After the Unknown System was added, sometimes I wondered about how the devs make them, from the ground up, as for me it seems like to be a probably difficult task.

Like how backgrounds are made (both with and without planets)

How asteroids are placed down

And how its determined to put different bot types across different sectors

It'd be nice if features of the unknown system were randomly changing at regular intervals. Like asteroid positions, bots, wormholes, everything. So mapping the system would be impossible. A new place everytime.

Making a vo skybox is relatively trivial there's multiple ways to go about it, in the gamefiles there's a background texture that's separate from the stars these are all relatively low resolution pngs (well by today's "standards" anyway), as far as placing the asteroids and doing all that fancy stuff, it requires in-house tools, the information to build models for vo is somewhere on the messageboard, afaik everything's done inside 3dsmax and to get to the filetype that vo uses you need a special tools that the devs keep on hand.

Sid123 that's technically feasible and the game already instances the training sectors to avoid newb congestion, problem is with changing asteroid locations and stuff is I doubt it can be done on the fly without a server restart due to how the backend is built but that's just a guess.

The backgrounds and most asteroid positions are created procedurally. There are algorithms that lay everything out.

In the case of the backgrounds, this is why the resolution of the textures that Spidey mentions are irrelevant, because they are not used in a simplistic manner. For instance, large numbers of background stars are point-sprites. The individual point-sprite texture might "appear" low-resolution if viewed as a single texture, but they aren't used that way, they're defined with pixel-independent precision and then thousands are rendered out into a "cooked" render-time texture by the actual game engine, based on the capabilities (and texture-memory settings) of the respective device hardware. There are various types of textures that have different visual properties.

So, there actually are no skybox textures in the game, not like you might find in many other games. There are only various components that are blended together by kind of an "in-engine Photoshop".

However, despite being procedural, there's still a fair amount of tweaking that can go into the "look" of different backgrounds. I spent some time playing with different lighting combinations, and forcing various values and biases to make the Unknown System look the way that it does.

The system was designed to allow us to create an unlimited procedural universe. It does have that capability, although like with any procedural system, you generally get better results if someone with an artistic eye has a hand in making the content.

Thanks for the response.
I never thought that the entire system is procedurally generated, even the backgrounds.
I mean they look good regardless, and great to save lots of time making background art.

I mean they look good regardless, and great to save lots of time making background art.

Glad to hear they look good, but it isn't really an "artistic" time-savings thing (for the current universe, anyway). It would be easier and faster for me to generate backgrounds myself, and make them look exactly the way I want, as opposed to prodding a procedural system to do "kind-of what I want". That's the downside of procedural in-game systems.

However, every single background is also unique, for every single sector. That's why you'll sometimes see a nearby planet, or the nearest star(s) ("sun(s)") in the system will scale in size, or other features. For some people those are cooked into the background to maximize performance, for others they're separated layers that may move (like how the planets rotate). But there's always the possibility of adding new content that's sufficiently "large" that it may be visible at a planetary-scale distance.

If all backgrounds were hand-made and unique, that would present a storage and download issue. Now you're saving six textures for 256 sectors, times 32 systems. That's 49,152 textures. Even a modest 1024x1024 RGB texture, compressed to DDS with DXTC, is about 1.4MB apiece. That would add up to about 68GB. Doing things dynamically, with render-to-texture, is a lot more efficient at keeping the game download smaller, plus we can render out to much higher resolutions if desired (like 4k-per-texture, etc).

But, even if you gave up on having individual sectors have unique backgrounds, and only did backgrounds per-system, or tried some alternative blend of render-to-texture, you would still end up with a storage issue once you started expanding the universe to a larger scale (not to mention losing the ability to expand the universe programmatically, or in some automated way).

Everything is a series of trade-offs..

I personally I love the style of VO, regardless of how "outdated" it is.
It just gives the game the atmosphere what I always come back to no matter what, as i like it.
There is always some trade offs, but thats the case with everything. As long as it works (what it does very well), its good to leave it as it is.

Id love to see the 'planets moving around' mechanism implemented in the game, would add more of visual quality to the game than any textures detailing itself, although it would be a lot cool to see them textures detailed to modern day's graphics. Irrespective of whichever gets added up, ill be happy either way.

And bout the stars that are placed, hearing Inc saying they are of in high resoultion, and would only look like a low quality png, is youd be able to watch it when you zoom into the space, which the game allows you to do that. Yeah, they do look like a low quality image.

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