that wouldn’t be quantum tunneling, that would either be wormholes or straight up teleportation, and a scientifically correct game wouldn’t and shouldn’t call something quantum tunneling when it’s teleportation to a whole new planet as quantum tunneling is something going fast enough that the physics rate of the universe can’t stop it from going through a really thin object, so aliens would be more likely.
… I gave your post a like because I was certain you were joking by making a really ridiculous statement.
And also as a thanks for digging up the previous time I had to talk about this.
I propose a few methods for generation of Alien Biomes and species.
- AI generation
- System generation from several preset variables
- Manual generation
You are going to have to elaborate a bit. Otherwise I’ll merge this into the Another thread about Alien life thread.
Basically we come up with ideas for each method.
For example the thread serves to list manual pre-set biomes, but also is a place to come up with variable, and is also a place to come up with AI solutions.
I merged this thread as biomes are part of what a planet generator for the space stage needs to create to make (alien) planets.
Since nothing is evolving anymore once you reach awakening, could auto evo for other planets run in the background? For it to not kill the framerate, maybe cell stage could be skipped, with cell presets being chosen instead, and auto evo could be simplified by using limb and organ presets, along with everything that would obviously evolve being forced to happen (eyes and mouth in the front, less gravity = more legs, etc.) Obviously this would take a long time to code, but it would be much more convincing than entire planet presets.
the amount of legs per unit of gravity is likely a parabola, less gravity below a certain point = more legs until you have little enough to allow fish to swim in air, and above a certain point more gravity = more legs due to increased need for structural stability until you get high enough gravity to stop the evolution of land dwellers
How exactly? The only way that works to create an equivalent base is to load a pre-simulated microbe stage. That’s the problem with everything regarding this: all species evolve along with their competition so you can either save fully ran auto-evo simulations or you can make a mishmash of different species which is an unstable configuration auto-evo will likely want to kill a bunch of species from immediately.
If theres lots of different presets, a ton of them could be all put on one planet, and then auto evo could be ran on them, except it’s tweaked to give greatly exaggerated values, so the weak ones are quickly wiped extinct. This would allow auto evo to only run one round in cell stage, so it wouldn’t be a huge problem for performance.
Is there a reason for that? Choosing random planets from a larger list of pre generated planets would also ensure seeing new planets in every new game.
No, they are the same.
1 Like
Couldn’t auto-evo be run on the pre-generated planets? Just like a drop of Evolution here or there on a single planet or even a single patch. Planets closes to the player’s world getting priority while planets farthest away would not get changed at all due to the breadcrumb system. Or would even acknowledging the existence of other planets tank the preformance?
What about when the player has spread to a bunch of star systems? Would the proximity rule require now all of those planets to evolve? Having arbitrary rules (from the player’s viewpoint) for which planets evolve would be very unintuitive. So I think there’s two choices: all planets evolve, or no planets evolve. And due to performance concerns only that latter idea seems viable.
1 Like
what about letting the player choose which planets evolve? if that’s too OP to just give to them once they’ve inhabited more than a certain amount of planets, it could be locked behind a technology that researches faster the lower your framerate is
So you want extra development time to implement GUI that is intuitive to the player to select? And also game balance that is good enough to not be super exploitable?
Also I’ll point out the strongest argument against this, which I didn’t mention again yet (I’m sure I’ve brought this up in the previous incarnation of this discussion): the timescales are vastly different. In the space stage the player species is there just for a few thousand years at most. That doesn’t represent any editor cycles at all for even multicellular species. So unless a player left their computer on for weeks, we don’t need to simulate any planet evolution at all. It’s that simple, not enough time passes for anything to get any significant mutations. Even before the space stage, domestication or various breed specialization is like the most that can happen due to the stage timescales shrinking the farther the player is in the game.
4 Likes
What I meant by this is that the other planets would evolve during the player’s entire playthrough up until about civilization stage like how I assume would work for the player’s planet. What I mean by the farthest away planet not evolving at all is that the closest planets would be barly evolving in the first place and, having a much higher chance for auto-evo to mess around with, the chances would become neglible at best for the farthest away planets.
This feels very unrealistic. Now gene editing other species could work but don’t see a way or reason for a sapient to accelerate the evolution of an entire planet without putting them in some kind of time bubble. Wich would be very problematic if you want to live on that planet.
But then that would result in a galaxy where the planets are less interesting the farther you go from the player start. Surely that’s not good?
And what difference would that make from having let’s say 1000 planets pre-generated and bundled with the game files?
3 Likes
No, no, what I meant was to take those 1,000 pre-generated planets (maybe a few non pre-generated ones for spice) and aply auto-evo to them for a bit of extra uniqueness each playthrough, not evolve every planet from scratch.
edit: I also do really like the idea of having a separate mode for generating ecosystems and non player species. You could have a whole library of generated planets and create experiments. If players are given access to it.
1 Like
Okay, then what would be the difference between that and including 2000 planets with the game? If there are enough unique planets, only super hardcore players with hundreds of hours of playtime would have a chance to see duplicate planets. This just sounds like a lot of extra work that doesn’t improve the gameplay at all.
3 Likes
Understandable, I mostly was brainstorming on how the idea could work, but I’m fine with it going either way.
Edit: thinking about this again it also really depends on how big and dense the galaxy is. if it’s as dense as spore then I would argue that 10,000 planets would be the best option to prevent duplicates, if it’s as spaced out as No man’s sky then 2 to 3,000 should work out just fine