlefoot

    piddlefoot Rear Admiral

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    Ive asked for this back in 2015 but the choice was not really available, the base of the terrain in Empyrion is procedurally generated, and was already in even back then, so they added Custom height maps but they are the same, well there is a set of them, so you have some variables but its pretty limited.

    What I asked for, was a terrain manipulator that allows us to left click on terrain, and raise it or lower it or drag it to left or right, allowing the creation of tunnels etc, literally anything , its similar to the system used in Age of Empires terrain creator, but obviously on a different scale.

    It would allow for extremely diverse terrains, it might even open the door to things like donut planets etc, odd shaped planets, but the biggest problem with this idea is its only viable for size 1 planets, yep, the smallest planets in our entire game are the only ones its even possible on because of performance, map shape is really heavy on performance.

    Its the sole reason Subnautica took out terrain deformation, performance.

    So if you get this mod to work, its going to be INSANELY awesome and popular among us planet builders.

    I think its possible for our smallest planets or moons.
    Small unique is still better than no unique.
    So I wish you luck, and if it works, you have your first donation right here because such an awesome mod is worth reward.
     
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