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 Macoman   |
Hey guys! it's me, Macoman! here's the thing- I've got an ambitious idea for a world in docking station. It involves a tidally locked planet with a radius approximately 3,000 kilometers. it has an elliptical orbit around a M0v star. The sun facing side has an everlasting hurricane up to 1000 km across, and the night side is a frozen abyss. there a thin habitable rim right outside the reach of the hurricane. it is basically Albia, but with a to-scale width (assuming 1 pixel equals 2 centimeters squared). I need to know several things before I start, though. 1: what is the minimum height for a metaroom in ds? 2: is it possible to get the world map to loop on itself like C2? if so, how does it work? Thanks! |
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 toxic biohazard Freylaverse Moderator |
1: I suppose there isn't strictly speaking a minimum. If your monitor is larger than the metaroom itself then everything else will be filled in with black. But, if nothing else, it should be tall enough that large creatures (think adult grendels) can move around unobstructed. 2: Yes, it is possible! I don't know the specifics of how it works, but you could try to reverse engineer the world wrap from C1toDS or C2toDS. Science is a beautiful gift to humanity; We should not distort it. |
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 Peppery One Papriko |
What. Lemme back-of-napkin calculate this real quick. 3000km radius means 6000km diameter, which means 6000km * pi = 18850km circumference, give or take. You said one pixel is about 2cm on each edge, which means..... 942.5 million pixels across? Goodness gracious, I am not sure if this poor 25 year old engine can take that much abuse.... I won't even go on my usual tangent about ambitious projects and all that, this looks like the textbook example of a technical limitation. As for the looping, it's all just smoke and mirrors. Or cameras and teleporters, rather. You essentially have a dead zone at each end of the metaroom. In that dead zone, you place huge camera screens, akin to the surveillance cameras that both C3 and DS have included. You set them up to show what is on the opposite side of the room. That way it looks like the world just continues normally there. Next up you make watcher agents which have two tasks: whenever something movable goes into the dead zone, it is instead teleported to the other side of the world to the corresponding real position shown on the cameras. The other task is to make sure your screen is teleported as well when it goes far enough in, so that you can smoothly move left and right through the seam. After that, you wanna CA-link the two ends for creature navigating purposes. I don't even know if and how they make it that creatures can see objects past the border, or if it's just a black void to them. I never played with C12DS or C22DS, but I heard creatures are not very eager to try out that wormhole. You can not pick up objects from the dead zone either. Remember, they are actually at the other end of the room, you're just seeing a life-sized camera image. Lets play plants! Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... |
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 Mandymom |
A metaroom that big would cause problems. Creatures would likely not be able to reach each other nor food. Also, who needs that much space? Grendels aren't so bad, but I love Ettins! They're adorable! The complexity of creatures is quite amazing. |
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 Malkin Manager  |
If a metaroom gets too big, norns can get lost (they smell their way around and smell only goes so far). Aquatilis Caverna is an example of a room that, although ambitious and ground-breaking, shows this issue. Have you played with C2toDS Refresh? That has a world wrap and it could be useful to see how it plays in game as well as looking at its code. My TCR Norns |
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Macoman |
Papriko wrote: The habitable zone of it is actually right outside the hurricane, which only affects out to 1000 km. which makes the habitable circumference approximately 6300 km. which makes the pixel length 315 million pixels across. The engine is incapable of creating a map greater than 650000x 650000 pixels. however, I've got a plan to overcome this, at least in theory. the plan is to create a series of metarooms approximately 1200 pixels tall by 630000 pixels wide. I then link metaroom 1's right side with metaroom 2's left side, metaroom 2's right side with metaroom 3's left side, and so on, until i reach metaroom 500, and I then link metaroom 500's right side with metaroom 1's left side. However, thank you for letting me know how the looping factor works. good to know about the dead zone! |
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Peppery One Papriko |
Back when I played on a low-end machine, the camera screens were one of the first things to go to improve performance. If, like, half a dozen already make such a difference, I don't dare to imagine what a whole one thousand would do. Next up, wouldn't it mean that you'd need to keep all 500 background images plus map data for collisions etc all in RAM? That seems like... a lot. Lastly, how do you plan on populating 500 giant rooms? Even after creating all 500 rooms with all 500 background images and all 1000 cameras and all 1000 watcher agents and all 500 collision maps, you still don't have a single piece of life in them. No creatures, no critters, no plants, not even a measly toy. Those all have to go somewhere as well, both physically and in memory. It really hurts me to be such a killjoy, but I just don't believe that those old games can take such a magnitude of content... Again, I won't even try to doubt your eagerness and passion for the project, I have seen other people around here pull off some surprising large scale undertakings, but I really do believe that we are busting out of all seams when it comes to technical feasibility. These games were made to simulate a small spaceship, not an entire planet. Just compare the sheer size of the shee ark in the official artwork to what we actually got in game. There are worlds between the two. Lets play plants! Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... |
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Macoman |
Okay, maybe the Docking station engine as it is isn't able to handle this. And I admit, my idea is ambitious, maybe a little crazy sounding. But assuming someone modernized and expanded the engine (I saw they were doing something like that on GitHub), could it be done? I would help in any way I possibly can, Though I just learned programming at the beginning of last year (Mainly by looking at other people's code, and looking up the meaning on the creature's wiki)! Again, thank you so much for the input. |
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