Cubical Drift's Planets^3: Now with Drew Barrymore! (Not)

[Gormador]

Hey guys !

A friend of mine posted a link to that kickstarter page a week ago and, well, let's say I probably got way too much excited. The thing is: I still am.

This game project seems overly ambitious at first glance, however the Cubical Drift team seems to have understand it and plan to make two games instead of one (second one being an add-on if I'm not mistaken), which made me believe that they could finish their project.

The game in it self is a mix between an open-world RPG and minecraft. Something like that.
So yeah, nothing really new, but man: spaaace! (They really did a good job, at least to me, with their video ^^)


What do you think? ;-)

[Taleric]

I really like the cutaway and layout of the world :P

If the game can match the detail and info graph sexiness of the kickstarter page it will be sweet.

I am overwhelmed anymore with all the anticipated releases. I have waited forever for satesfying next gen homeworld, dungeon keeper, Xgame ect. that are truly sayesfying. So often they miss the mark anymore.

It looks to have elements of several recent releases that will be great to have together.

Is this a first where the second counter part title/DLC is disclosed like this?

[Gormador]

Well it's not so much a DLC than a rationalisation of their project in my opinion. They had a game in mind, and realised it was quite the piece, which led them to split it in two parts.

On the disclosure thing, I would say that their project is much more appealing that way and gives meaning to the "s" in the name.
Also, you have to agree with the fact that "Planet^3" isn't such a sexy name ;-)

It reminds me of the current development of Star Citizen, which seemed like a huge, almost impossible to complete project to begin with. But now that I know that with the enormous pile of money they gathered they are doing the right thing (hiring competent companies to do the things they couldn't to as well them selves), I'm giving more thought to buying a slot for the alpha.

In regards to Planets^3, they seemed to have adopted the slow (but not necessarily worse) approach: divide and conquer!

And this gives me hope.

[DaveYanakov]

Two things struck me while reading through that. The first was that I wasn't really getting excited by a new Cubeworld. The second was that this is going to bring any computer older than a couple months to its knees trying to keep track of that many voxels.

[Gormador]

Two things struck me while reading through that. The first was that I wasn't really getting excited by a new Cubeworld. The second was that this is going to bring any computer older than a couple months to its knees trying to keep track of that many voxels.

Well yeah I fear for the performance as well, however I'm confident enough that they might have found a clever solution to avoid issues.
In my opinion it is very well possible. Whether they will achieve it or not is the big question; in that you are absolutely right.

[Sarudak]

I'm really excited to see what people end up trying with the next generation of voxel games. Computers keep getting more powerful and with minecraft having opened up the idea to the world at large I think we're going to see some amazing things.

[DaveYanakov]

Considering that Minecraft is capable of bringing my not that old rig to its knees, I would like to see how they manage to do this with 64 times as many blocks per volume.

[jorgebonafe]

Considering that Minecraft is capable of bringing my not that old rig to its knees, I would like to see how they manage to do this with 64 times as many blocks per volume.

Well, Minecraft is not the best game in terms of optimization, is it? Might be tricky to do, but I'm pretty sure there are ways.

[FlowerChild]

Well, Minecraft is not the best game in terms of optimization, is it? Might be tricky to do, but I'm pretty sure there are ways.

That's not necessarily true. Yes, there are individual bits of code that aren't exactly tuned for performance, but in terms of the overall architecture, it was pretty ingenious in terms of making this all possible in the first place.

Otherwise, we likely would have seen these kinds of games before. Notch really came up with a lot of the core concepts not only in terms of design, but how to make something like this feasible in the first place from a performance standpoint. So yes, in terms of low level optimization it isn't necessarily the best, but in terms of high-level (which is the more important part), it's pretty damn stellar.

This has come up before, but it's one of the reasons why when I see higher resolution blocks in these kinds of games, I tend to not take them very seriously. If I can play one and see for myself it works right, then fine. Until then, they occupy the "likely to be vaporware" file in my mind.

Again, this was one of the reasons I was so attracted to 7 Days in the first place. I watched a couple of videos, saw the big blocks, and immediately thought "ok, these guys know what they're doing and should be taken seriously".

[Gilberreke]

This has come up before, but it's one of the reasons why when I see higher resolution blocks in these kinds of games, I tend to not take them very seriously. If I can play one and see for myself it works right, then fine. Until then, they occupy the "likely to be vaporware" file in my mind.

Most of all because I'm very wary of the gameplay too. I don't think a game design with smaller blocks would work, though I do think that non-grid terrain sculpting might work. I guess that it's mainly the block placing then. Blocks should be large, gameplay wise, to make building anything non-painful.

Also, I think MC is not very optimized GPU-wise. I notice that I'm getting 120FPS or more at all times on my PC which has a budget GPU, while people with monster gaming machines get less. I'm guessing that's because MC is not delegating much to the GPU, keeping it all on the CPU (and my CPU is stellar).

I don't think performance can be scaled much, but doubling the framerate should potentially be possible, which is not a large margin if you're going to have thousands of blocks per scene extra.

[FlowerChild]

I don't think performance can be scaled much, but doubling the framerate should potentially be possible, which is not a large margin if you're going to have thousands of blocks per scene extra.

Yup, exactly. You can think of it as the kind of performance increases which are low-hanging with MC are likely of a linear benefit, while what is required for increased block resolution is likely a geometric performance increase.

And yes, the design considerations are obviously a big one and something I've mentioned before in other threads. Particularly when you get into automation systems and such, increased block resolution makes things way more complex to design around, and that extends all the way down to the cost/benefit in terms of player effort vs reward even in just strictly aesthetic building projects.

In other words, there's a sweet-spot to be hit in between "Yay! I just built a castle!" while the player really feels like they accomplished something through their efforts, and "you mean I have to manually place every single brick of a castle? Fuck that..." where the sense of accomplishment will never be felt because the project won't be undertaken in the first place.

[Gilberreke]

Yup, exactly. You can think of it as the kind of performance increases which are low-hanging with MC are likely of a linear benefit, while what is required for increased block resolution is likely a geometric performance increase.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at indeed. I urge any developer to prove me wrong of course :). I love being wrong.

[Sarudak]

Having looked at the game a little more I like the idea of having the base voxel be a tetrahedral shape. It allows for slopes and flat planes as well as more complex shapes to be formed organically. As to performance I think that it's definitely within the realm of possibility. I guess I'm cautiously optimistic.

[magikeh]

The folks that are making this game just posted a bit on how they are working the whole voxel engine without bustin the cpu.

To make it possible to see everything, we had to implement a sub-resolution system so that landscape elements that are far away are drawn with less precision (thus reducing required resources a lot). In our game, changing the view distance, only changes the boundary where the first resolution switches to the next.

View distance = 12m on the left and 40m on the right

Then a bit later they said that the game will be multi-threaded (rendering lighting, generation seperatly from other things)

Source.

[Gormador]

Then a bit later they said that the game will be multi-threaded (rendering lighting, generation seperatly from other things)

Source.

They also claim their engine supports long distance travel without any loading time (like going from one planet to another).

If this is true, it means that, in my opinion, they are capable of doing things right, at least technically. Good news, isn't it?


enthusiasm tempering edit: my opinion is based on my not so long personal experience of programming as a computing engineering student, but mostly on my enthusiasm rush of the moment. So you might be well advised to not be as "euphoric" as I was ^^

[magikeh]

They also claim their engine supports long distance travel without any loading time (like going from one planet to another). - snippy -

Honestly that bit is what makes MC and this game so attractive. The lack of loading screens. I really do enjoy a game that only has a loading screen when you boot the game. Quite excited to see how the overall performance of this game is. (Max all the things! ^-^/)

[Gormador]

Honestly that bit is what makes MC and this game so attractive. The lack of loading screens. I really do enjoy a game that only has a loading screen when you boot the game. Quite excited to see how the overall performance of this game is. (Max all the things! ^-^/)

Yep, that's for sure. It really makes the suspense of disbelief hold much better.

Edit :
Also, just dug that up :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4RZPT0 ... fWGjLmtZLe_

I must say, I'm not entirely convinced on the aesthetics at this current state. I might need to get used to it though, as I needed for MC.

[FlowerChild]

The folks that are making this game just posted a bit on how they are working the whole voxel engine without bustin the cpu.

Yup...that would work absolutely stellar for any form of automation...

or not.

[Gormador]

Yup...that would work absolutely stellar for any form of automation...

or not.

You bring up a good point actually, as there is no clue on whether there will be some or none at all.
Hum, and now that you mention it, their project seems a lot more oriented towards the RPG part of the game than the sandbox one.
Which isn't bad in my mind.

And we all "know" that the automation part will most likely be covered with RTH ;-)

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, please just be careful "advertising" games that don't exist on these forums as I wind up feeling obliged to point out where the flaws may be so people don't wind up sinking their money into something that may never materialize.

I may try to formulate some kind of rule against this sort of thing as it doesn't feel right to me.

If something appears too good to be true, it often times is. Unless you really know the inner details, it's very easy for programmers to throw up a shroud of reasonable sounding explanation for how they'll do something leaving all the nasty little details that will either make it work or unfeasible hidden under it. Often times they are also doing so not out of a desire to deceive but because they themselves are being overly optimistic about what they can reasonably accomplish in a reasonable time frame (anyone who has worked in programming will likely know that's a very hard habit to break yourself of, as we all want to please at some level and promise beyond our real capacity to deliver).

If they're doing an adventure game, fine. However, much like with that other popular game whose name eludes me right now (Cubeworld?), I really have no idea why you'd choose voxels if you're doing a game with a non-dynamic world. Randomization I guess, but it really strikes me as missing out on the real potential of such an engine in an attempt to force more traditional gameplay on it, and there's likely ways you could do something similar with a more traditional non-voxel engine that would wind up looking better.

Anyways, yeah, for the time being, I'd ask people to restrain their enthusiasm somewhat when talking about game concepts. I don't particularly want to get dragged into this stuff, but when I see comments like "they are capable of doing things right" that I feel obliged to intervene and try to bring some reality back into things.

[Gormador]

Anyways, yeah, for the time being, I'd ask people to restrain their enthusiasm somewhat when talking about game concepts. I don't particularly want to get dragged into this stuff, but when I see comments like "they are capable of doing things right" that I feel obliged to intervene and try to bring some reality back into things.

Will do. I regognize I may have been too enthusiast... I certainly don't hope so but still.

Disturbing your mojo wasn't on my agenda for this topic, so you have my apologies about that :-)
I also edited the post you quoted, so that people don't get as exited (for no true reason, yes) as I did.

[FlowerChild]

Nah nah man, you didn't mess up my mojo :)

I just don't want things to spiral out of control. People get overly enthusiastic about a WIP, I feel obliged to make counter arguments to keep things real and because I feel rather protective of this community, next thing you know devs are showing up to argue their point, I find myself sitting there arguing with eager junior programmers based on a lifetime of experience that makes me a jaded old cynic (and trying to argue idealism out of someone is an exercise in futility), bad mojo (and juju no less) then results.

Sounds far fetched, but given it's already happened, I just don't want to get into this stuff too much anymore, so yeah, if people could just tone down enthusiasm about such things and try to keep it real in the first place, all is good.

Put another way, I'm just tired of fighting battles that in no way benefit me, which I think is a common theme that has come up in several threads over the past little while. I just want to focus on my own work and only get involved in fights that relate directly to it.

[Gormador]

Put another way, I'm just tired of fighting battles that in no way benefit me, which I think is a common theme that has come up in several threads over the past little while. I just want to focus on my own work and only get involved in fights that relate directly to it.

So, you really want to talk about Drew Barrymore, don't you? ;p

[FlowerChild]

So, you really want to talk about Drew Barrymore, don't you? ;p

Yeah, I could definitely see myself fighting for Drew :)

[johnt]

What concerns me about it is that they already have nine people on the team, including a CEO(!) and they're only asking for 250k. That will get you how much development time from those 9 people? 4 months?