Void Runner - Bringing Construct to its knees...

I've had this little pet project for a long time. It started out a long time ago as a text based console program. It generates an entire universe from a number. The only thing that is stored is the number, everything else is generated on the fly. Without the constraints of RAM or hard drive space, the universe is effectively infinite. There isn't too much to do yet, but I wanted to show a little demonstration of its current state to show off the capabilities of Construct. I am honestly quite impressed that it hasn't died yet under this kind of strain.

I have to release this in EXE form, not CAP, as I use special custom plugins. All the information you need to explore the universe is in the readme file included in the zip.

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fi ... 3797781698

EDIT: Blegh, I forgot to add to the readme one of the keys. On a planetary surface, if you hold the right mouse button, your view will zoom out to map mode to see my perlin noise at work a bit better.

This is just... genius!

What a concept! The principle is neat, and the fact that you can have an infinitely sized game world that takes up almost no space kind of makes my head hurt

I can't wait to see what sort of game you make out of this system.

Bravo to you, good sir!

Absolutely fantastic!.Keep it up.

Wow! It runs fine on my machine. This is an interesting concept and I think it has a lot of potential. I can't wait to see more.

Edit:

My God! I just realized you can land on the planets

Woah, that's an epic idea for a game...

well i certainly realise where the VOID in the title comes from

cool, but try not to let it fall into the trope of being "So randomly generated its boring"

Well, my artist is a fan of realism, and I originally had stars everywhere, so we tuned it back a bit. Just keep in mind that that's a number somewhere in the code that I can tweak in about six seconds, but you probably will be satisfied with this star density once the game comes out. Most of our game is actually going to occur within your ship as it is flying through space. Also, those empty sectors are going to be filled with anomalies.

The seed of the universe you are all playing in is 1337. If I change that to 1338, you will be playing in a totally different universe. When the game is released, the seed will change at random behind the scenes every time you start a new game.

Amazing. I had this in mind too, but I wasn't sure it could be done.

Congrats!

btw what do your custom plugins do?

What, no custom icon for the .exe?

(I kid, I kid )

Very cool! The bump mapping on the lava planets in particular looks great.

There is actually no bumpmapping yet, but there will be, and the direction and strength of the lighting will be dependent on orbital position.

My custom plugin handles the generation of the universe, and I link Construct to it using a series of expressions.

Oh.

Well... it's a very nice texture, then.

Is this project inspired by "Elite" in any way?

In my opinion, now you should concentrate on how to detail, how to improve the graphical aspect (maybe perlin noise is not that "eye candy", for instance some rock sprites randomly set up on the planets may look better), how to enable the player to interact with planets, etc...

I don't think you should set up a story mode, it has to be an endless exploration. Do you know the web game "Alphabounce" ? Your work made me think about it.

Great work !

What you are looking at is simply the ground texture layer. There will be an object detail layer on top of it filled with rocks and trees and stuff. I was trying to figure out a way to do that layer without resorting to a tilemap, array, or perlin noise, and I think I've come up with something. I'm off work today and that is actually what is next on the list.

The reason I avoided those three things was because they would contribute to that "randomly generated look" mentioned earlier in the thread.

You are a man after my own heart Arsonide. I love this kind of stuff.

Very interested to see how this turns out. Keep up the good work.

There will be an object detail layer on top of it filled with rocks and trees and stuff. I was trying to figure out a way to do that layer without resorting to a tilemap, array, or perlin noise

have a grid, with 3 perlin noise layers in it. Say they're 0-100. You'll have a grid size in x,y and a density threshold for the planet.

For each point in the grid:

if the value in the density noise layer is bigger than the planet threshold, the object stays.

the object then gets displaced by the percentage of the grid size indicated by the other two noise layers.

tada! since this also relies on perlin, you may do perlin tricks with it (it's repeatable)