PLANETS! & Water ?

Hey, i have been thinking that volumetric water in a game like Space Engineers is going to be impossible with the current engine.
But meaby more simple water ? and underwater stuff.

Any ideas ?

 

You right! Volumetric water is impossible in Vrage 2, couse wiht it your computer is blow up!
So, only two ways to have water on planets: simple "texture" water, like in Empirion, HL (one) and other games, and actual solution - water like ice.

 

yeah, Water as ICE is alrdy in the game tho

EDIT: Terraforming should be possible, and i hope it is added too

 

I've been secretly hoping that they found out a way to add some form of simple water. After all the planet source code is over 2 months old, which had ice oceans. And they were talking about some really cool features they were working on for the planets and then they stopped updating the source code.

 

yeah, i think ice will definetly be on planets.

 

Well, we could use spheres of water with no physics. They would apply water physics to objects and change light brightness. Atmosphere could replace water inside airtight objects.

 

Oh ? thats great news i hope they add food and other survival mechanics too.

 

I read about water in Medieval Engineers but not in Space Engineers, would be cool tho. Still waiting for planets first, I wish I could just sleep untill planets are released because this waiting is killing me

 

I know the feeling mate

 

Spherical gravity and volumetric water on (SE) planetary scale is going to make your CPU go nuclear.

 

For some reason it is NU CLEAR to. Me what you are talking about.

 

Sorry to dash your hopes, but have you seen crashing waves, a planet reflected off of a lake surface or a submarine in any of the teaser videos? Nope? Me neither.

Trust me, if they'd added liquid water, it'd be a big enough 'thing' that it would have made at least one star appearance in at least one teaser.

 

Well clearly I'm not expecting anything like waves or reflections ever coming for this game, I'm not seriously even expecting water at all. I've just been hoping they would have been secretly working on a extreamly simple water and save it as a big surprise for the 2015 trailer of the game, when they release the planets. Clearly they want to save a lot of the planet related stuff as a surprise since they stopped updating source code over two months ago. Sure there have been a lot of teasers, but none about ice oceans that they had in the latest version of source code.

 

Good point. I don't recall them showing ice oceans in their videos, so you could be right. Mind you, I also haven't seen anything showing them digging a big hole in the ground either. Maybe they just don't consider those things glamorous enough to add in to the videos.

 

Yeah imo a simple water sphere is really easy to make and would even be okay.
It would essentially be the simpliest and and also "very unrealistic" version where there is a fixed water layer at below whichs depth water simply exists when everything is mined away.
This water layer however should have the option to rise above the planets normal height surface so that you can find completely submerged planets where every landmass is submerged.

There are of course three issues and questions there.
How should the water interact with out ships?
Well it should be a very high movement resistance. Much like in space where things slow down for a few months now, grids in atmospheres should slow down even more. In water however the magnitude of movement resistance and thus the slowdown effect should be inceased exponentially so that any kind of propulsion feels rather useless due to the sheer force you need to push things. We know that effect when trying to push or pull something through water. Aerodynamics however should be avoided imo as they are too complex right now. If there would be a nice algoithm to precompute an aerodynamics matrix, i would love it, but i can live without.

Next thing would be how to live with water, how to counteract it?
While water on planets could be such a dominant sphere where it spawns everywhere within its set region, certain meassures should be able to be take. You should have an option to build an underwater base. For that we could use the oxygen system. The current system got more generalized so that we dont just have an oxygen system but a genenral gas system with a set of rooms. Now what we could do with water and that system is that these gas system rooms got the ability to negate the water effects. When you fill a room that is submerged with water with some gas like oxygen, the water level in that room would fall (in an unrealistic manner though) so that it simply vanishes. Decompression would lead to the room filling with water again.
That seems to be a nice compromis of "realism" and what we actually could do with our limited performance without processing actual liquid dynamics.

Furthermore we would of course need to change certain blocks, mostly propulsion blocks. Athmospheric and electric thrusters were unable to fire underwater and instead we would need a new kind of propulsion for there. May that be ship propellers (easiest implementation) or even some fish fin/tail like many modern low-energy bionic propulsions use.
Also very important is archimedes principle. Any grids volume and weight (mass in gravity) generates an uplift force based on the displaced liquid that either is positve (it rises) of negative (it sinks). For that filled rooms with different gases and liquids have to be considered of course. So that when a room is filled with water it is more likely that it will sink while when the room gets emptied and filled with air it will rise up instead.
Using such a mechanism that isnt too complicated we could actually build ships with out current grids (though we had to ensure sealed rooms without leakage so no water gets generated inside) aswell as submarines or even buoys that either float in place or are meant to sink down to the surface of a planet, attach to a sunk ship and lift it up.

So yeah, i generally agree with the idea of water like so many others. However this above is my idea. If anyone wants more clarification, feel free to ask

Edit:
The concept above doesnt imply waves per se. But if one would use no perfect sphere but a deformed version that spins over time, one could generate a similar effect to tidal waves. No largely visible waves but the relative height of the water surface would periodically change over time.
If more wave-forms get overlayed with the water surface, even smaller waves could be generated.
However i guess that underwater streams are not so easy. At least i have no idea for it in semi-correct correlation to surface waves. Overall some streams shouldnt be too hard either, but the connection between underwater and watersurface is hard to maser. Also they most likely wouldnt start or end like it does in reality but instead "flow through solid ground" aswell as the water layer is considered very independent from the actual planet voxel layer.
Furthermore with actual waves the odd effect would of course be that water waves could originate on hills on very flat beaches. That would look silly to some degree but it is fine imo.

 

I'm not sure how you'd realistically represent a ship moving through the water without hydrodynamics physics... It would be extremely unrealistic if a wall of armour could move at the same speed as a sleek, arrow shaped craft of the same mass.

 

American spelling is nuclear, but nucular is also acceptable. now lets not split the atom over semantics.

 

I would really love to see what kind of solution they would come up with underground mining, especially with wheeled vehicles. I would love to build lifts that go even 500m down with entrances to tunnels networks on different levels where I would do the mining with wheeled drills. Sadly that kind of elevators are not really possible at the moment.

 

im going to be happy with a sphere mesh with animations and particles as water in planets.
i dont expect or desire something more advanced because a more advanced water is probably going to suffocate our cpus that they already suffering the actual calculations.

 

As much as I understand the reasons for avoiding water, the fact that they are waiting for planets release does make me wonder, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

 

Water would be a very good asthetic thing to have on planets, coastlines are among the most spectacular landscapes on earth. and a shell would not be entirely unrealistic, we have groundwater and it would be that in mineshafts.

I think this sounds like a very good idea. Most space ships we have now would sink like rocks but with design that could be avoided. How about a bouyency block or soemthing as well as filling rooms with air? Water thrusters could be like normal ones that only work underwater.

 

Will we get aerodynamics though?

 

Look at a game like Subnautica it is voxel base, they just add a water texture and when you are below it they change the physics

 

actually I believe the physics are the same, character movement mode and properties that exist such as air change but the physics is the same throughout the game- you cant have different sets of physics in the same game- unless its a minigame, in which case its more accurate to say you are opening another game within the game- but not effecting the main game at all, save for passing some values between them. Game physics are the overarching rules in the game- they cannot simply be changed because you enter a different zone, however you can change physics properties within a zone, for instance in water based on depth you could have it push up on the bottom of a grid with varrying force, and if you are under water the water above you will push down- however that may sound simple but considering all the other calculations that have to run- it adds up

 

Sure that is a given imo. It also is included in the density consideration archimedes principle revolves around. If the net-density of the grid is below the one of the displaced liquid, an force applies in upwards direction. If the net-density of the grid is higher than the displaced water, a downwards force will apply.
Special considerations have of course to be taken into account when you are only partially submerged and thus afloat. In such a case either every block had to be calculated (processing intensive) or some approximated model for the grid had to be used.

But that isnt quite right, depending on how you define "physics". There are several games with different behaviors for different entites. Examples are games with infantry, cars/tanks, planes and helicopters. They essentially use different "physics" that dont apply to the others.
Also SE uses different "physics" when you walk around in gravity or fly with a jetpack enabled in gravty.

Besides, i have given a "rather simple" proposal that could work. It revolves around simple mechanisms that are mostly ingame and the physics themself dont actually change. One could even get a step further and apply the same effects to atmosphere so that even very low density things like "ballons" could float upwards in a planets atmosphere til a certain height is reached where the surrounding airs density is too low to generate any uplift.

 

As has been said, they are trying to implement it into ME first. ME's initial plan is to have planar water levels, before they go whole hog and try for volumetric water.

The question is, whether it'll then be transferred to SE after that.

I think... Maybe. Eventually maybe. I wouldn't be waiting for it to happen next week.

 

I don't mind water, if it comes, that's great. If not and we have to use Ice as a replacement, although not really a replacement, just a colder version.
Either way, I'll go with the flow.

 

Yes because clearly they've shown off EVERYTHING we have in the game now from day 1.................. :rolleyes:

I need the ability the land and cruiz in the water like this. And no they didn't have a special set of thurster/engines for water use