Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: Mantuvec

Hello to all. My name is Elliot Gibbs, and I am the developer for Distant Worlds 2.

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This article has a slightly different focus. It will give you a behind-the-scenes look at a small slice of the game with an important on-screen role: the natural environment of the Distant Worlds galaxy. While this article is more technical, it will help you see “under-the-hood.” It will give you insight into how we solved some of the unique problems faced in a game as vast as Distant Worlds 2.

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What is procedural rendering? This refers to drawing various parts of the game without using hand-made art assets. In other words, an item is rendered on the screen without using any artist-created models or images. Instead the item is drawn using only software instructions – the item is rendered in code.

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That might not sound very useful. Why would you bother writing a lot of software to draw something in code instead of just having an artist make a 3D model, or draw a 2D image?

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That depends on what you are drawing and the number of different items that need to be drawn.

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As you probably appreciate, in Distant Worlds there is a vast galactic environment, filled with many items to explore and discover: stars, planets, moons, black holes, nebula clouds, and many others.

In Distant Worlds 1 (Universe and earlier) these items were mostly hand-drawn 2D images: there were a set of images for desert planets, another set of images for ocean planets, a set of images for nebula clouds, etc. In total there were about 250 images for planets alone. So there was a lot of hand-drawn art!

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However there are some big drawbacks with static art:

2D images and textured models have a resolution limit that is constrained by memory, thus when zoomed in their appearance can become blurry or pixelated

you typically need to draw each image or texture by hand, limiting how many variations you can realistically have. Although tools can help automate the generation of some images, you still have to store them and load them in game, which can take a lot of memory and storage

Procedural rendering is an alternative to making a lot of hand-drawn art. It means writing software that knows how to draw a particular item. We can then draw as many variations of this item as needed, tweaking parameters to make changes to its appearance.

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In Distant Worlds 2 nearly all of the galactic environment is procedurally rendered.

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That means that we use minimal hand-made art to draw the stars, planets, moons, black holes or nebula clouds in the game.

Instead there are a set of custom shader programs that know how to draw each of these items:

a star shader that can draw brightly glowing coronas of semi-transparent gas and plasma

several shaders that draw planets with solid surfaces: some with a lot of mountains, others with deep oceans, others with glowing lava lakes

a shader that draws planets with gaseous surfaces with colored bands and swirling storms

another shader draws black holes

other shaders draw nebula clouds

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At the core of these shaders is a concept called fractal noise. Fractal noise refers to a set of special random values that are tuned for drawing a natural environment in a realistic manner.

Fractal noise is a huge subject, which I won’t go into detail about here. But if you want to learn more you should look it up. You’ll see terms like Perlin noise and Simplex noise, which are good starting points.

But how do these procedural shaders work? What process do they follow, and what do they allow us to do?

Firstly they use fractal noise to make a unique height map for each planet, allowing us to generate mountains, valleys, plains, coastlines and sub-oceanic terrain

applies shadowing from sun light on the mountains and hills to provide subtle realism to the terrain

if the planet is populated , adds city night lights that follow the natural geography of the planet, preferring low-lying and coastal areas (including underwater cities in shallow coastal regions)

provides light-emitting features like lava lakes and oceans

adds cloud layers with animated storm systems and shadows on the planet below

allows latitude-specific features: polar ice caps, equatorial jungle belts, deserts

allows altitude-specific terrain: snowy mountain tops, forested valleys, grassy plains and coastal areas, shallow underwater continental shelves, deep ocean basins

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Thus procedural shaders provide a vast improvement when rendering the natural environment in Distant Worlds, giving us an incredible level of detail and variety. The advantages of procedural rendering directly address the weaknesses of static art that we had in DW1:

because the shader programs operate on each pixel on the screen, there is no resolution limit. You can keep zooming in closely to an item without blurriness or loss of quality

by varying the input parameters for each shader you can obtain nearly infinite variety for an item, thus every planet in DW2 is unique

because no static images or textures are needed, there is a dramatic reduction in memory and storage requirements

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Procedural rendering also enables another feature: animation. The fractal noise used in the shaders can be multi-dimensional, so you can use one of the dimensions to represent change over time. This allows you to smoothly animate things that you draw. For example, we have the following in Distant Worlds 2:

cloud layers on planets that move and change

star coronas with prominences that rise and fall

gas giant planets with animated cloud surfaces

nebula clouds that smoothly change over time

black holes with swirling vortexes of light and energy

Thus procedural rendering helps to bring the galaxy of Distant Worlds to life, with motion and activity even in the natural environment. It gives infinite variety and depth of appearance to all of the planets and stars.

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You might be thinking: how does this affect modding? Can you easily mod new planet and star types into DW2? Or does this require special coding or shader skills?

The good news is that modders also have access to these same shaders to make their own unique planets and stars – no special skills are required. By simply adding a few values to a file you can have a completely new type of planet available in the game. Your planet will have all the same features as the built-in planet types: hyper-detailed height maps with shadowing, animated cloud layers, city night lights when populated, planetary rings, etc.

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So how does procedural rendering improve the galactic environment in Distant Worlds?

provides infinite variety – no two planets in the galaxy are the same. They all have their own unique geographical features and coastlines

eliminates blurriness or pixelation. Everything remains sharp and clear even when zoomed in close

allows animation of features like star coronas, planetary clouds and nebula clouds

uses a lot less memory, thus freeing up resources for other rendering

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I hope you enjoyed this look at the galactic environment of Distant Worlds. I’ll be back later with more behind-the-scenes information about other features in Distant Worlds 2.

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ORIGINAL: rxnnxs
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could you please say if all the uni-verse that is then created stays the way or is forgotten the next zoom out?

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ORIGINAL: rxnnxs
TLDR:
could you please say if all the uni-verse that is then created stays the way or is forgotten the next zoom out?

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P.S.: Also, I really dislike games like the new elite (what was the name?) where you have a huuuuge galaxy but everywhere are ships. you fly to a saturn like planet, go into the belt, fly in, and there they are. WHAT?? I want to see places that no one ever has seen before, but then there they are: NPC ships that attack you and so on... Even here on earth, whereever we go, into the woods, as deep as you can.. well, everywhere is plastic stuff and garbage.. over the head there is a plane and so on... let this uni-verse have many places where no one was before, and other places where others were - aeons ago...
Thank you for reading!

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ORIGINAL: elliotg

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ORIGINAL: rxnnxs
TLDR:
could you please say if all the uni-verse that is then created stays the way or is forgotten the next zoom out?

Yes, the appearance will be retained across views and game sessions. You'll see the same-looking planet next time you look at it.

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P.S.: Also, I really dislike games like the new elite (what was the name?) where you have a huuuuge galaxy but everywhere are ships. you fly to a saturn like planet, go into the belt, fly in, and there they are. WHAT?? I want to see places that no one ever has seen before, but then there they are: NPC ships that attack you and so on... Even here on earth, whereever we go, into the woods, as deep as you can.. well, everywhere is plastic stuff and garbage.. over the head there is a plane and so on... let this uni-verse have many places where no one was before, and other places where others were - aeons ago...
Thank you for reading!

Yes, there's plenty of that kind of thing out there to find - DW2 galaxies are big places.

Of course, all the other factions are also keen to explore too, so you shouldn't waste time getting out into the galaxy yourself :)

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ORIGINAL: ElanaAhova_slith
I prefer to play on smaller maps. Will playing on smaller maps eliminate the unexplored by anyone aspect of the game? Yes, smaller game map means less 'unexplored by anyone' space -- but will it scale according to map size?

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BTW - Elliot - I haven't posted in many years. Enjoyed our posts when I helped play-test original DW. Glad to be back and looking forward to DW2. Your work has always been awesome.

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ORIGINAL: Grognerd_INC
Will it be possible to add hand-drawn graphics to mod in planet Earth?

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ORIGINAL: muncuss

that last picture is very good

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ORIGINAL: TSBasilisk
For drawing your own custom planets, is that able to benefit from the secondary features of the fractal generation - city lights, clouds, etc.? I imagine you'd have something like that for any unique planets you might add to the game, such as homeworlds. Would you need to create a height map to accompany the terrain drawing for example or would the engine be able to do that on its own?

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ORIGINAL: SirHoraceHarkness
This is one I don't think people have asked about but will there be the ability to make system templates for galaxy creation? As in you recreate the solar system and the game will use that as your starting system if you pick humans? It could also help to make galaxy creation a little less random by having a certain amount of systems contents predetermined.

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ORIGINAL: Lobster

No Man's Sky uses procedural rendering. Only way you can have quitillions of planets.

Looking foward to DW2

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ORIGINAL: elliotg

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ORIGINAL: TSBasilisk
For drawing your own custom planets, is that able to benefit from the secondary features of the fractal generation - city lights, clouds, etc.? I imagine you'd have something like that for any unique planets you might add to the game, such as homeworlds. Would you need to create a height map to accompany the terrain drawing for example or would the engine be able to do that on its own?

If you want to use the built-in procedural planet or star shaders then you get access to all of the rendering features. But if you choose to use static textures, then the following features could still work with it:
- animated cloud layers
- atmospheric haze
- planetary rings

The city night lights and terrain shadowing rely on the procedural height map, which you forgo if you choose to instead use static textures. Of course along with the static textures you would have access to all the standard material features: normal maps, emissive maps, specularity, etc.

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ORIGINAL: zgrssd

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ORIGINAL: elliotg

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ORIGINAL: TSBasilisk
For drawing your own custom planets, is that able to benefit from the secondary features of the fractal generation - city lights, clouds, etc.? I imagine you'd have something like that for any unique planets you might add to the game, such as homeworlds. Would you need to create a height map to accompany the terrain drawing for example or would the engine be able to do that on its own?

If you want to use the built-in procedural planet or star shaders then you get access to all of the rendering features. But if you choose to use static textures, then the following features could still work with it:
- animated cloud layers
- atmospheric haze
- planetary rings

The city night lights and terrain shadowing rely on the procedural height map, which you forgo if you choose to instead use static textures. Of course along with the static textures you would have access to all the standard material features: normal maps, emissive maps, specularity, etc.

Some questions:
1. Could you allow modders to manually define a height map? You already planned for hand-drawn textures, the height-map would be just another input.
Actually providing the custom height map might be more interesting in the first place: Being able to see the same topography in different climates and levels of colonisation might be interesting.

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2. Will it be possible to extract the Seeds for each procedural step from a existing games planet?
Effectively giving us a way to "re-use" a well generated world in future maps via map editing?
This would also be nessesary for bugfixing, as the procedural drawing code might break.