ooooooh pretty! Nice work!

ooooooh pretty! Nice work!

EDIT:oops sorry, double post 😳

It is the original one. I just used a bit of trickery to fake a nice looking Earth. 😉

Its all based on height, the higher up you are the more craggy and mountainous the landscape is. Low down is still as smooth as it was before, with just the rollng hills.

So the normal height map is loaded, then this pattern is applied after.

The improvement in the view from afar is from the new colour settings which are tailored specifically for the heightmap, however they also look very good on the procedural worlds.

Now you will appear to find sandy beaches, grass plains, forests, dirt/dry/deserty lands, brown rock, grey rock and of course frozen land.

Whereas before, it was just grass, sand/dirt, rock and snow. So not only are there about twice as many colours but they are applied more frequently too at various points along the height.

Just call me SlartiBartfast.

And wait till you see the fjords!

Yes I like working with this planetary terrain system, it really is amazing.

With the right math you can literally get it to do so many things.

I also reckon the system could be coaxed into creating planet wide cities like coruscant, but a heightmap may be needed....

In fact, I know it could. I just have yet to find the right equation that creates city blocks instead of giant spires.

Just having large cities covering a flat plain would be good enough, with a star port nearby for good measure.

Is a planet wide one likely to be a GPU killer?

I don't think so, there are planet-wide mountain ranges which are far more detailed. While a city would have more ups and downs so to speak, the space in between those points would be flat, so theoretically there would be less faces.

At least thats how I think it would work.

Depends on how the starports are managed: does every building has its own LOD check, or does the starport get rendered as a whole?

Honestly I'm not too sure, I think its calculated as a whole. But thats one of the many sections of code I have yet to read through properly.

Although, saying that. The models are all created in the .lua files which would have lod assigned to each individual model, so I suppose I have no idea 🙂

But I was thinking of using the actual terrain engine to render the buildings using an equation to create square/rectangular blocks instead of say mountains or hills.

What do you think, is this just a silly idea?

Not at all. If it'll work well with textures etc. that could be a great way to generate really big procedural citys. Coruscant like 😀

Textures is the one thing it can't really have. It can have colours applied like a planet, but that would never be as good as a real texture.

You could give it a try though. I think it could make sense if they were completely white. However, aren't the colors depending on the height? That should cause some troubles if buildings were on a hill/mountain (if that would be possible at all...)

So it would really just make sense or be possible if the whole planet would be plane and completely covered with buildings, right?

The other problem with planet wide cities of course is that, since the game is set a little over 1000 years from now, there is no way mankind could have created it.

Now a Thargoid planet........

It would be the most efficient aproach, but you're getting yourself in two hells of trouble here: first, "Fractal" building generation is kind of a toughy. No problem to just create blocks, but the real advantage of fractals is that the details increases when you zoom in. For buildings, you of course can't calculate with fractals (they don't result in clearly defined geometric objects, which is exactly why they are so great for terrain), but you still have to use the same concept of increasing complexity, which can be really hard to do and get right for buildings. You'll have to write up a whole new library in any case.

The other trouble is textures... you'll need a procedural texture generator to go with that, which means another library to write up. Procedural buildings are harder to do than procedural terrain, really...

A lot easier would of course be to keep the current "mix buildings together"-aproach, with a distance limit that places and removes individual buildings, and maybe low poly models of every building to increase the viewing distance without forcing the GPU to its knees...

I gotta be honest and say that city buildings do nothing for me. I got city options at the lowest. I think to see little houses and condos in planets it's an atmosphere killer. Specially in planets that should look hostile and unwelcoming to humans. I suggest the developers to concentrate in one single building with station included. but everything on a single structure. You can place all buildings on a large flat concrete trapezoid or rectangle base including the landing structure domes, etc. I would also like to see more variations in the geometry of the structures like pyramids, obelisks and domes etc. Here's an example:

Building density should probably vary, presumably getting less dense the further from the core you travel.

It would also be a nice touch to have the building types vary according to the type of base they are situated near.

I think that none of the surrounding city buildings should be anywhere near as big as the space port itself.

Much like current airports they should dwarf nearby facilities and some additional variation here would be nice too. A mixture of underground docking and "helipad" type bays, maybe elevated platforms to land on too.

I didn't mean to propose way back in the "Case Against Earth" thread that the entire planet should be covered in one giant city, but 1000 years from now Earth could be quite built up. Perhaps overbuilt. There should still be mountains and oceans and farmland to supply all that animal meat and fine Earth liquor!

Exactly! The amount of city area should be tied to the planet's population. There should still be small frontier outposts with no city around them at all, but in a spaceport in a major Earth city there should be some sort of city background.

If mars can be terraformed into a sustainable planet, I'm sure we could hack together a big enough robot construction crew to build up a planet-wide insfrastucture. Hell, they could build an entire planet.

Would it be possible to tweak the code to not place buildings on terrain above a certain steepness or angle?

If so you could tell it plonk city blocks over very large areas but not on the sides of mountains. A similar technique can be used in some landscape generators such as the Vue products when placing flora.

I've been tweaking some more planet types, nothing much interesting, just trying to improve their looks some more and add more detail:

Some dead world pics:

[attachment=510:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-02-03 20-47-44-01.jpg]

[attachment=511:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-02-03 20-33-14-69.jpg]

Ice world with more cliffs and canyons:

[attachment=512:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-02-03 19-02-52-78.jpg]

Awesome job! I hope you'll add plenty of deep canyons and moutainranges with plains and hilly areas in between. Those dead worlds look very real and I can't wait to visit the canyons on that snowplanet 😎 .

Thanks 🙂 Your right Gudadantza, it does look more like IO.. Bear in mind though that the pic was taken around an orange star, so normally they should be more reddish-brown like mars. But it could probably do with a touch of bleach 😉

I'm going to have another go at IO, I have found a better technique for adding the 'lava' or 'sulphur' pools that you now see in-game, and for forcing a planet to use multiple colour gradients, which looks nice on lumpy terrain.

The only problem with it is it takes a long time to get the colour values just right this way, as there are various overlapping colours, its easy to have them clash.

Well they won't beat the canyons that you found on that terraformed world, but they should generally have a lot of nice cliffs, which will sometimes look like a canyon 😉 :

[attachment=513:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-02-03 23-36-31-38.jpg]

[attachment=514:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-02-03 23-36-07-92.jpg]

Kinghaggis, you will like this.. 😉

A canyon function that works:

[attachment=515:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-02-04 00-15-52-76.jpg]

Amazing-looking planets! I will pull this work in shortly

Thanks Tom, I'm not quite finished yet though as I'd like to add these to a few different worlds if you don't mind waiting a little longer.. I'd say I'm about half-way through all the planet types.

Check this out:

[attachment=516:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-02-04 01-57-06-78.jpg]

😉