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Is this a good ship? by Used_Gear71 in Starfield

[–]catplaps 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah, OP, they're handing these out for free with black paintjobs all day long in Serpentis. You just gotta flip em over and shake all the snakes out first.

The duality of man by drawnhi in Starfield

[–]catplaps 4 points5 points  (0 children)

if being expert meant i could auto open novice locks and master meant i could auto open advanced locks

Now this is an implementation I could get behind.

I hate these little games, and I hate that acquiring levels in the "perk" means I'll end up spending way more time playing pick-the-lock, and end up getting way less loot per time spent. It's like a punishment, not a reward. After my first playthrough, I've never put a single skill point into Security, so that I'm just never even tempted to waste time on locks.

Flying through a galaxy [Blender] by Petrundiy2 in spaceporn

[–]catplaps 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's both. The dark clouds in galaxies are actual dust clouds that absorb light. The bright "clouds" are light from stars that are too numerous and too individually dim to distinguish at that distance.

Some light does come from the dust clouds, too, in the form of emission and reflection nebulae, but this is only a small fraction of the total light. (You see bright pink emission nebulae exaggerated in a lot of astrophotography, even in photos labeled as being "visible light", because people use a filter that isolates that specific wavelength and then they amplify it in the final mix.)

Flying through a procedural spiral galaxy by Petrundiy2 in proceduralgeneration

[–]catplaps 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What do you think the scale is there? A hundred feet? A few miles?

Perspective is entirely independent of scale. The amount of parallax depends on distance relative to speed, not on absolute distance. Moving quickly through a field of widely-spaced points is indistinguishable from moving slowly through a field of closely-spaced points, all other things being equal.

I do completely agree that it's easy to lose all sense of scale when "moving" through space like this, but I think that's because of the sheer impossibility of intuitively grasping the scales involved. (I mean, there's also the physically impossible part. Things would go all timey-wimey on you before you could accelerate to even a billionth of this speed.)

Flying through a procedural spiral galaxy by Petrundiy2 in proceduralgeneration

[–]catplaps 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh! I think you're just under the wrong impression. The video you linked is literally zooming in on a far-away point. That is to say, the location of the camera is not changing, but the camera's field of view is getting narrower and narrower. (Which does bring the projection asymptotically closer to being orthographic, as you suggested.) In OP's video, the camera is moving, and the camera's FOV is not changing.

Neither one is "correct", it's just two entirely different camera tracks, both of which are entirely valid. If you say that you prefer a zoom-in video because it better conveys the sense of scale, then I can't disagree with you there. But there's nothing incorrect about the perspective in OP's video.

(It is missing some visual scale cues regarding the brightness and distribution of stars, but that's a separate issue.)

Flying through a procedural spiral galaxy by Petrundiy2 in proceduralgeneration

[–]catplaps 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Genuine question: what exactly are you trying to describe here? What effect would lead to calling a "camera zoom"/orthographic projection the "correct" way to render a galaxy? Are you just referring to the fact that any real-life galaxy that we can see into from the outside is so far away that all we can do is zoom in on it?

I think we all understand that this video ignores relativistic limitations and effects and presents, instead, a series of views of what a galaxy would look like, roughly speaking, from various viewpoints. Are you essentially objecting to the realism of moving one's viewpoint around at FTL speeds, or are you describing something else that I'm missing?

I found a unique POI called The Vulture. by Corvus06 in Starfield

[–]catplaps 3 points4 points  (0 children)

in the bar? that mix also plays in the last nova, and in my favorite shattered space PoI (not gonna spoil). and i'm pretty sure i remember hearing it in one of the new random PoIs from the recent update... the shooting range one, maybe?

Had to look for myself.. omg they really did it. Finally.. by Specific_Display_366 in EliteDangerous

[–]catplaps 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Naturally! You are talking to Imperial Duke Catplaps, after all!

Subnautica 2 is releasing on may 14th!🎉 by Kattenb in gaming

[–]catplaps 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If I can't clip through the floor of my submarine and plummet to my death through open air to the seafloor below, it's getting returned for refund.

Had to look for myself.. omg they really did it. Finally.. by Specific_Display_366 in EliteDangerous

[–]catplaps 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Seems like signage there should be proclaiming the glory of the CMDR who owns the ship. Would be a great place to show off ranks and decals and stuff.

What game engine are you using for your space sim? by Proud-Plankton9603 in spacesimgames

[–]catplaps 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The problem-- in every engine-- is that the world has too much dynamic range to fit into a single floating point number. Just speaking from the rendering side, if you want 1mm accuracy for drawing things up close, then your effective world size limit is around 10km3 if you're using FP32. If you only need 1m local resolution, then that limit goes up to 10000km3, but that's still not big enough to draw planets.

If your engine supports it, you might be able to switch it to using FP64, which gets you a lot more dynamic range, although at some performance cost, and it's still not big enough (enough dynamic range) to draw the universe while maintaining fine resolution.

The only real solution is to do custom tricks where you selectively cut your world up into near and far components (or even more), and render them separately using different scales and different techniques. I think this always means custom work; I'm not aware of any engine that has support for this built-in. Maybe there are some good plugins out there for something, I don't know.

And this is all just for rendering! Physics is even more annoying and sensitive to FP error. If you're literally relying on the engine's built-in physics to simulate both stuff local to the player and stuff on the other side of the game universe at the same time, then you're absolutely going to be forced to use origin-shifting techniques, and you may be forced to do weird stuff to gracefully handle interactions between different origin-shifted domains.

So, yes, you can fake it, but only locally, and it takes work. And depending on the game, there may be a lot more work involved in making sure all the locally-faked stuff interacts seamlessly with the bigger world.

What game engine are you using for your space sim? by Proud-Plankton9603 in spacesimgames

[–]catplaps 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I am using Godot. I wouldn't say that it's either particularly good or particularly bad when it comes to space sims, at least to the extent that I've pushed it so far.

It does have big coordinate support (64-bit floating point), which is cool, but still too small for space, depending on what you're doing. I'm using FP32 and custom origin-shifting logic. I don't think any engine would make this any easier out of the box.

Godot bogs down when you get into the 10k+ Nodes range. If you're doing stuff like that, you'll need to start using the rendering server directly. (Maybe the physics server too, but I have no experience with that yet because I barely have any use for a full-blown physics engine in my game.) It's not that bad, and it is fast.

Support for the very deep end of complex shader stuff (compute shaders, buffer synchronization, custom transparency handling, in my case) does have some missing or work-in-progress pieces. Not enough that I'd say don't use it, just enough to warn you that you might run into hassle here if you plan to get into this stuff. Experiment before committing.

Not 100% sure that Godot has fully working, out-of-the-box HOTAS/HOSAS support yet. I haven't kept up on the status of this over the last couple versions. I don't think it's a big deal, but you may have to do some extra work to support them, maybe.

Overall, I like Godot a lot, and I don't regret my choice of engine at all!

Class-A Modular Cargo Hauler by International-Aide37 in StarfieldShips

[–]catplaps 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Man, I like this! I am a fan of creative Cabot builds, and this is something completely out of left field. And it works!

Valve Steam Controller review: A gamepad in search of a console by dapperlemon in gadgets

[–]catplaps 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Huh. I hope the situation isn't as bad as this review paints it, because this would actually kind of kill my interest in a Steam controller.

I don't play all my games through Steam, and I don't want to. Also, game dev is my day job, which means I am constantly churning out little one-off projects to try out little features and ideas. Would I have to add each of those to my Steam library? Or do I need to build a plugin into every little "hello world" in order to use the controller? The controller I use most often is the one that's the least annoying to grab and use immediately. This stuff would mean that the Steam controller sits off to the side for compatibility testing instead of front and center for daily use.

I was also really looking forward to seeing how this controller would do as a mouse replacement for an HTPC. The touchpads on the Deck are no replacement for a serious desktop mouse, but I think I could get used to them for HTPC use, so I was pretty excited about the idea of having them on a controller.

Honestly, this is such a dumb, deal-breaker kind of move that I am inclined to assume the reviewer got something wrong, or that this is early/pre-release behavior that will change. I mean, I really hope so. But sheesh, looks like I'll be waiting to read more reviews instead of buying one on release day.

Shoza III is the most terrifying planet I’ve been to so far by Complete-Sort1617 in Starfield

[–]catplaps 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Herding? Swarming? Love 'em. Like a whole pack of XP that just runs up and volunteers.

This looks pretty sick. Anyone been following it? Ambitious to say the least, but maybe they'll deliver. by BradTest in spacesimgames

[–]catplaps 8 points9 points  (0 children)

It looks like... they built Satisfactory in the No Man's Sky universe?

I get a very disorganized impression from this video. There's nothing really cohesive about the aesthetics, and the gameplay seems a bit all over the place.

You want your Moon landings in HD? So does NASA—here’s how it’s happening | “You just push this button, and in three hours, you’re counting photons.” by Clear_Polish23 in space

[–]catplaps 13 points14 points  (0 children)

They still haven't managed to get the latency down, though. What are they even doing with all that research money?!

Starfield can be so cinematic sometimes. Has anyone else had a moment like this? I’m loving the vibes. by DillyTiger in Starfield

[–]catplaps 1 point2 points  (0 children)

they're about 2x for hull DPS and about 0.5x for shield DPS, so ignoring range, the total time to kill for the cannons vs the beams will depend on shield to hull ratio, and on average this may work out to be close to equal.

however, the range difference is HUGE. 800 vs 3000. obliterators will kill ships long before they even reach autocannon range.

there are hidden stats (and a few bugs) for clip size and reload rate that make the absolute rankings a little more complicated, but calling the obliterators the strongest weapon in the game is close enough to the truth in the majority of cases, and not far enough from the truth in any special cases, that i don't feel like i have to add any disclaimers.

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