PV Gap

Clayton Said:

What would it take to make a video game that incorporated a WHOLE PLANET system?

We Answered:

Mired in controversy, you can do this in several games of the Battlecruiser series, by Derek Smart. Don't get your hopes up, though, as the worlds are sparsely populated and not too interactive.

From the horsepower standpoint, it's certainly possible with several different scalar game engines. Let's take the engine for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, as an example. I'm probably oversimplifying, but it should serve as a good illustration...

It can faithfully render interior locations, and ground-level exteriors including people, vehicles, scenery and environment. The trick is, it only renders line of sight in detail, and detail drops out beyond a given visual cone. As you move around, it fills in detail as needed.

When you jump in a vehicle, and as you start moving faster, it can narrow down the cone of detail, because the game can better predict the direction you'll continue to travel due to physics. The faster you race through the environment, the fewer minute details are rendered to focus more power on the game engine rendering basic scenery in a wider area (since you can move a greater distance). A neat trick is the game starts blurring the periphery, simulating high-speed tunnel vision (and hiding the lower detail on scenery).

Hop into an aircraft, and start gaining altitude or zooming around at high speeds, and the game is rendering much less fine detail in favor of basic geometry so it can render the largest area. Several aircraft allow you to go so high that you can barely see the ground. Due to the constraints of the GTA storyline, you can't go into outerspace, but there doesn't seem any reason why you coulnd't if the game called for it.

The Hulk, Spiderman and Superman movie games also did this kind of thing pretty well.

They all pretty well demonstrates going from a pretty detailed ground-level perspective to upper atmosphere perspective as a technical possibility.

The biggest limitation will be how much detail can a developer reasonably construct. The more populated the world is, and the more ongoing tasks available that it has to map, the more work it'll be for the developers. There's only so much time and resources a developer can afford to put into a project.

Another ish is the whole micro versus macro issue. If you're in command of fighting a planetary war, do you need to go into such minute detail as to see what's going on at street level? That's a big concern about the Battlecruiser games. It can be hard to focus on the bigger events, because you spend so much time and effort micromanaging minute details that have little or no real bearing on the world events.

And, if you're infantry fighting at street level, you're probably too busy to focus on anything beyond 100 yards of you (let alone hundreds of miles).

But, then, it could probably be pulled off by some of the better developers. There are some things that sounded bad on paper, but the right developer pulled off (for isntance, Half Life 2's advanved physics engine sounded like it would be frivilous and laborious, but HL2 wound up being one of the best games in ages).

Alex Said:

I heard that the game "Spore" you can find your solar system?

We Answered:

Check dis out:

Adrian Said:

Is there an ultimate economic/space sim game that has to do with the exploration of our Solar System?

We Answered:

its not our solar system but have you looked at eve online?