Wondering about procedural landscapes

[semalina]

I've been playing No Man's Sky recently, and I was wondering if it would even be possible to lay SL on top of a procedurally-generated world without wrecking existing builds, if only to make all of the ocean navigable without sim crossings?

[cariboustag]

No Man's Sky is truly a redemption arc of a game release, glad it's good now. 

It certainly would be fun to have the procedural elements of it on the land, but I doubt SL has the inherent things built into the "engine" to make it possible.

I'm not the most knowledgeable about SL's inner workings but I know it's vastly different from commercial or indie game engines in almost every way.

I can't imagine it'd work without breaking nearly everything else, sadly. Fantastic idea nonetheless.

[Coffee Pancake]

There is no way to procedurally create mesh content in world on the fly. So no .. not going to happen.

You could do it with prims .. but you would run out of prims long before you had anything anyone would want to look at.

I wish we could do this.

[Paul Hexem]

10 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There is no way to procedurally create mesh content in world on the fly. So no .. not going to happen.

You could do it with prims .. but you would run out of prims long before you had anything anyone would want to look at.

I wish we could do this.

Considering most procedurally generated content is made from the same few assets over and over with different attributes (size, shape, position, color), it actually wouldn't be impossible to do in SL.

It'd be a nightmare to code it though, probably.

[Love Zhaoying]

Technically, doesn't the LSL "landscaping" function llModifyLand() modify landscape "procedurally", and you can write a script to "procedurally" call the function?

 

[Coffee Pancake]

Technically sure, yes ...🍑 it's not really viable for practical use beyond "flatten my land" one 4m section at a time. llModifyLand() has novelty value in that it can be fun to watch a prim zip about messing up the land as it goes, doing meaningful purposeful no mans sky style world gen .. lol.

Mainland baked in terraforming limitations at really tight.

A region to do it on is expensive .. and if you're going to that trouble, it's probably a better solution to write a bot that does all the magic and then uploads finished terrain heightmap, might as well use the bot to rez and decorate everything too.

 

I've done procedurally placed content before and .. that part of the puzzle isn't that hard to do.

[Sammy Huntsman]

2 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Technically sure, yes ...🍑 it's not really viable for practical use beyond "flatten my land" one 4m section at a time. llModifyLand() has novelty value in that it can be fun to watch a prim zip about messing up the land as it goes, doing meaningful purposeful no mans sky style world gen .. lol.

Mainland baked in terraforming limitations at really tight.

A region to do it on is expensive .. and if you're going to that trouble, it's probably a better solution to write a bot that does all the magic and then uploads finished terrain heightmap, might as well use the bot to rez and decorate everything too.

 

I've done procedurally placed content before and .. that part of the puzzle isn't that hard to do.

I wish they would change the whole Terraforming function and menu. So you can really create a land. I am not asking for procedural generation, as it would be impossible and if they did do that. They would have to kick everyone out of mainland and make it so only Lindens could do stuff on the land. 

[animats]

Procedurally generated terrain isn't that difficult to create. There are plenty of open source and commercial terrain generators of varying quality. But it wouldn't help with ocean sim crossings.

Every SL region has to have a server program behind it, always on even if no avatar is seeing it. Each of those servers uses at least a quarter of a CPU. That's why SL lacks big, open emptyness. There's a real operating cost to empty space.

(While somewhat expensive to run, this approach does make the grid more robust. Sims can fail without taking down the whole grid. SL handles this well. Failed sims just leave a watery square hole in the scene. I'm not sure how the fancier schemes such as Improbable's M2, with movable region boundaries, handle failure. We may find out when BAYC's Otherside goes live on Saturday. Lots of hard technical problems in this area.)

 

[semalina]

Thanks for the feedback everyone, I just wanted to float that idea and see where it went. 🙂

[Arielle Popstar]

In Opensim there is a procedural tree module that worked ok when I tried it a few years ago though there are some caveats about its usage:

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Trees_Module

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Someone seeded one of my sims with a procedural landscape that generated about 400 skyscrapers at lightning speed last year. I was buried under a virtual Manhattan in less than 5 minutes.

That what you mean?

(At least it wasn't grey goo.)

[Finite]

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Technically sure, yes ...🍑 it's not really viable for practical use beyond "flatten my land" one 4m section at a time. llModifyLand() has novelty value in that it can be fun to watch a prim zip about messing up the land as it goes, doing meaningful purposeful no mans sky style world gen .. lol.

Mainland baked in terraforming limitations at really tight.

A region to do it on is expensive .. and if you're going to that trouble, it's probably a better solution to write a bot that does all the magic and then uploads finished terrain heightmap, might as well use the bot to rez and decorate everything too.

 

I've done procedurally placed content before and .. that part of the puzzle isn't that hard to do.

Sometimes I wish SL was converted to an editor for a more complete and closed game.

[semalina]

11 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Someone seeded one of my sims with a procedural landscape that generated about 400 skyscrapers at lightning speed last year. I was buried under a virtual Manhattan in less than 5 minutes.

That what you mean?

Not exactly. I was thinking in terms of having SL layered on top of a completely different system where boats and planes would "drop off" the normal SL region system on to an underlying procedurally-generated ocean where sim crossings aren't a factor. In the game I mentioned, you can travel for thousands of miles without so much as a hiccup.