Ah, the old problem of knowing which way a river flows without knowing where it begins or ends… One of the holy grails of procedural generation 
This one would at least be technically possible, if they make the water surface another procedural layer. Any kind of water surface animation is essentially already a procedural system.
I did this once by simulating rain at random spots (random rays pointing straight down) and added some erosion to get it to look natural. It was slow (hours) for my small scene. Doing it this way randomly across the planet would be impractical. However they could add smaller streams, waterfalls and other water features as base building elements, or maybe an option on the terrain manipulator. You could place a starting point and they could generate water geometry based on the ground in a fixed radius. Unless they forced a mostly fixed geometry they would have to get clever to pack this into the save file, but a little bit of water movement/sound around the base would be nice.
Oh, I did similar things. That’s not the point. In this case you have all the data required in memory, and “just” have to simulate a physical process. In a system like NMS, the usual case would be that you encounter a river, but you don’t know where it originates nor where it’s going. You’d have to generate the entire river first, which you can’t do.
That would be possible, yes.
Should this be an entirely separate update — Call it “The Basin”!
Such a lovely update would fit beautifully with “The Abyss” v1.7.
Or “The Oasis” has a nice ring to it - Most fitting is “The Basin”.
are treated as a whole procedural system
a natural free-flowing part of the terrain
spreads across all surfaces freely
are based on random topographical markings
- which react under a procedural system
- which result impressions in the terrain
- which volumize and flow with gravity
- if more gravity, then faster flow
- faster flow = more mist + more sound
- longer the waterfall, greater the intensity
- especially intense at bottom of waterfall
coding: perhaps a combo of terrain generation and cave generation
direction of water flow is based on
Oncoming flow
EXAMPLE:
IF a flat surface is encountered
figure this out, and you’ve automatically figured out lava flow
slow it down & thicken it to a glowing superheated substance
oceans, lakes and ponds do exist.…
but without flow, so suggestion:
direction of water flow is based on
that should take care of surface flow and under flow
all types of flows
BONUS #1 — whirlpools
tip: use the same system of whirlpools for tornadoes
BONUS #2 —natural springs
BONUS #3 — caves
BONUS #4 — geysers
needs new glasses
Oops, my bad“It was then that Mr Oblivious found himself in a cave behind the waterfall”
“Caught in a pixie-swirl w/ pots o’ gold at the end of an anomalous rainbow”
Having a liquid flow dynamic for the game would be great. This would be key for making the worlds look more realistic. (It may wait for the PS5 if we ever see it.)
My further thoughts were: if they could to it for normal old dihydrogen oxide, shouldn’t this also work for lava flows or toxic goo?
Oh, for the umpteenth time: This is an unsolved problem we’re talking about. Every solution you’ll find for the problem requires knowledge of the terrain in advance. NMS doesn’t have that.
Even letting the stream carve out a canion isn’t a feasible solution, because there might not be any terrain to carve out. Let’s say you have a ditch. So that fills with water. Fine, no problem there, all localised, you get a small lake (expensive in CPU cycles, though). Where does the water leave the ditch to flow onwards? At the lowest point of the ditches rim, of course. Pretty simple.
Now answer me this: How are you going to know where the water will flow through if a) you don’t know that there’s a ditch in its path, and b) where the lowest point of its rim is? That’s right, you can’t. Just simply C.A.N.T.
So what can you do? Well, you let the course of the river be determined by a mathematical function instead, as everything else. Now you always know where the river is flowing through, right?
But oh wey, now there’s a ditch in its path, and the ditches lowest point happens to be not where the river is determined to flow. Great. Now you have a magic water wall.
What could we do about that? Well, we might locally edit the terrain to form a river board. Now we’re having an additional expensive layer of post-generation that needs to analyse the terrain first, so good bye PS4 and Xbox, but at least it works.
That is, until there is a giant canyon intersecting the stream perpendicularly instead of just a ditch. So now the water falls into the canyon in a majestic waterfall, flows right across the canyon, and burries itself a completely illogical cave at the other end instead of following the canyon, which would have been natural. Ok, fine, I guess we can live with weird things like that. Except, now I scale the canyon wall on the side where the river flows underneath and walk a ways. After a while, the game doesn’t know anymore that there is a canyon back there. So… How on earth does it know that the stream runs underneath the surface, and not on the surface? After all, if the canyon wasn’t intersecting the flow, the river would just have continued flowing naturally across the surface. So since we now don’t know that there is a canyon, that’s obviously how things should be. And we get an entire river magically popping into existance on the surface. Until you walk back to the canyon, when it just as magically disappears again because it realises that it should run at the level of the canyon floor. Big whoops.
So let’s not do waterfalls, because any waterfall will inevitably break the flow of your procedurally generated river, because its flow must be generated without knowledge of the terrain its flowing through. You’re left with spontaneously generating in some kind of natural aqueduct to carry the water over the canyon, or generating some weird basin walls crossing the canyon so part of it can fill up and become a rather weird lake. In any case, we now officially banned waterfalls, because there was simply no other joice, so we achieved nothing, because people will keep asking why there’s no waterfalls.
I’m not claiming the problem is unsolvable, mind you. But as of right now , again, it is unsolved, and if a solution exists, it has to be so out of the box and bat-shit bonkers that nobody thought of it yet.
With BEYOND, I have encountered a couple of planets with long narrow lakes that resemble rivers. Of course, they do not flow. Some planets also have red skies which cause the water to resemble lava. I have also found that you can remove terrain and expand these “rivers” to a certain extent. I imagine this is the closest to flowing lava rivers we will ever get.
Concerning lava, it would of course be trivial to just change the properties of the water on a planet to turn it into lava. I’m not sure what changes would have to be made to the water physics to make it less viscuous so you can barely swim in it, but in a pinch you could just give it insane heat damage and near-zero visibility, plus not generate any flora or fauna, so there’s no motivation to go swimming it anyways, at which point nobody will complain about it behaving the same as water when you go for a swim.
The most effort would likely be spent on a shader that makes it look like lava. Oh, and the whole thing would probably require emmissivity, but all of that sounds rather simple. In fact, I would very much welcome more specificity and variety in the actual nature of the liquid (because at some points it’s pretty obvious it ain’t water, judging by the temperature). Would also make the whole thing more emersive, and there’s not many technical challenges here.
I don’t expect flowing liquids to be in the cards ever, though, for the reasons explained above.
Likely, you would experience extreme heat damage just going near it. So no one would ever go in it…well, I am sure someone would.
Of course, then the fauna would need to burst into flames if they get too close. 
If not, then… How do things render if there’s no knowledge of what to render?
How is it that when we return to a destination - it continues to look the same?
So it would seem that…
Continuing from my prior writing…
First, let’s establish this:
In No Man’s Sky…
So terrain generation is based on
Is this not “knowledge of the terrain in advance”?
Topographical Markings are
So, clarification…
Example:
- IF terrain scenario, THEN basin scenario
- IF cave scenario, THEN basin scenario
Terrain Variable:
- IF mountain scenario, THEN basin scenario
- IF canyon scenario, THEN basin scenario
a collection of variables, based on a collection of principles
Do we traverse planet-wide replicas, or near replicas, or based on principles?
How do all aspects of our terrain seem to match up? …seamlessly, is if magic,
…would be how a water system would match up, 
including rules on flow.
Just one more thing: Add a setting to turn off/on ‘The Basin’ layer. Thanks!
Here’s hoping our diligent efforts are enough to inspire Hello Games. 
Seriously? That’s the whole point of procedural generation. That’s the entire crux of the technology. That you can persistently generate any point in the data, without having any of the rest of the data. You don’t have to know an entire infinite line to know whether it intersects with an object or not. That’s the basic concept at work here.
So to address this directly:
No. It only has knowledge of the terrain currently in memory, most of which you are seeing on screen (at least if you could look in all directions at once).
No. It renders all it knows in your line of sight.
I don’t even know what you mean by that…
Again, wrong. The terrain is the result of mathemathical functions. The stuff distributed over the terrain, that’s based on templates.
Hello fellow Travellers!
I have read a lot of your ideas and some of them i really like. But with ships there should be no drastic Customization so hunting stays relevant
Also I’d Like to see word opportunitie s to Learn Languages and also more Ways to invest money. I am sitting on 4,2 Billion Units and there is nothing to get.
Traveller101
Honestly, I thought about that, and I think it could work as a late-game mechanic. Not in the typical vein of shipbuilding games like space engineers or Empyrion. Instead, have an actual supply chain leading up to it.
Finding crashed ships gives you some form of tech-points which you can “research” in a terminal to get ship parts, similar to how we unlock other tech right now.
Actually crafting ship parts requires all of the crafted materials, and possibly some new gizmos. No ferrite or chromatic metal or whatever. The basic resources are Herox, Aronium and the likes, and you need them in significant amount.
But you can’t just put ship parts together in your backyard. No siree, you need a factory. And that factory will only be capable to build the most common components and will always produce C-class ships. To get something better, you need to expand it with all kinds of specialist facilities.
I could see a system like that working.
Hello fellow Traveller!
Very nice, I like that idea. There are certain Frigates labeled as ‘Factory Units’ so I could see them getting in use for such a thing!
If also it would be such a grind, for blueprints and Materials, you could truly have YOUR special and one of a kind star ship. But if such a feature is in the heads, still my only compromise would be if it could be done to a maximum of one ship. I still prefer the farming aspect of unique ship designs and it is hard to get me off that hook honestly, even if your points are good.
Traveller101
Oh, I would never advocate substituting the hunt with something else. Of course everybody should still be free to look around for ships. I think an approach as outlined above would provide an alternative for those who wanted without making just looking for cool ships pointless. It would even be conceivable to track a ship discovery list, and you’d only be able to build hull combos you’ve scanned. And then only if you have researched all the parts. Though I guess that might limit the creative freedom of the builder proponents a bit too much…
Still, I wouldn’t mind having the capability of building that really cool ship I saw in a higher class and potentially with a couple of extra slots. Because let’s face it, if you ever encounter the coolest ship you’ve ever seen in a dirt-poor system, you’re kinda screwed. The chances of ever finding an A or S version of the model are outright negligible…
Having something for my billions of units was something on an earlier wishlist I posted.
Beside needing a villain, NMS also suffers from not having a well developed late game. I like the idea of the world of glass to explore or simulations of the great wars for late game activities.
But I think the most important thing would be to give billionaire players something to purchase (and therefore something to do for late game.) Ideas like infrastructure building for empires or corporations , terraforming planets or purchasing/ customizing space stations come to mind.
I’d like to see ‘age’, as in wear & tear affect long held equipment.
Something like:
Once you reach ‘X’ number of hours of gameplay, you begin to get gradual wear & tear on your long-term Starships & Capital Ships & Frigates.
You get prompted to either source a replacement, repair the worn components or maybe just drop it off to a space station for a once off (expensive) full overhaul to bring it back up to new.
This would help burn those extra Ʉ we pile up as we become more successful and also give us another reason to acquire wealth as we travel.
S class ships would last better than C class but all would need some maintenance from time to time.
A nice touch would be to actually ‘see’ the age on our ships, with paint going dull & scuffed.
In the same way fighters are kind of rough looking, it would be nice if all ships had age/use counters that progressively altered the skin as they got old so they looked more ‘used’.
(This would need to be on a ship by ship basis, as it wouldn’t make sense for a rarely used ship to deteriorate the same as your daily use ship).
Routinely maintaining your ship via a ‘service’ at a terminal someplace (like a minor settlement/workshop) would slow this process down.
An another thing that could be implemented is cheaply ‘patching’ a ship, say at a minor settlement/workshop, might get you flying again but with miss-matched colourings. Over time, a continuously patched and unserviced ship, (even an S class), would look terrible and keep breaking down every couple of hours.
For those not keen on the idea, they would keep their ships serviced and periodically overhauled to keep them lovely.
While others who want a bit more adventure might let their ship get a bit rough and deal with the consequences when it malfunctions on a lonely world and needs field repairs… or its shielding system looses module boost halfway through a dogfight and they have to make a hasty retreat.
