The Eden Project

Community Showcase Game Development
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Spent most of saturday hunting down an id10t error on the bottom floor of the code that was stopping the terrain from doing more than 13 octaves.

Now that that’s sorted I can crank up the size a bit and see what UE4 can handle.

So here’s one of the content rooms sitting near the surface (manually positioned at the moment) and one of my spaceship models just for a sense of scale:

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And here’s the same shot from a wee bit further out:

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But the really good bit is the lod range of the whole system…

Here’s down on the ground using 14 octaves, terrain quads are 1600 cms across (each extra octaves halves this size again):

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And here’s the whole planet in a side orthographic wireframe view weighing in with a diameter of a little over 400,000,000 cms:

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So, I think that can be wound back like so:

400,000,000 cms = 4,000,000 meters
4,000,000 meters = 4,000 kms
4,000 kms =(ish) 1/3 the diameter of the earth

So for the first pretty big size test, I’m pretty happy with the results.

Performance is fine, given I’m doing all this on a four year old laptop. Size wise it can probably go quite a bit bigger, but to be honest it’s already doing big enough for my purposes. I’ll try cranking the octaves up to 16 though just to give me a bit more detail around the player position.

Obviously all very rough around the edges, will code out the gaps between the octaves next, then tweak the vertex normals to follow the surface properly (they’re all 0,1,0 at the moment).

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First off this is awesome loving it! :smiley:

So got a few questions -

  1. In the bottom picture it says 1e+3km. What does the 1e of the equation mean?
  2. Do you plan on making this available to the public? Yes? No? Maybe?
  3. Will this work with EMOS by @DigitalKarnage?
  4. What did you need to change with the default unreal Coordinate system to get this working?

Cannot wait to see this planet textured. :smiley:

Dev grant BTW Apply for it!

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Hey there HeadClot,

Ok, lemme see:

  1. 1e+3km : No idea :slight_smile:
  2. Making this public : Sure! If I can get it stable enough I’ll make it a marketplace product, otherwise I might just open source it.
  3. EMOS : Don’t know, haven’t used EMOS before, had a quick look, seems like it might be doable
  4. Coordinate system : Nothing! At least at this size which was a (nice) surprise. At some point it will freak out though, and when it does I’ve got a bag of tricks to reign it back in.

It’ll probably be another month or so before I get some basic texturing going, still have quite a bit of mesh work to do.

Re Dev grant, well that would certainly be nice :slight_smile:

Could get a proper desktop at home, three monitors…

Sadly, the queue for dev grants is a million people long and no-one from epic has expressed any interest in eden so… shrugs who knows, maybe down the track when I’ve got more going?

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To answer the question of 1e+3km is the plum scale it’s roughly 1000 by 3km similar to the power of 10. 1.7e86 would roughly be 17000 with 85 0’s. Found that info out on another forum and a lot of google searching. It’s basically 1000 by 3km though if I am correct.

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If you make a marketplace product - I would be really happy. This makes one of my larger game ideas a very strong reality. :slight_smile:

Let me know if you need people to bang on your planet system. To Improve user friendliness for the overall workflow.

Hey @Keiyentai - Thanks for the reply. The more you know :slight_smile:

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Yay, coded out the gaps between the octaves… now it’s nice and smooth to the horizon :slight_smile:

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Working on vertex normals now… switched out the ugly pic with bad normals for this youtube with the normals mostly fixed:

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Also, if anyone could make any suggestions about how to smooth out these faceted shadows that would be awesome:

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Seems to be more to do with the shadows from the movable directional light than the mesh normals generally.

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You were featured on the Unreal 4 Livestream today [MENTION=887]ioFlow Studios[/MENTION] :smiley:

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You will finish this.

'Seems to be more to do with the shadows from the movable directional light than the mesh normals generally.’

Try editing the cascade and pull in draw distance of the shadow.

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Woohoo!

Lol, saw you in the comments telling alex to scroll down =P

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Yeah - I wanted him to see the procedural planets in all their glory. :smiley:

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Oh, and thanks to Alexander and epic for the mention and the cool badge!

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Congratulations ioFlow Studios!

And what you are working on looks really, really neat!

I can’t wait to see where you go with it next!

:slight_smile:

Rama

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Wow, looks great! Keep it up!

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Got a bunch of work done this weekend on getting the vertex normals sorted out, still more to go though as you can see… (but nearly there).

Once I properly get rid of those lod seams I’ll make an eden compatible player controller and sync the lod focal point to it so you can see it running in game.

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Hey [MENTION=887]ioFlow Studios[/MENTION] -

What will the Eden compatible player controller include?

Will the Eden player controller be extensible via Blueprint?

Will there be Eden Compatible Sample Vehicles? (Example such as Car, Jet or Spaceship)

Keep up the great work,

HeadClot

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Would this possibly work to have multiple planets in a universe? That would allow almost infinite expansion if you do it right. Keep up the nice work, and you made front page on the EPIC games launcher for this project.