COMMUNITY - FORUMS - NEW PLAYER QUESTIONS
Will there be Tides ?

Will there be rise and fall of sea levels caused by the combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the Moon and the Sun, and the rotation of the planet ?

In other words, will we feel Tide effects ?

So, places like "Mont-Saint-Michel" in France could exist.


Eolwyn Lunicorne

10/7/2018 9:25:06 AM #1

I would think so. Check this page and do a 'Ctrl-F' for 'tide': To'resk

10/7/2018 10:27:54 AM #2

I paraphrased this from.. Chronicles of Elyria | World Generation | 5.16.18 video around 24:00. Just happened to be listening to it on the background and thought of this topic.

"Are natural disasters going to be totally random or will they follow geographic and meteorological patterns?"

A: They do. Unnatural disasters are more random. We will probably not have in domain and settlement selection anything in the user experience or UI that says this settlement is prone to earthquakes. However, if you are along the subduction zone, along a mountain line or ridge you are likely to encounter those more. If you are on the plains or desert you are more likely to encounter tornadoes or those kind of things. If you're on a coastline, you're more prone to having hurricanes and tsunamis and things like that."

Also, in the same video around 16:00 they discussed more about sea level, flooding, how water systems are handled.

So what I got is that tsunamis they mentioned as existing, but they also said flooding is very difficult to model as a fluid and they can't do fluid dynamics for the entire ocean and floods. So as far as tides go, I'm not sure how it'd be super different. Little conflicting it sounds, and I'm thinking maybe tsunamis were an example? But, from what is said back then in this QA I'd think probably not since "sea level" isn't a major thing they're focusing on as far as dynamics go. Not sure if this information has changed at all since then, or if they're doing something specific to create that tide effect

If I got the info wrong someone let me know! Cheers


10/7/2018 10:42:03 AM #3

Aye. It will not be easy or even feasible to effectively make the sea levels rise and fall. There may be creative ways to simulate the effect of tides in specific biomes though.

10/7/2018 11:31:25 AM #4

For a more concrete answer, I found this from Snipehunter in the discord:

Snipehunter 03/29/2018 @Lady Grace We are probably not going to simulate tides. on our timescale it's a bit unmanageable.


10/7/2018 11:38:16 AM #5

Posted By Saebelorn at 04:31 AM - Sun Oct 07 2018

For a more concrete answer, I found this from Snipehunter in the discord:

Snipehunter 03/29/2018 @Lady Grace We are probably not going to simulate tides. on our timescale it's a bit unmanageable.

That was a lot quicker, easier and more factual than my answer. Thanks for the input :)


10/8/2018 10:05:49 PM #6

Sad to hear that.

As Tides are predictables, I don't see where lies the difficulty in varying the height of water.

It's harder to simulate flooding over an existing vegetation and destroying buildings, than having a piece of swamp land without vegetation (because of salty water) getting water on soil (like rain) then raising the level of water.

Of course I'm talking about simulating Tides, not calculating gravity with Einstein relativity formula.


Eolwyn Lunicorne

10/9/2018 12:47:53 AM #7

Posted By Saebelorn at 04:31 AM - Sun Oct 07 2018

For a more concrete answer, I found this from Snipehunter in the discord:

Snipehunter 03/29/2018 @Lady Grace We are probably not going to simulate tides. on our timescale it's a bit unmanageable.

But then how will we dig clams?


Count of Frostale, in the Duchy of Fioralba, in the Kingdom of Ashland, by the Grace of Haven. The above opinions are mine alone and do not reflect those of my Kingdom or Duchy.

https://chroniclesofelyria.com/forum/topic/17117/naw-the-duchy-of-fioralba https://chroniclesofelyria.com/forum/topic/14124/naw-kingdom-of-ashland https://chroniclesofelyria.com/forum/topic/30605/of-contracts-and-commerce-a-tldnr-post https://chroniclesofelyria.com/forum/topic/31835/on-taxes-rents-and-ancestral-lands

10/9/2018 12:49:17 AM #8

An interesting and intriguing question for sure.

TL:DR: Tides should be part of the local weather system, not a global concern/simulation.

It's late in the night and I don't think I'll be able to recall and translate some thoughts on that particular topic from long ago. But I can try, maybe someone will make sense of the following musings.

Tides

Tides are part of the lore indeed, if only for the To'resk tribe's ways of life, but also during the "Longest Night" event (every december) which features a big tide event lasting an elyrian year (one week).

Regular tides on the other end... you mentionned the Mont St Michel: a site where its tides are reputed to be as fast as an horse's gallop.

Except that in Elyria, there are 86 minutes between dawn and dusk (and 46 mins for the night to last), both lasting only 16 minutes. Which means, in some elyrian places, high and low tides would feel quite supersonic if realistically simulated. ;)

Hopefully, flooding should be a thing, so devs should have secured a way to make/envision the mechanics in the game engine. Or else, they wouldn't "carelessly" mention it in design journals.

Note that the Oceanus server will have map selections leaning more towards the "archipel" landmasses compared to other servers: accomodating both heightened player knowledge of such environments and lesser population/domain pledges. So, tides could be even more game-breaking there if done wrong.

By the way, "ocean travel" technology would not have been discovered by 817 (elyrian date of launch), so "tides" could be part of the new mechanics developed along that particular stretch goal/ingame technology/out-of-game development later in the 10 years of shell life announced for the game.

Wave patterns

Starting with a memorable experience: I don't think a game like "Asssassin's Creed Black Flag" has tides, but I felt it does. Simply because wave heights would locally change, enhancing the gameplay... especially battling during a storm (made good memories).

That's the kind of "(si/e)mulated" tides that I would like to see in CoE: changes in the local wave pattern rather than global sea level.

By that I mean that animated waves could theorically go for instance +/- 10m around THE immovable reference sea level, but the game would use a maximum of +/- 3m for tide "effects", with the possible addition of +/- 5m for troubled waters (all in all still below the theorical limit to avoid fringe limit bugs).

A character or floating object would transition to underwater behavior on the "top" of the wave, rather than on the sea level... and yeah we could see some flying fishes and PCs as potential bugs. Too much rum I say!

Locality

Versimilitude is always a matter of how to bend the system in games, or else how would we envision high montane lakes in CoE if there was a unique sea level for the whole seamless world.

In a physics engine, we could have your character drown in a floating cube with intangible borders... or have a raging tsunami lashing as its cell limits.

Now plunge/bury that particular micro-region inside a big lake and you have the illusion that the entire lake is furiously aiming at capsizing your ship. While some character a mile away wouldn't feel a thing.

So I used the "wave" term, but it could be quite misnomming in our case, as this system can have a lot of variety in the range of its effects: from flat slow rises to dangerous whirpools... while maintening the illusion of different/gradual sea levels at different hours... and micro-regions.

Weather actually

Just like with particules and line of sights, transitions are important for believability (not to break the illusion or immersion): neighboring micro-regions would carry the weather from one to another.

Acting waves, raging snow, muddy puddles... all the same: weather system. Treating them differently is like forgetting that artificial intelligences are blind.

Truly a matter of perception, and maybe difficult to envision for a species that supposedly rely on visual cues as 80% of their natural/idle perception. But that's actually the mainr eason we are so easily fooled no matter what we think... after all, 3D rendering on a flat screen is just tricky 2D (without even VR to fool depth perception even more) and it works really well.

Anyway, those weather events are transcient and local: "suddenly it poured and you got drenched in seconds, trying to find the nearest shelter" is no different than "the storm wind reinforced and the waves built up by the minutes as you struggle against the clashing currents".

To me, in a nutshell, I would treat tidal waves as just another weather pattern to propagate/simulate.

Canals

The "local pattern" system would also work to make canals a reality, since they don't have waves per se: sure if your otterbears are zealous, you could imagine surfing behind a barge, but that is not a natural tide, just a wake, an ever closer effect. There would be no shame in this one being entirely cosmetic.

Remember that "just" 16m in real life, is huge when it comes to canals, even backed with modern technology. Humanity has used canal locks since antiquity, but they only became efficient quite recently in comparison.

Hence "big" differences in altitude between high and low point could exist, depending on where the reference (not sea) water level is set for the locale elyrian region... or how small a microweather region would need to be in order to set/box around that particular section of a body/stream of water.

A seamless world, an infinite scrolling page or a reponsive loading screen are good examples of well-prepared (smart) illusions of continuity.

Flooding

As for floodings, again it is the same thing as avalanches, storms, tornadoes or even earthquakes: since they would be timely exceptional (to say the least, but I mean on many wording levels),

Hamster power should be harnessed beforehand to ease computing server-side, since you don't want to tip clients until it is dooming late (insert evil laugh of your choosing).

Even in a fully destructible world (which Elyria isn't), there would be plenty props/structures/elements that won't change in the next few minutes to an hour... so pre-calc models can and would ease the future real-time.

As a passing note, it rises the question of a full automatic environment, or a managed world (think Westworld) where the devs (live team actually) still have a say on major impactful events... by being able to see/check post-simulations.

Back in the day, before pre-alpha, there were already technical preview videos of weather (snow and rain) drastically changing the scenery of the prologue (Titan's steppe).

Looking forward to

Despite SbS (Soulbond Studios) being back at square one not having found a good financial partnership, i'm not too pessimistic about the possibility of getting mesmerized by waves/tides somewhen in the future CoE.


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