Troverse Planet Collection — Generation and Attributes
Approaching the launch date of the Troverse Planet Collection, we’d like to share more information about the attributes and stats of the planets and how their combination makes each one 100% unique.
Before starting, make sure you’ve marked the date on your calendar. The first ship dives into the portal on:
📅 March 04 @ 10:00 AM PST 📌
The first phase is the Trove Auction that is available to the public, everyone can participate in this fair flat-priced auction method that we introduced earlier. Read more here:
Your Home Planet in the Metaverse
Once we started the project, we were thinking to position the planets as lands in the metaverse, similar to other land and real estate metaverse projects, but MUCH bigger (planetary big!) with more utilities and authorities. We were thinking of thousands of hundreds of planets! Like at least 200,000 planets.
As we progressed we started thinking it might be a good idea to make them scarce to increase their value. It could be also a wise decision in terms of the gameplay to encourage players to have more interactions, let them remember the planets they play on and makes the game universe more meaningful.
When the art team delivered their magic, we all loved it. Planets were artfully beautiful and also distinguishable. At that point, we decided to limit the planets to 10,000 and make a collection out of them with attributes and rarities.
Properties
Each planet has different properties (attributes) that make it unique. Properties are the individual pieces that come together to define the visuals and characteristics of a planet, along with a vast range of unique features for the gameplay.
We needed to follow two principles to design the properties and features of the planets; First, planets are the actual world that players will play on. Not only they should fit within the logic of the game, but they should also be fun and immersive to explore and be capable to deliver unique experiences.
Secondly, Troverse planets are going to be NFT collectibles and it is important that they look and feel different from each other from afar. Some should also look exotically rare and unique for collectors and NFT lovers.
We want players to remember each planet they have explored, to distinguish them with their looks, location, resources, weather system, life forms, hazards, and even what they encountered there as a story. We needed to combine many completely procedurally generated assets with handmade ones to direct our vision in a large galaxy. To achieve that, we’ve designed the properties to either fit into both or serve one of them directly. Here are the main categories:
Planet Types
Planets of Troverse are essentially distributed between 6 various types;
1) Barren
Barren planets have dry desert-like ecosystems with mostly rocky or sandy surfaces. From space, they usually look rocky with occasional large canyons. Barrens can be found mostly in the middle orbits of their host star and are the most common planet types in the Galaxy. However, they can be a source of various minerals and don’t usually impose the most life-threatening hazards.
2) Frozen
Frozen planets are the furthest ones from their stars and are the coldest ones. Vast amounts of their surface are covered in snow and ice and wildlife is scarce. Expect to experience intense fog and snowstorms making it difficult to navigate freely.
3) Scorched
Scorched planets are the closest planets to their stars with extremely high temperatures. These planets usually lack vibrant and dense floras and are covered in ashes and running lavas. You can feel the intense heat when viewing them from space.
Scorched and frozen planets are the extreme ends of the spectrum when it comes to temperature and weather systems. They pose extra dangers and challenges for explorers where various devices and tools might be needed to explore them.
4) Toxic
Toxic planets are usually the fanciest and most exotic planets looking from afar, but the deadliest ones that are infamous for extreme environmental hazards with hostile and mutated life forms, if any. Toxic planets can be found in the middle orbits of each star system.
5) Lush
Lush planets are lively planets covered with dense flora and often time can provide a suitable environment for standard life forms. You can find breathtaking sceneries with beautiful landscapes there. Lush planets are placed in the habitable zone of their stars.
6) Earth-like
Earth-like Planets are in essence a derivation of the lush planets but all variables for sustainable human life are met. These are the rarest planets of Troverse with properties similar to our own home planet Earth such as drinkable water and breathable air.
We have shown a small glimpse of each type. They are vastly different from each other and influence many factors in the gameplay. However, we tried to make sure that all planets are viable when it comes to the gameplay, if there are a lot of disadvantages there might be some rare finds for hazardous ones.
Here you can see the approximate number of planets for each type:
- Barren: 3100 planets
- Frozen: 2200 planets
- Scorched: 1900 planets
- Toxic: 1500 planets
- Lush: 900 planets
- Earth-like: 400 planets
Biome
Biomes define general environmental conditions, weather, hazards, floras and faunas but within the overall criteria forced by each planet type. From types of vegetation to minerals and resources are derived from the biome property. As an example, the Tropical biome is covered with dense green vegetation and you can find various plants of any size. It might be hard to find hard crystalline rocks but you will not face any shortage of giant leaves! As another example, a Barren Volcanic dune biome has a high temperature and is covered with sand and volcanic rocks. Some small dry-looking plants can be seen here and there but what you should be looking for is different types of volcanic rocks. Additionally, you have to be careful of small hostile life forms that are adapted to this warm weather.
You can expect to see more than 30 biomes ranging from Tropical rainforest to Radiated plains.
Formation
This property is generated by a combination of various noise functions that formulate the pattern of each planet's surface and how it elevates. Whether a planet has high mountain peaks, is covered with spiky hills, has very low and smooth altitude or is full of curvy rivers. Formations actually play an extremely important part when you play on the planet as they are responsible for every up and down on the surface.
We designed around 40 various formations ranging from the Standard Continental like the Earth to formations as weird as the Meteor Struck or Spiky Craters!
Atmosphere
The term “Atmosphere” refers to layers of gases surrounding each planet. From afar, it looks like a layer of aura around the planet. It also defines how the sky looks when you walk on the planet. Thanks to Unreal Engine, we can render a physically-accurate sky and the transmission and scattering of the light through the atmosphere of each planet, giving it a realistic look.
Some planets have thin atmospheres while some have thick layers. A small portion of Troverse planets have no atmosphere at all and you can see the sky in black like you are standing on the Moon! Shield and aurora atmospheres are the rarest ones.
Clouds
We utilized the physically-based volumetric cloud rendering system in Unreal Engine. Clouds are important for the look of each planet as they are spread within the atmosphere. Only half of the planets have a form of clouds.
Clouds and atmospheres are separate properties but play their roles hand in hand and in combination with biomes, they influence many weather conditions on a planet such as storms and rains. So they have an impact on the feeling of what you can experience while playing.
Liquid
The surface of many planets is covered with specific types of liquids. We know our home planet is covered with water which is the same for all Earth-like planets and most Lush ones. However, this is not the case for all planets!
For instance, Frozen planets are mostly covered with ice. Also, some don’t have any liquid, while many others are covered with dangerous fluids like lava or poisonous materials such as radioactive liquid or acid.
Moon
Moons are designed to give the planet even more unique looks. They can be seen while you are playing on the planets. Most moons are generic rocky ones but there are some rare sci-fi, structural and magical moons. A very few have also more than one moon, a double moon!
Ring
Rings are entities that are circled around a planet. You can find rings in three main categories: Gas rings, Structural rings, and Asteroid belts. In some rare cases, Gas rings and Asteroid belts are combined.
Rings and Moons impact the look of the sky and fill you with awe when you walk on the planet. These two properties might go a little bit over the top in rare planets for those who are interested in extreme rarities!
Stats
Star Systems — Location Matters in Troverse!
Planets of Troverse are distributed among 750 Star Systems and orbit around 750 Stars. Each system host between 8 to 24 planets. This gives each planet a specific fixed location in the Galaxy. It can be anywhere, in the center or on the edge of the spiral arm. It’s hard to say which location is better as it heavily depends on the gameplay and the dynamics of the game ecosystem.
Imagine a huge NFT treasure drops somewhere in the Galaxy and its approximate location reveals in different stages. Of course, players that can reach the zone earlier will have more time to hunt the treasure.
On the other hand, some owners may prefer to own more planets in the same Star System to increase their influence and power when the conquest takes the most priority.
The Galaxy of Troverse is a persistent connected network of Star Systems that players should traverse to reach the section they want or alternatively, use a few jump points (wormholes) available next to some systems to fast travel to another part of the Galaxy. However, planet owners have instant access to their planets through their headquarters.
There are also more stats that are derived from the properties with some randomization. These also affect the gameplay and experience of the players:
- Oxygen Level
- Average Temperature
- Flora Density
- Fauna Density
- Hostility Level
Generation
Troverse Planets are essentially huge voxel worlds that are generated with complex formulas and multiple noise functions to create surface patterns. This approach lets us incorporate various formulas to create the variation and also enables players to deform the surface in the run-time as part of the gameplay.
When the foundation is ready, it’s time to design and create the NFT collection. In 2D NFT projects, developers usually try to mix and match different parts of art pieces to generate a high volume of various NFTs. However, in 3D projects, it becomes more of a challenge as there will be extra steps of 3D rendering that should be handled properly.
In Troverse, we were facing even bigger challenges; Firstly, we cannot simply mix and match every possible cool-looking idea. As mentioned earlier, it is important to consider players’ experience and game logic while designing the planets. And it’s not something that we can postpone to the future, this is already happening! Secondly, planets are not simple models that can be mashed together in a render engine, they are actual game assets and are entirely built inside the game engine.
We needed to design a rule system and monitor its behaviour, so we created a system with Python called “Planet Generator” that reads a complex data table filled with properties, rules and exceptions. The code then generates a final data table of 10,000 generated planets with ALL properties and attributes that can be fed to the game engine.
Inside the game engine, the next step happens. A system called “Planet Builder” reads the data from the table and spawns and assigns different assets that represent each specific data to create a cohesive world. The world is built out of many different parts ranging from lights, post-process effects, fogs, clouds, rings and moons, to surface details of each planet, liquid surface, vegetation, weather system, resources, atmosphere, texture and material systems.
Finally, after generating and building all planets it’s time to actually render all 10,000 planets inside the game engine one by one! Here another piece of Python code comes into play. It opens an empty level, reads from the planet data table, asks our Planet Builder system to create the planet and adds all the necessary pieces to the level and the planet is ready to be filmed!
It’s time to capture the video through another standalone system. The output is arrays of PNGs. Through another plugin, we combine the output images and create a looped video. The NFT video is ready! To generate the final video, it takes between 2 to 3 minutes for each planet. And yes, we know, that’s a whole bunch of work to do! Shout out to our developers for their technical achievement.
We love making games, and the team enjoys overcoming challenges to achieve a much higher level of delivery in blockchain gaming. We believe in order to mainstream crypto games, one must deliver a game that is not only acceptable but competitive to mainstream games while utilizing the blockchain features to the fullest.
There are much more details to reveal and also to implement to make the planets ready to host you all later this year. We will share more information as we progress. Stay tuned!
Mark the launch date to not miss your chance on owning your planets;
📌March 04 @ 10:00 AM PST📌
Everyone can participate!
Join the Community
If you’re an NFT collector, an avid gamer, crypto enthusiast, space lover, crypto investor, or just a blockchain fan, you will love Troverse and we love to have you in the community! Join other Troversians on Discord and follow us on Twitter.
