Infiniscape - Coming Soon!

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  • After much personal deliberation, I have decided that while the direction Construct 2 is taking is interesting, it is not going in a direction that will help me achieve my goals...and with that I will be standing by - and improving in any way that I can - Construct 0.9x. Hopefully in doing so, I can help that portion of the community that stays behind as Construct moves forward.

    So what is Infiniscape? It is my first offering, of hopefully many - and it will also be the largest one. It is at the very heart of Void Runner, powering it's ability to generate a procedural universe that extends forever in every direction. A universe as detailed as I want it to be, down to the very soil on the planets. Internally we refer to this "heart" as the "Combobulator", which crunches most of our numbers for us. The code is already there, I just have to yank it out of Void Runner.

    Over the next week or two, I will be isolating this portion of Void Runner, and releasing it as a plugin called Infiniscape, which will be primarily targeted at generating infinite procedural terrain in terrestrial settings, but could possibly be jury rigged for space as well if you tried hard enough. Using this plugin will be simple enough, but will require some explanation, so I will also write up an in depth tutorial to coincide with the release. I am not sure at this time if I will integrate perlin noise support within the plugin itself, as it could easily be used alongside the perlin plugin, but it would certainly be easier to use if it was integrated.

    Most of my future offerings will likely be targeted at helping people with large scale "roguelike" games, as those are my favorite games to play! I am planning a city generator to compliment the existing dungeon generator, as well as a very simplistic inventory plugin. Anyway, more info soon.

  • It's great to see that there's some more love coming Construct 0.x's way. Infiniscape sounds pretty awesome and versatile. And I know many people will love you for the inventory plugin!

    Can't wait to get my hands on your plugin(s)!

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  • I will love you for an inventory plugin. I think I'm nearing the stage where I could actually make an inventory myself... but anything that makes complicated things easier is awesome!

  • I will be very happy to be discombobulated by your Combobulator.

  • Sad to see Construct 2 moving away from executables to more of a web focus. Oh well. Can't wait to mess with your plugin! I wanna combobulate!

  • Sad to see Construct 2 moving away from executables to more of a web focus.

    Has that been confirmed? I haven't kept up on everything going on with it, but if that's true that's a program killer. I can see it in addition to exe's, but web-only? I'd hate to have to switch back to MMF2, because, well, MMF2's event system sucks, but web-only would make me go bye-bye. I'd gladly pay for it if it's an advanced continuation of the original Construct but I don't know about the web-based thing. The whole concept with the original is just too good to throw away and go into a different direction now.

  • Opengl exe export is planned.

  • As Arima said, an exe export is most likely to come, but you shouldn't expect one in the next 6 to 12 month.

    Arsonide, that's some fine decision. I'm happy that there are more people that don't ignore 0.x and support with such nice plugins. Can't wait to test them

  • I didn't mean that it wouldn't eventually have an exe export plugin, but that the focus has shifted away from desktop applications to be more web based. I think it should be the other way around, but that's just my personal opinion. I just hate that executables is now an afterthought, and now all of the plugins and examples that have been made by the community for Construct are effectively trash, seeing as 0.X won't be getting a whole lot of attention any more.

    Kind of disappointed when I read the article for the 2.0 release on the direction the Construct Team is going with the program, but it's still early in development, so we will wait and see what happens.

    Wow, we got a bit off topic :D Anyways...

  • Has that been confirmed? I haven't kept up on everything going on with it, but if that's true that's a program killer. I can see it in addition to exe's, but web-only? I'd hate to have to switch back to MMF2, because, well, MMF2's event system sucks, but web-only would make me go bye-bye. I'd gladly pay for it if it's an advanced continuation of the original Construct but I don't know about the web-based thing. The whole concept with the original is just too good to throw away and go into a different direction now.

    I didn't mean that it wouldn't eventually have an exe export plugin, but that the focus has shifted away from desktop applications to be more web based. I think it should be the other way around, but that's just my personal opinion. I just hate that executables is now an afterthought, and now all of the plugins and examples that have been made by the community for Construct are effectively trash, seeing as 0.X won't be getting a whole lot of attention any more.

    Kind of disappointed when I read the article for the 2.0 release on the direction the Construct Team is going with the program

    That just about sums up my feelings on it.

    It's all about the moolah!

    They should have included .exe and web export from the start, and charged a price for it, and other exporters would be extra, much like Unity uses (my time is spent between Unity and Eclipse/Java almost exclusively these days.)

    I still love Construct 0.x, and have no plans to abandon my main Construct project, so by the time I've finished all these projects, maybe Construct 2 will have caught up with Construct in ability, and a fully-featured .exe exporter will be available at a decent price.

    I've got more than enough to be getting on with for most of this year, lol.

    Oh yeah, back on topic;

    Sounds great Arsonide.

    If you need someone to do any testing, I'll be glad to help out.

    Looking forward to what you come up with.

    Krush.

  • Basically the plugin will work as the universe does, using "stratum". These can be whatever you like, and are effectively onion layers that represent various levels of abstraction of your game world. World->Zone->City->District->Block->House. In the case of Void Runner: Universe->Sector->Subsector->Star->Planet. The combobulator doesn't actually generate the terrain. Perlin can do that. However, it does play a part in an integral concept: persistence.

    To fully understand it, you have to first think about pseudorandom number generators. They are essentially storage devices of large amounts of data to the combobulator. Say you seed a PSRNG, and you get a string of numbers: 2,3,7,1. You will get that string of numbers every single time you use the same seed. However, the numbers can only be taken one at a time. If you take them in the same order, the results in gameplay terms will be the same, every time. So imagine each number in that string as a locker storing data, it's just a number, but with an infinite amount of them, you are literally storing data in the math itself. No storage devices required, which is important, as all known storage devices are finite. This isn't Finiscape. All you need to know is the seed and which number you are looking for! But which number you are looking for can be difficult sometimes, and that's where the combobulator comes in. It properly reseeds the RNG every time you want a number, and you give it a specific ID for what you want, and it will retrieve the same number every time you ask it for that data. To put it simply, it does all of this dirty work for you, keeping your infinite world persistent instead of completely random, assuming you know how to ask for what you want politely. This persistence is extremely important when dealing with something like infinite terrain that can't possibly be stored. Without it your world wouldn't make any sense. It sounds complicated, but it is actually a very simple, small block of code...just a loop at it's base level - however, over the development of Void Runner, I have optimized it's speed, especially with larger numbers, by exponential amounts.

    To summarize: Infiniscape will not give you terrain, but rather, a seed for the area you are representing on a theoretical world. If you use this seed in conjunction with perlin - you will get persistent terrain. That seed can also do things like spawn objects, NPCs, even generate entire timelines of events that happen in the game, if used in conjunction with UnixTime. Our weather patterns do this. Here's an example call to Infiniscape: Infiniscape.GetCityBlock(global('WorldSeed'), global('PlayerZoneX'), global('PlayerZoneY'), 1, 2)

    Looks complicated, but what this will do is give you a seed representing the block at position 1,2 in the city the player is in, and assuming the WorldSeed never changes, that city block will always be there thanks to the combobulator. An entire world from a number. I'll try to simplify the process as much as possible, but work is a bit hectic right now. It's coming.

  • I didn't understand it, but last 2 paragraphs helped me. It looks interesting and super useful.

  • Kind of hard for me to conceptualize, but it's sounds incredibly interesting. Can't wait to play with a new toy!

  • Any news on this Ars?

    Krush.

  • Any news on this Ars?

    Yes...my fianc?e was diagnosed with small cell neuroendocrine carcinoma. It's a rare cancer that presents itself in 3% of cancer patients, and differs from normal cancer in that instead of waiting for a tumor to fully develop before sending off more cells to other parts of the body, it can send these cells before the tumor is even developed. It can metastasize before it is even diagnosed, and kill a person in three months. It has an 18% survival rate, and a 44% recurrence rate. It has to be treated extremely aggressively to beat it.

    I have been spending every last minute of the last few weeks with her. I'm sorry...I will get to this in time.

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