MAP VIEWING

[YamaKami]

Is there a reason we can only zoom out on our maps so far? Why can we not scroll back far enough to see the entire 10K mile radius?? This seems like something that should happen without it being mentioned to me. I'm just curious if anyone knows a reason (or potential reason) as to why we are limited to seeing only so much of our maps at once. I can't think of a single one myself.

[Totally Not A Gamer Girl]

The map is generated as a compressed "image" (for lack of a better word) file (or several) as far as I can tell The devs have likely clamped it from when navesgane was pretty much the only map and was pretty small. It may also be an optimisation thing as loading up so many segments at once only to show a fraction of the pixels at such a low resolution can be quite timely for most. I find that after lots of exploring a zoomed out map can hang momentarily on my machine when entering the map screen. After which I need to relog to remove the stutter in and out of map screen.

[YamaKami]

Originally posted by l-smith:

The map is generated as a compressed "image" (for lack of a better word) file (or several) as far as I can tell The devs have likely clamped it from when navesgane was pretty much the only map and was pretty small. It may also be an optimisation thing as loading up so many segments at once only to show a fraction of the pixels at such a low resolution can be quite timely for most. I find that after lots of exploring a zoomed out map can hang momentarily on my machine when entering the map screen. After which I need to relog to remove the stutter in and out of map screen.

They made the map bigger (able to zoom out further) not too long ago. Yet it is still limited in size though. As for optimization and loading times. I greatly doubt that has anything to do with it at all what-so-ever.

[Totally Not A Gamer Girl]

Originally posted by YamaKami:

Originally posted by l-smith:

The map is generated as a compressed "image" (for lack of a better word) file (or several) as far as I can tell The devs have likely clamped it from when navesgane was pretty much the only map and was pretty small. It may also be an optimisation thing as loading up so many segments at once only to show a fraction of the pixels at such a low resolution can be quite timely for most. I find that after lots of exploring a zoomed out map can hang momentarily on my machine when entering the map screen. After which I need to relog to remove the stutter in and out of map screen.

They made the map bigger (able to zoom out further) not too long ago. Yet it is still limited in size though. As for optimization and loading times. I greatly doubt that has anything to do with it at all what-so-ever.

I'm a programmer, graphic artist and a game dev I have a decent Idea of what it takes to make these things. In order to do what you are suggesting would require the game to save several LOD versions of the entire map.
When you zoom out the game is forced to create a larger visible pixel grid for you, partially from what is around you now (which needs updating at least once a second) and what you have explored on file. Once you zoom out that pixel grid becomes massive and as you move the view it needs to be updated with what is on and off the screen panel. When your machine is asked to draw more pixels per inch than your actual screen has then it must compensate by deciding which pixels to draw and why (This gets taxing on your GPU) and a reason why photoshop can't handle large 300dpi images on mediocre machines. Because of the larger than seen active pixel grid. So while I have a "Good" machine others have "mediocre" or simply "good enough" machine. So like I said likely an optimisation thing and they settled on this size for a reason and that's great that they made it bigger not so long ago but you have no idea what you are talking about. What-So-Ever. This is why you asked.

I might add that maps are not cheap on resources by ANY stretch of the imagination.

[Torriador]

without introducing a compression algorthm, I believe the furthest possible level of zoom would be 1 game voxel = 1 screen pixel.
Beyond that, it is pretty well as I-smith described. but that is still a fairly large amount of data to display, if not rendered as image file(s), clamped to certain zoom levels.

[Totally Not A Gamer Girl]

Originally posted by Torriador:

without introducing a compression algorthm, I believe the furthest possible level of zoom would be 1 game voxel = 1 screen pixel.
Beyond that, it is pretty well as I-smith described. but that is still a fairly large amount of data to display, if not rendered as image file(s), clamped to certain zoom levels.

Pretty much yeah. I was actually impressed with the map when I saw it in A14. I'm working on a voxel based game myself and this is one of the complicated hurdles I have met. It is allot of work and resources to render a voxelised terrain like this AND render a map of the same thing.

[YamaKami]

I still can't see this as being reason enough to not be able to see the entire map at full zoom. At worst they should just have a toggle for those trying to play it on a potato, so they can be able to toggle the option off.

Not seeing the entire map made sense when the world was infinite. It no is infinite and it no longer makes sense. The reason stated above appears to me, to be not much better than a cheap excuse. Most games with a map are not limited in this way. TFP needs to get on this and make it happen if this is the actual reason, preferably sooner than later at that.

[Totally Not A Gamer Girl]

Originally posted by YamaKami:

I still can't see this as being reason enough to not be able to see the entire map at full zoom. At worst they should just have a toggle for those trying to play it on a potato, so they can be able to toggle the option off.

Not seeing the entire map made sense when the world was infinite. It no is infinite and it no longer makes sense. The reason stated above appears to me, to be not much better than a cheap excuse. Most games with a map are not limited in this way. TFP needs to get on this and make it happen if this is the actual reason, preferably sooner than later at that.

The map is going to be expanded in the future. Hence the rad gear being introduced and madmole preparing the radiation system for rolling out in the future. 10k isn't supposed to be the limit. Though once you get beyond 60k I have noticed that floating point errors really take their toll on the renderer. Making the game shaky and shadows freaking out everywhere.

Yes you can get the terrain to generate infinitely. It becomes unplayable a little past 100k.

Also rendering at further zooms creates an exponential issue in the renderer. eg: default zoom = 1. zoom out x2 = 4. zoom out x3 = 9. zoom out 4 = 16.
This soon becomes zoom out 32 = 1024 and so on. Like I said it becomes very expensive very quickly. it's not a simple task of making a toggle either. If you want this feature then wait even longer for npc's.

[YamaKami]

Originally posted by l-smith:

Originally posted by YamaKami:

I still can't see this as being reason enough to not be able to see the entire map at full zoom. At worst they should just have a toggle for those trying to play it on a potato, so they can be able to toggle the option off.

Not seeing the entire map made sense when the world was infinite. It no is infinite and it no longer makes sense. The reason stated above appears to me, to be not much better than a cheap excuse. Most games with a map are not limited in this way. TFP needs to get on this and make it happen if this is the actual reason, preferably sooner than later at that.

The map is going to be expanded in the future. Hence the rad gear being introduced and madmole preparing the radiation system for rolling out in the future. 10k isn't supposed to be the limit. Though once you get beyond 60k I have noticed that floating point errors really take their toll on the renderer. Making the game shaky and shadows freaking out everywhere.

Yes you can get the terrain to generate infinitely. It becomes unplayable a little past 100k.

Also rendering at further zooms creates an exponential issue in the renderer. eg: default zoom = 1. zoom out x2 = 4. zoom out x3 = 9. zoom out 4 = 16.
This soon becomes zoom out 32 = 1024 and so on. Like I said it becomes very expensive very quickly. it's not a simple task of making a toggle either. If you want this feature then wait even longer for npc's.

The map is not going to be expanded to 60K. The rad gear is for small pockets of irradiated areas that will have choice loot, and are only accessible with the suit. 10K is the new limit because they cannot solve the shakes issue, and short of .xml edits we won't get a bigger one now.

If you have read from a dev it will be 60K, please post a link to the source. I follow this game closely and have since 2014, and 60K would be news to me that said.

I'm in no rush for NPC's either. Or any feature, I would much rather they take whatever time required to do it right and do it well. However if it was my show to run I would make the map zoom out more of a priority. Being able to define the maps edges and yet not see them at the same time just feels cheap and lazy. Regardless of if it is or not, it still appears that way.

[Totally Not A Gamer Girl]

Originally posted by YamaKami:

Originally posted by l-smith:

The map is going to be expanded in the future. Hence the rad gear being introduced and madmole preparing the radiation system for rolling out in the future. 10k isn't supposed to be the limit. Though once you get beyond 60k I have noticed that floating point errors really take their toll on the renderer. Making the game shaky and shadows freaking out everywhere.

Yes you can get the terrain to generate infinitely. It becomes unplayable a little past 100k.

Also rendering at further zooms creates an exponential issue in the renderer. eg: default zoom = 1. zoom out x2 = 4. zoom out x3 = 9. zoom out 4 = 16.
This soon becomes zoom out 32 = 1024 and so on. Like I said it becomes very expensive very quickly. it's not a simple task of making a toggle either. If you want this feature then wait even longer for npc's.

The map is not going to be expanded to 60K. The rad gear is for small pockets of irradiated areas that will have choice loot, and are only accessible with the suit. 10K is the new limit because they cannot solve the shakes issue, and short of .xml edits we won't get a bigger one now.

If you have read from a dev it will be 60K, please post a link to the source. I follow this game closely and have since 2014, and 60K would be news to me that said.


I'm in no rush for NPC's either. Or any feature, I would much rather they take whatever time required to do it right and do it well. However if it was my show to run I would make the map zoom out more of a priority. Being able to define the maps edges and yet not see them at the same time just feels cheap and lazy. Regardless of if it is or not, it still appears that way.

You are missing the point. I never said 60k was confirmed I said that floating point errors at 60k become noticeable (the shakes). I remember reading somewhere that the 10k limit is not ideal and may be pushed out later when/if they can get a few things fixed as well as 10k being a way of limiting drive space usage on servers. local and dedicated. My point is also while not impossible a larger zoom level to map rendering is allot of work trust me.

I can only speculate that the shakes are due to a poor implementation of unity as the engine I have built to run as a back end to unity for my own game does not suffer such issues. I have near infinite terrains and worlds (possibly limited to about 24 million kilometers across as of now though that should change soon) in all directions, both in sp and mp with no shakes or lighting issues. That includes up, down, north, east, south and west. This also allows me to create wrapped worlds where traveling in the same direction brings you back to the same place you started if world wrapping is enabled. I wish I could show you but until I go into public funding I have allot of polishing and features to add. TFP have done a great job so far and their voxel grids are quite different to mine in that they cost more to store as of yet due to the terrain smoothing and additional data required by such a system. Though I could implement such a terrain smoothing system to my own engine and still not suffer the shakes. It seems to me like a scaling issue in the render environment in unity that causes this for the fun pimps.


I have also been a backer of 7DTD back since alpha 5 or so.

[YamaKami]

Originally posted by l-smith:

Originally posted by YamaKami:

The map is not going to be expanded to 60K. The rad gear is for small pockets of irradiated areas that will have choice loot, and are only accessible with the suit. 10K is the new limit because they cannot solve the shakes issue, and short of .xml edits we won't get a bigger one now.

If you have read from a dev it will be 60K, please post a link to the source. I follow this game closely and have since 2014, and 60K would be news to me that said.

I'm in no rush for NPC's either. Or any feature, I would much rather they take whatever time required to do it right and do it well. However if it was my show to run I would make the map zoom out more of a priority. Being able to define the maps edges and yet not see them at the same time just feels cheap and lazy. Regardless of if it is or not, it still appears that way.

You are missing the point. I never said 60k was confirmed I said that floating point errors at 60k become noticeable (the shakes). I remember reading somewhere that the 10k limit is not ideal and may be pushed out later when/if they can get a few things fixed as well as 10k being a way of limiting drive space usage on servers. local and dedicated. My point is also while not impossible a larger zoom level to map rendering is allot of work trust me.

I can only speculate that the shakes are due to a poor implementation of unity as the engine I have built to run as a back end to unity for my own game does not suffer such issues. I have near infinite terrains and worlds (possibly limited to about 24 million miles across as of now though that should change soon) in all directions, both in sp and mp with no shakes or lighting issues. That includes up, down, north, east, south and west. This also allows me to create wrapped worlds where traveling in the same direction brings you back to the same place you started if world wrapping is enabled. I wish I could show you but until I go into public funding I have allot of polishing and features to add. TFP have done a great job so far and their voxel grids are quite different to mine in that they cost more to store as of yet due to the terrain smoothing and additional data required by such a system. Though I could implement such a terrain smoothing system to my own engine and still not suffer the shakes. It seems to me like a scaling issue in the render environment in unity that causes this for the fun pimps.

Sorry I did read that as you had 60K confirmed, I always did intend to edited the size of map once gold if it was still limited to 10K though.

As for the rest it seems like something solvable (the shakes), that TFP gave up on. I never really had any problems wit hit myself, but my CPU is pretty OP for gaming. Actually my setup in general is (see my profile if you care for the details), but my GPU is due to be updated (holding out for a GTX1080 when EVGA rolls some out).

Your game sounds interesting though, I'd like to check it out myself when you are ready for it. Any guesstimates as to how much time until you go public?

[CatPerson]

Originally posted by YamaKami:

(holding out for a GTX1080 when EVGA rolls some out).

Since my 980ti is barely a year old (turns out it's actually a "SC"/superclocked model, unlike what I said/thought before), I think I'll wait for the inevitable 1080ti (or whatever they end up calling it) and stick that in a new rig, instead of tossing the 980ti in, like I was planning. Not that I don't want it, tho. *sigh*

Sorry...I know that's offtopic...geek-drooling...

[Totally Not A Gamer Girl]

Originally posted by YamaKami:

Originally posted by l-smith:

You are missing the point. I never said 60k was confirmed I said that floating point errors at 60k become noticeable (the shakes). I remember reading somewhere that the 10k limit is not ideal and may be pushed out later when/if they can get a few things fixed as well as 10k being a way of limiting drive space usage on servers. local and dedicated. My point is also while not impossible a larger zoom level to map rendering is allot of work trust me.

I can only speculate that the shakes are due to a poor implementation of unity as the engine I have built to run as a back end to unity for my own game does not suffer such issues. I have near infinite terrains and worlds (possibly limited to about 24 million miles across as of now though that should change soon) in all directions, both in sp and mp with no shakes or lighting issues. That includes up, down, north, east, south and west. This also allows me to create wrapped worlds where traveling in the same direction brings you back to the same place you started if world wrapping is enabled. I wish I could show you but until I go into public funding I have allot of polishing and features to add. TFP have done a great job so far and their voxel grids are quite different to mine in that they cost more to store as of yet due to the terrain smoothing and additional data required by such a system. Though I could implement such a terrain smoothing system to my own engine and still not suffer the shakes. It seems to me like a scaling issue in the render environment in unity that causes this for the fun pimps.

Sorry I did read that as you had 60K confirmed, I always did intend to edited the size of map once gold if it was still limited to 10K though.

As for the rest it seems like something solvable (the shakes), that TFP gave up on. I never really had any problems wit hit myself, but my CPU is pretty OP for gaming. Actually my setup in general is (see my profile if you care for the details), but my GPU is due to be updated (holding out for a GTX1080 when EVGA rolls some out).

Your game sounds interesting though, I'd like to check it out myself when you are ready for it. Any guesstimates as to how much time until you go public?

The shakes unfortunately have little to do with machine performance and at 60k it only becomes "noticeable" but barely so. Go out to 100k and it becomes nauseating. It has to do with accuracy with decimals in large numbers in computing in general so 100000.000000 point accuracy becomes an issue to track by the renderer assuming that 1.0 = 1 meter. I wouldn't blame TFP entirely for the issue as it is likely they built the back end of the engine before they realised that 1) The worlds were going to be so big. 2) They realised that terrain smoothing was going to be a thing. and 3) That this was even a thing that could happen in unity.
I on the other hand had seen this happen in early stress tests of my prototype engine and had observed it happen in games like Minecraft. So I went in with some forethought on the matter and carefully designed my system to handle it by compressing regions down into manageable slices and offsetting the renderer in unity based on the players position when they load up a game. This theoretically means that you could encounter the shakes if you traveled non stop in one direction without ever leaving the game and coming back. But as soon as you did start to experience the shakes it could be remedied by reloging. It's again no simple feat to achieve based on if the game is built with this issue in mind let alone if the issue is discovered after the game is already established as a code base.

I hope to have an exploreable world demo available by the end of the summer but I make no promises as I have web services, user logins and content storage for user created content to build before I can allow it into the hands of the public. I post updates Here[www.facebook.com] if you want to follow it and there are some old test shots for the terrain renderer in the photo albums on that page as well as some newer pictures of the game launcher and art style direction on the timeline.

[YamaKami]

Originally posted by CatPerson:

Originally posted by YamaKami:

(holding out for a GTX1080 when EVGA rolls some out).

Since my 980ti is barely a year old (turns out it's actually a "SC"/superclocked model, unlike what I said/thought before), I think I'll wait for the inevitable 1080ti (or whatever they end up calling it) and stick that in a new rig, instead of tossing the 980ti in, like I was planning. Not that I don't want it, tho. *sigh*

Sorry...I know that's offtopic...geek-drooling...

Yea I dunno if I can wait long enough as ti is usually around 1 year off the vanilla launch, I'm hoping to wait it out for like a 2.0 EVGA one. Already has more balls than a Titan X so should be solid enough. I was thinking 980ti myself but I like one valued at $1K USD... and the 1080's will go for $550 and be better. Makes me wonder what will happen to the 900 series pricing at that much lower. Titan still has way more vid ram though so it still has a purpose for now.

[CatPerson]

It's interesting because I notice a visible hand-shaking start long before 10k, but it's pretty minor. Mostly noticeable re: the hand animations if I'm standing still just staring at the hands....my actual weapon aim doesn't feel that off or anything, which is what I mostly recall people talking about in terms of vast distances?

I don't think I ever went much beyond 20-30k anyway, myself, even when it was still default-infinite...so never knew it could be so bad until I read some threads on it at some point.

[YamaKami]

Originally posted by l-smith:

Originally posted by YamaKami:

Sorry I did read that as you had 60K confirmed, I always did intend to edited the size of map once gold if it was still limited to 10K though.

As for the rest it seems like something solvable (the shakes), that TFP gave up on. I never really had any problems wit hit myself, but my CPU is pretty OP for gaming. Actually my setup in general is (see my profile if you care for the details), but my GPU is due to be updated (holding out for a GTX1080 when EVGA rolls some out).

Your game sounds interesting though, I'd like to check it out myself when you are ready for it. Any guesstimates as to how much time until you go public?

The shakes unfortunately have little to do with machine performance and at 60k it only becomes "noticeable" but barely so. Go out to 100k and it becomes nauseating. It has to do with accuracy with decimals in large numbers in computing in general so 100000.000000 point accuracy becomes an issue to track by the renderer assuming that 1.0 = 1 meter. I wouldn't blame TFP entirely for the issue as it is likely they built the back end of the engine before they realised that 1) The worlds were going to be so big. 2) They realised that terrain smoothing was going to be a thing. and 3) That this was even a thing that could happen in unity.
I on the other hand had seen this happen in early stress tests of my prototype engine and had observed it happen in games like Minecraft. So I went in with some forethought on the matter and carefully designed my system to handle it by compressing regions down into manageable slices and offsetting the renderer in unity based on the players position when they load up a game. This theoretically means that you could encounter the shakes if you traveled non stop in one direction without ever leaving the game and coming back. But as soon as you did start to experience the shakes it could be remedied by reloging. It's again no simple feat to achieve based on if the game is built with this issue in mind let alone if the issue is discovered after the game is already established as a code base.

I hope to have an exploreable world demo available by the end of the summer but I make no promises as I have web services, user logins and content storage for user created content to build before I can allow it into the hands of the public. I post updates Here[www.facebook.com] if you want to follow it and there are some old test shots for the terrain renderer in the photo albums on that page as well as some newer pictures of the game launcher and art style direction on the timeline.

See learning even a little from posts like this has really made me see games in a new light, and I have been thoroughly enjoy participating in the development in what little ways we can of games in the Early access program. This is the kind of stuff that has me loving the ride as much as the gaming itself. Especially since when it comes to programming I am worse than useless, but I am willing to listen and learn what I can. This thread has been particularly enlightening so thanks for the detailed posts I do appreciate them. Having some PC trouble I hope to solve after work today or tomorrow but I will try remember to log in and save that link so I can see what you are doing, you have me very intrigued.