Terrain following radar for night flying

There's been a lot of talk about nightvision enhancements, I would suggest terrain following radar would be as/more useful.

The suit HUD could be augmented with a lidar device that does this that can be equipped in one of the slots, and a block for the ship/vehicle with longer range, maybe? Boosted by antenna, similar to the ore detector?

LiDAR is basically a dot projection so it would be something within the rendering possibilities of the game, but it would not be resolution independent enough to render just the points, especially when the voxels on some planets look more like coarse fur than rock. If you render the LiDAR point cloud, it would be hard to really tell what it's seeing, but if you render the vertexes (lines between the points) it's the same thing as what the OP asked.

I would prefer something closer to "nightvision" or contour line grids (eg sea level is blue, and mountain tops are white) and "warm/cool" objects stick out against the ambient temperture of the planet, but this is more of a "nice to have" not a "this is how it needs to be."

Like I can't find a good reference image of what I'm thinking of that wasn't actually drawn by hand.

I believe you’re referring to an AR topographic overlay display providing fluorescent terrain contour lines within a certain range.

I don’t know what sensor technology is used to achieve this. I would have assumed LiDAR data and then conversion to the topographic output…

https://lidarvisor.com/lidar-topography/

Yeah, LiDAR just generates point clouds. There's multiple kinds of data you can do with it, so for the purposes of this discussion let's just assume topographic contour lines that just highlight the vertices every 10m at close range or 100m when more than 2km straight up. Just you can't just do "wireframe" contour lines in a 3D game engine since it still requires there to be surfaces or you just see lines through lines. That's why in theory this is easy to generate, just turn off all the textures outside the ship and highlight the vertices with thick illuminated lines that correlate with 10m, 20m, 30m, etc. Otherwise you're rendering the world geometry twice.

From a game development standpoint, this could be accomplished with terrain shading/shaders (don’t know enough about performance considerations though). I wouldn’t use the terrain wireframe as the starting point.

https://www.alanzucconi.com/2022/04/19/topographical-maps/

Keep in mind that the underlying voxel framework should already have some level of wireframe data inside the game engine, you wouldn't need to simulate actual radar/lidar inside the physics engine. Usually you're creating some sort of wireframe model of each object and then painting the surface with the texture information (PBR materials). Pulling that wireframe data back out and drawing it as a nighttime terrain mesh overlay shouldn't be very engine intensive since it's using already existing data.

Nightvision could be a helmet feature, but keep in mind that nightvision would be just as blind in clouds, storms, and similar and if done correctly would be blinding under certain flash/light conditions where the light level changes quickly.

Yes, however, if you want a topographical map, it does not have the "resolution" of the underlying geometry. Otherwise you're just drawing the same geometry and in order for the game to not have to constantly load/unload textures (which is the most expensive part of doing anything with the GPU), basically you want to use the lower-resolution you see from a distance, rather than the high resolution you see when you get close, and thus there is a performance impact to keep flipping topo on-off or nightvision on-off since you have to maintain this second render state to avoid having the game hold for a few seconds every time you switch it. Particularly with GPU cards with less performance. This is why games typically resort to inaccurate tricks (eg a mirror is just drawing the pixels with the Z axis flipped or draw order from the player's POV.) It's usually far more performance draining to have particle effects, and one way a player might try to negate performance penalties is to ONLY use the the topographical mode in the ship, and only use a nightvision mode when not building.

Like, the idea itself is fine, but if you think about the performance costs to maintain another shader/texture set at the minimum then this stops being an option, or the ONLY option for low-performance devices. Doing it, is pretty straight forward render-wise, and if you want to go for the cheapest way to do it, by stripping the players view of a bunch of image data, you have to consider what is "inside the 3D view". The game already seems to have issues with losing shaders.

it's an interesting analysis, I'm not sure you'd have to load and unload constantly, it would be more of a camera-relative voxel query that would pull a simplified wireframe.

I was flying at night in a storm last night and was like, 'gee it would be nice if I could get a wireframe outline of the map of the earth right now.'

It's a good thing our current aircraft have this figured out and don't have to fly at night relying on headlights like our FTL spacefaring, magic backpack wearing future space buddies do.

That's the entire difference between a spotlight light source (i.e. headlights) and something like terrain following radar. Much farther range. Plus, from a game engine perspective, this data probably already exists essentially as a wireframe of the voxels prior to painting PBR materials on it. Wouldn't seem too difficult to draw (let's say faint green) contour lines based on that which would stand out in the dark and provide some added details. Tie it to a block you'd need to research/add, even better.

thinking recalculate all the ground, even it is a 3dline should be too heavy for this feature and could cause a gap between real fly and showing radar grid. if you have in rapid fly mode, it should be fatal. I propose if it is done anyway, to condidere just in the screen show for this feature the horizon line and the draw line of relief front of ship, a plain color zone for ground, and nothing or blue for sky. less ticks'ovore..

I think it would be neat if you could also pipe this terrain following radar output to an LCD screen with the horizon and other data as a control screen. I've seen many ship designs that have the flight seat far inside the ship, and a screen that shows the wireframe of the terrain that you could fly by would be cool. Assuming we don't have camera that can pipe their output directly to an LCD display, that would be cooler :).

Yeah, a simplified version of that mode (from the youtube clip I found) seems pretty reasonable. Space is rarely all dark or all well lit, so it could be something that changes brightness depending on ambient light in the areas covered.

Lights need some serious rework, it makes no sense that after a certain distance they become completely useless as if they don't even exist, heck I can light up things as far as hundred meters with a portable LED light, I suppose the floodlight mounted on a spaceship should be a tad more powerful than that...

it would be nice if the engine could handle the inverse square law for lights vs. the current' this light has this radius' but that's true for all game engines pretty much. Longer range, definitely.

Having terrain following radar is for more than darkness, it should be anle to provide guidance in fog, clouds, sandstorms, etc (with varying efficiency). I know the devs spend a lot of time and effort making conditions that make it difficult to see/fly for 'game environment' to increase the challenge, but it's a fine balance given that this is something we have now, it should at least be as effective in the space future, if not better.

I think a lot of battles in 3rd person view would benefit from that, especially when you start adding scripting to those LCDs, as well. (edit- and just to add, an LCD/PiP...and/or a full screen filter... for those things)