Friday Facts #411 - All about asteroids

[morse]

I guess this is the best you could achieve without going full 3D. Still, I would lie if I say that I like this more than, say, "Δv rings of saturn", which conveys a very strong feeling of "real space", while still being quite ascetic in its graphics.

[picklock]

Thanks for the background information in this FFF. Once again you can see how much work something as "banal" as asteroids means for the developers.

[Gemma]

I find the dust and streaking meteorites dizzying and confusing to my depth perception. A "shooting star" should be quite distant, yet they often appear to be very close to the camera (and therefore to the ship), or even sometimes *above* the ship/the base layer. I can't tell where the dust is, it appears to be all around us, as if we're flying through clouds, and the effect for me is that it further fuzzies my depth perception, which is already overwhelmed trying to deal with the streaking meteorites. Being dizzied aside, it also simply feels like a lot - too many things on screen, too busy, too much chaos, which I think is aesthetically unpleasant.

If you could thin the dust clouds and reduce the number of meteorites without compromising the sense of passage through space, that would be a real improvement imo.

If this is implemented as is for 2.0, I hope there will be settings to turn it off.

[Firnefex]

It looks good, but Metallic and Carbon are too similar.
Please give Metallic a little more reflection and at the same time remove some of the white noise on Carbon to distinguish them better!

[crj]

They look very pretty, and unlike some commenters I don't think this will be too busy in the context of a small border around a platform which is the main thing on screen.

But alas there do seem to be some things I find jarringly wrong:

• As others have noted, every asteroid is rotating about an axis perpendicular to the display; they should also "tumble"
• On average, larger asteroids should rotate slower than smaller ones (because of conservation of angular momentum in any collision)
• The motions feel a little too uniform; I'd expect a far greater variety of speeds and directions. Especially as one is presumably encountering asteroids while going between planets in the same planetary system, so real asteroid motion would generally be crossing your path perpendicularly.

[Dmitriy_69]

Why do meteorites fly only from the front? Perhaps the speed of the meteorite is greater than the speed of the ship, and the blow will be struck from the left, right and rear

[FuryoftheStars]

Something that's been at the back of my brain since the first announcements about asteroids and using them for fuel and resources, but made louder with this announcement, is how are any of these planets supporting life (past or present) and not just constantly under bombardment?

Everything is so busy looking that it seriously gives off the feel of a solar system still under development. I understand, though, that it is a game and as such you wanted us to have something to do going from planet to planet vs a simple cutscene/transition or sitting on a space platform just waiting with nothing to do or threat to manage. I obviously don't have a better suggestion, though.... *shrug*

At the very least, maybe if it did look less busy?

And yeah, the stars in the background should not be moving.

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Maybe the occasional distant nebula hahaah.

This would be neat to see, but they would have to be completely static and unchanging to be believable. You could possibly show/don't show them depending on platform orientation, but that would be the extent of it. And only a couple, I suspect.

[gGeorg]

I like your thinking process.
However, I hoped that you get out of box to deliver true 3D objects - they can rotate in all directions.

Perhaps you can do 3D objects as bitters. Check "Pillars of eternity" game. They use 2D world with 3D characters. Looks very good.

[aka13]

Very interesting slice of insight into the graphics design process.
I enjoyed the FF.

The foreground looks a bit busy at first sight, but I won't pass any harsch judgements until I have played it.
Great work as always.

[MeduSalem]

However, I hoped that you get out of box to deliver true 3D objects - they can rotate in all directions.

Perhaps you can do 3D objects as bitters. Check "Pillars of eternity" game. They use 2D world with 3D characters. Looks very good.

Pillars of Eternity is made with the Unity Engine. That game engine both allows for 2d sprite-based stuff and 3d polygon objects.

Factorio doesn't. And it would be way too much work to implement a 3d rendering pipeline for polygon graphics just to display asteroids rotating around all 3 axes.


Also the more objects (like biters etc) you would add to the list of things that possibly could be done easier or better in 3d... the better it would be for them to write a whole new game engine and make a new (sequel) game around that instead. Which I am sure they will eventually anyway, but it will take some years to happen.

[akulla]

I'm not familiar with graphics rendering, so forgive the basic (and likely confused) question, but I got lost in the transition from

Usually for sprites that need to rotate, such as the character or vehicles, we render a separate image for every rotation so the lighting matches up. While this approach would likely still have worked for this case, it would have been a performance nightmare - with each asteroid class having 5 sizes, each of which would need some amount of variants, and probably at least 64 frames to convincingly rotate, we would have needed a whopping 7680~ frames of animation.

to the section after, which is about shaders. Is the implication there that (a) those 7680 sprites would be pre-rendered and that would take way too much memory, (b) it would be more efficient to dynamically rotate a 3D object and then apply all those shader post-processing techniques afterwards? Assuming that's true, why is saving 7680 * <sprite size> of memory worth more than the computational cost of the dynamic rotation and shader post-processing?

[PotatoGolem]

Seems too busy, space is supposed to be mostly empty, I don't think anyone would be upset if there wasn't a lot going on visually, in empty space...

The dust is way to thick, that would absolutely destroy a ship/platform going at any reasonable interplanetary speed (you gotta go really, really, really fast to get to a planet in any reasonable time), same for the micro meteoroids those things are dangerous. Also agree with others that the star-field should not be moving much if we are on a straight line course, It would scroll past if we were in orbit though, and would move strangely if we were in a planetary transfer trajectory, which is not straight or circular.

sure these are kind of nit picks, but this game's audience is fairly educated when it comes to space and what we would expect to encounter, I don't think its out of the question to have the visuals be a bit more realistic than, "need lines when go fast".

[MeduSalem]

to the section after, which is about shaders. Is the implication there that (a) those 7680 sprites would be pre-rendered and that would take way too much memory, (b) it would be more efficient to dynamically rotate a 3D object and then apply all those shader post-processing techniques afterwards? Assuming that's true, why is saving 7680 * <sprite size> of memory worth more than the computational cost of the dynamic rotation and shader post-processing?

a) Yes. The 7680 pre-rendered sprites that would be necessary to make smooth rotation for the different asteroids would be loaded as part of the sprite atlas and that takes up way too much memory. You can easily run out of video memory if the sprite atlas is huge.

Actually happened to me in Factorio a few times in the past already with some mods enabled that added a lot of HD sprites; it crashed the game and the graphics cards driver. ^^

b) It is not a 3d object they are rendering. It still is all 2d sprites they apply the shaders to.

Anyway the reason they are doing all the calculations on the fly instead is because GPUs are stupidly fast in performing such shader tasks. They are basically designed to do nothing else but geometry and pixel transformations (or at least that was the idea of GPUs back in the day, nowadays they can do more crazier stuff like AI and more general purpose applications that profit from tons of parallelism too, but that is another story).
Anyway doing above is probably not even a real processing load for a typical GPU nowadays. Most 3d games out there do way nastier things with shaders and run just fine. ^^

[akulla]

Anyway the reason they are doing all the calculations on the fly instead is because GPUs are stupidly fast in performing such shader tasks. They are basically designed to do nothing else but geometry and pixel transformations. Doing above is probably not even a real processing load for a typical GPU nowadays. Most 3d games out there do way nastier things with shaders and run just fine. ^^

Thanks for the context. So I'm still confused: does this mean that the shader is responsible for doing the rotation as well? That makes me suspect "shader" is a historical term applied to a module responsible for much more than lighting calculations.

[MeduSalem]

Thanks for the context. So I'm still confused: does this mean that the shader is responsible for doing the rotation as well? That makes me suspect "shader" is a historical term applied to a module responsible for much more than lighting calculations.

Yes, a "shader" is basically a little program that tells the GPU what to do with specific data.
And by pipelining (chaining) together such little shader programs you get the end result. That pipelining is usually the purpose of a graphics engine in games. ^^

And yea it deviated from its original meaning since modern GPUs can do all kinds of stuff with different kinds of shaders. Way more than just color or lighting calculations.

3d shaders... which do all kinds of manipulation on 3d geometry like vertices/polygons. Hence often referred to Vertex and Geometry Shaders.
2d shaders... which usually is referred to as pixel shader; they manipulate 2d textures/images.

If you want to dig even deeper into the topic here is the wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shader

[Deutschflanker]

Wait, is bullet casing falling on space platform like if they are affected by gravity?

[Stalinlover22]

Oh God . It looks so cool,I can´t wait to play the expansion. There will be more uses of the asteroids in the late game ??

[Upserter]

I would like to suggest the devs take a look at the game Super Stardust running on an Amiga in the 1990s. That had awesome looking asteroids considering how little compute & memory were available. Ray traced sprites, I believe.

[FuryoftheStars]

Wait, is bullet casing falling on space platform like if they are affected by gravity?

They're likely using the same animations as planetside. Don't read too much into it.

[AileTheAlien]

Will there be an option to reduce the motion and/or brightness of the dust and foreground asteroids? They look pretty distracting to me in the current videos, or like they could cause motion sickness.