Digging holes limit?

I imagine every hole you dig takes a bit of memory or CPU time.

once you dig a massive hole are they optimised into one bit "nothing" or do they stay lots of little "nothings".

I have an idea to make a bunch of drones and cut the Ice moon in half.

Is this just a stupid idea? I'll have to leave the game running for ages.

 

Original reply redacted 28/3/19 as release version 1.189 adds the ability to selectively revert voxel changes in the space master and dedicated server option settings

Every bit of material removed from a voxel entity (asteroid, planet or moon) increases the size of it's data structure, in memory when the program is running, or on disk when the program is shut down. In addition, in some cases, the filename of its disk save data grows. This will all end in tears, a broken save, and a game that fails with a memory allocation error, in no particular order. Sorry.

Also, relevant gif...

 

Wait, it makes the voxel set BIGGER?
I sure hope they plan to add a cleanup system that remakes the voxel set to include the holes as part of the normal shape....

 

They can't. The normal shape is procedural (or height map in the case of planets). This is why file sizes increase as you dig more. If you want to keep altered shapes, you must save those changes.

 

Which is also why meteors ("environment hostility") should be disabled when planets are occupied unless the world/save/planet is planned to be reset on a regular basis. At higher rates, the files grow quite quickly, causing higher memory use and considerably longer load/connect time.

 

Ugh, I should really turn off those asteroids then. I didn't and now the entire landscape looks like post war Dresden. Is there a way to delete changes selectively, such as the craters?

 

Nope, the only thing you can do is restore the planet data file from either the original game data or an earlier backup, in either case this will revert any or all changes from meteors and mining. The meteor option should really come with a severe warning or be disabled on worlds that have planets ... see below

 

There is an option to restore voxel changes in space master menu. You can select how far from any grids or players voxels should be restored, what kind of voxels(asteroids, ore veins) and you can turn that to auto cleanup mode that removes any changes to voxels based on settings above and time which has passed since the last modification of a terrain in the area.

 

Wow, thanks There were so many changes in 1.189 that I actually missed that one, and it even seems to work, not only reverting the changes but shrinking the file size as well.

@Malware apparently didn't know this was coming either

 

I've wondered for a while if meteors should be set to NOT damage voxels and just leave some ore rocks scattered on the surface. I've also wished for a while now that you could turn meteors on to just be a random cool visual thing in the distance to make the universe seem more alive. Seems like a very cool looking effect is being wasted as is.

 

Sorry?

 

Ref your reply above from the day before the release announcement : https://forum.keenswh.com/threads/digging-holes-limit.7402582/#post-1287104245

 

I wondered if that's what you meant. But my statement there is still correct, because it has nothing to do with regeneration. It explains why changes can't be saved to "the normal shape" as there is no "normal shape".

 

Yes, that is true... I guess even if you had known this regeneration option was coming, to even hint at it would have been a breach of confidentiality agreement.

 

I wish I had known this a before. Here's hoping the admin can use the new voxel cleaner to "fix" my 5-8 minute load times on this server.

 

If it takes so long to load each time, then it probably is the world data that is huge, but there may be other reasons for it, it's worth asking others on the server if they have the same issue and try to get the word to the admin that there seems to be a problem. The voxel data is updated for each player connecting so if that's the problem it will cause a considerable lag spike for players on the server at that time.