If new Ore Deposits were turned into voids...

[warmer]

If you could turn the Ore deposit borders into negative space once it was created, wouldn't that create a path to cave generation?

 

Couldn't you just inflate the Ore deposit size in a random way to create differing sizes of caves.

 

Granted you wouldn't get the same ones of A16 days, but I think that would be really nice additions to the game in regard to terrain features.

[AtomicUs5000]

I don't know the exact details, but I'm pretty sure the issue is not that they have a hard time coming up with ways to generate caves.

The claim is that there is a problem of performance at the surface above the caves.

On top of that, they just have no interest because they have nothing to offer to make caves an interesting part of the game.

However, I must say that when the topic is brought up, the story changes a little and sometimes shifts from one point to another. I take all this as, they simply just do not want to do it, they don't want to deal with anything that comes with it.

Enjoy (I did):

 

If the occlusion works out it might see a return someday.

 

We'll keep optimizing and see where that lands, then we can think about some kind of underground cave networks. We took them out because we had no occlusion framework and chunk generation / rendering speeds were unacceptable.

 

We were using perlin worms and generating cave data at runtime. Some of the caves were extensive and we were rendering huge cave networks MOST players didn't even see. (why is my game slow, I'm staring at a flat open desert?) Then to make them interesting, we had to spawn animals or zombies down there, slowing it further and taking away from potentially obvious zombies on the surface. In short, imagine rendering 1.5 x as much stuff as you need to, and use a costly algorithm when generating it for the first time when a player goes into the area. It was making it challenging to keep up with a minibike movement. If we could pregenerate it and cull it 100% and not spawn guys in there until a player was inside, (all easily doable in a static world game, but challenging in a fully destroyable voxel game) then we could probably add them in.

 

So you render every polygon and every entity and having caves just adds to the list of problems we already have. We don't have 16k worlds yet, generating them is too slow. So should we put a feature in 2% of the players want and block a feature 50% of the players want? Then there is stability concerns.

 

Anyhow it might come in a future build, but its not in the cards for 18. Until then, Get off your ass and carve your own cave with a pickaxe

 

1 I'm not sure what the fascination is with caves, they are super rare IRL, and would be a horrible place to go looting in a setting similar to TWD like our game is. Maybe people have played too much minecraft, but to me caves are really pretty boring when there are POIs and a full world to explore. Any cave generation system would have to be coded by someone. There is nothing to expose to modders if it isn't written.

 

Performance, why is this simple scene laggy? (there is a complex sewer/cave network you can't even see rendering, adding to chunk building time, etc.)

 

there is nothing about procedural underground caves that is simple. Minecraft doesn't have stability nor more than a cube every meter for detail, and the whole thing is about mining, hence the name. This isn't 7 days to mine or explore caves. Arizona has a total of 11 caves in the entire state, so its not like we're not accurately portraying the region. We have a few man made caves we place randomly, that is good enough to ship.

 

As cool as it would be, after already investing several alphas into this idea we've concluded that its not worth the man hours to chase this feature. We can always add some more man made ones that are randomly placed.

 

They were kind of cool at first, but then got boring and added SI and performance issues. Maybe something down the road, but I'd rather do man made stuff. Now that we have filler 2.0 we might see more of that in the future.

 

Underground already occludes above ground stuff, occluding it isn't the problem, its generating all those vertices while driving fast and weighting the game down for very little return. On top of that it has to be engineered to look good and be interesting and worth doing. Given that roads are still a mess, towns and biomes need work and 1% of players would go oh cool for 5 minutes then find out they are just the same thing over and over with very little loot or game play so its not worth investing into. We can do anything, but not everything. We have man made caves in the game, they work fine.

[JaxTeller718]

I love this post. It was a roller coaster of emotions. Too bad the ending sucked.

[AtomicUs5000]

I love this post. It was a roller coaster of emotions. Too bad the ending sucked.

A tragedy for sure.

[Damocles]

There are lots of tricks that can be used to occlude them, reducing their performance costs a lot.

Sounds more to me that the generation did not yield interesting enough results to have been worth the effort and costs.

 

If someone could just write a better cave generation code, that makes them feel worthwhile to have as elements in the game...

[AtomicUs5000]

I think the strategy here, if people really, really want caves, is to come up with some incredible idea involving those caves that is too tempting for TFP to pass up.

On top of that, it would have to be something that won't take many years to develop. With no interest in them, they're just not going to do it regardless of how many people want it.

[Damocles]

Missions into caves would be a start.

That could also be just a couple of POI caves.

 

High reward area people "scan" for.

 

Mixing caves with underground bunkers/vaults.

 

Clearing out a hard cave will prevent the next horde to show up, or stuff like that.

 

The same reason world generation works better and is easier to control artistically using stamps - in contrast to fractal noise like Perlin - can also be applied to generating cave-structures.

[Boidster]

POI caves would work alright, if there are several of them (like, 10 or more, maybe with "left" and "right" versions). If I could wave a magic dev tool wand for TFP I'd give them an algorithm that took cave POI building-blocks and pieced them together during RWG. Like an underground gerbil habitat with tubes connected to rooms, each piece pre-built, but assembled dynamically and within a fixed POI area. So maybe the cave POI template is 32x32x32 blocks, and the RWG can fit nodes into that volume however it wants. Sleepers can be pre-placed into each node (or not).

 

It is SO easy to say, it must be easy to do, right? Just like when my customers say, "well can't you just..." and I smile at them and answer, "of course I can! I just didn't do it before because I hate you and only want your money!"

[Sappystreetbum]

I don't know the exact details, but I'm pretty sure the issue is not that they have a hard time coming up with ways to generate caves.

The claim is that there is a problem of performance at the surface above the caves.

On top of that, they just have no interest because they have nothing to offer to make caves an interesting part of the game.

However, I must say that when the topic is brought up, the story changes a little and sometimes shifts from one point to another. I take all this as, they simply just do not want to do it, they don't want to deal with anything that comes with it.

Enjoy (I did):

 

Do you keep a notebook of madmole quotes meticulously categorized by topic? Madmole; you best be on your toes, because this guy has you mate in one. 😂

[bdubyah]

Well, MM is obviously a big Fallout fan. So mention something about vaults and stuff. Maybe he'll bite.

 

At the very least it could get a lot more cave-like POIs made.

[warmer]

Maybe it is just me, but I never really experienced bad performance because of caves, though I also never really play MultiPlayer, so that could be why rendering the worlds caves for a single player isn't such a CPU bog.

 

I have cleared out some veins that were huge. Turning them into negative space would be interesting. The collapse physics would be great for creating caverns and openings to the surface.

[Rez090]

One thing I don't get, why do the big cities not have sewers? Where does all the sewage go?

[warmer]

One thing I don't get, why do the big cities not have sewers? Where does all the sewage go?

 

I remember a lot of talk about this in the past. It would be cool if bunkers/sky scrapers/hospitals/industrial plants all had sewer entrances of some kind.

[Yisiscreise]

POI caves would work alright, if there are several of them (like, 10 or more, maybe with "left" and "right" versions). If I could wave a magic dev tool wand for TFP I'd give them an algorithm that took cave POI building-blocks and pieced them together during RWG. Like an underground gerbil habitat with tubes connected to rooms, each piece pre-built, but assembled dynamically and within a fixed POI area. So maybe the cave POI template is 32x32x32 blocks, and the RWG can fit nodes into that volume however it wants. Sleepers can be pre-placed into each node (or not).

 

It is SO easy to say, it must be easy to do, right? Just like when my customers say, "well can't you just..." and I smile at them and answer, "of course I can! I just didn't do it before because I hate you and only want your money!"

 

Your idea is awesome bro

[guardianangelmp]

Make the caves the place where the bandits have their fortified base. Have the bandit cave system be the end mission to some epic quest chain, then, after a certain amount of time, have the bandits start to set up in a new cave.

 

Have a bear den in a cave.

 

Have a "quarantined" cave where all the dead bodies were dumped and have them be all sleeping ferals.

[warmer]

Make the caves the place where the bandits have their fortified base. Have the bandit cave system be the end mission to some epic quest chain, then, after a certain amount of time, have the bandits start to set up in a new cave.

 

Have a bear den in a cave.

 

Have a "quarantined" cave where all the dead bodies were dumped and have them be all sleeping ferals.

 

Those are all great ideas for Cave based POI.