Very nice Nev 😎 😎

Any plans for your next step as in different types of planets, denser atmospheres, oceans, pants/animals, cities?.

Stayed above 100fps the whole time if I am right there, and it was generally smooth the whole way through the vid. Nice stuff Nevil!

Lovely Nevil and great soundtrack by Eric too! :girlcrazy:

Lovely Nevil and great soundtrack by Eric too! :girlcrazy:

Thanks and yes EricMatyas tracks are really helpful to complete productions with nice music

 

 

Stayed above 100fps the whole time if I am right there, and it was generally smooth the whole way through the vid. Nice stuff Nevil!

yes the CDLOD algorithm and otherwise the whole engine architecture helped a lot to avoid avoid FPS shock and slowdowns that I get on my old 2012 engine. Buying a new recent GPU is also very effective to improve FPS optimizations  😆  😀

 

 

Any plans for your next step as in different types of planets, denser atmospheres, oceans, pants/animals, cities?.

All you mentioned here is planed, except animals. I fear that this point is totally out of my reach  :swoon:

BTW I'm also currently working on a enhanced ocean/water rendering. I should post some screens about it here in a few days if I'm satisfied enough with it

Absolutely awesome! Please consider giving up your social life and make this into a Shores of Hazeron clone and I would be eternally grateful 😉 Heck, I'll even send you a cake and flowers if you pull it off! However, a game like Pioneer would also be much appreciated. Your planetary terrain engine really has the "looks" for it. Great project!

 

Please consider giving up your social life and make this into a Shores of Hazeron clone

I guess my wife won't agree at all  :biggrin:

I'll send an extra cake for her! As long as I can play a SOH clone with graphics like these. But seriously, you should make a game out of this. It's so sad to see so many of these nice 3D planet projects going to waste. Nobody ever makes a game with procedural planets, they just make a 3D planet, put it on YouTube and abandon it. I hope you'll do something nice with this beautiful engine you're working on. You'll have my support! Not that that'll do you much good, except for the cakes and flowers maybe... but.... it'll make you a better person! And women like spacegame creators! I believe you'll also live longer and happier if you've made a spacegame.

Did someone mention cake? Carrot cake, perchance?

 

Nobody ever makes a game with procedural planets, they just make a 3D planet, put it on YouTube and abandon it

Yeah I saw alot of those on youtube... including myself  :sorry:

Maybe from my own experience I can testify on it with three points:

1. Making a procedural planet renderer is such a rich and fun experience that, once you've finished it, getting back to the "classical coding" for making the game itself appears as a such boring and annoying task; you have to be mentally strong and motivated to gather your strength and embark yourself on this very different task : making a game with your engine.
2. Making a graphic engine is easy; Making a video game is hard, really hard. About a graphics engine, there's  only one well marked road : trying to produce the best rendering until you reach your technical limits. On Internet there's hundred of pages and tutorials explaining how to render this or this awesome graphical effect. But you wont find a tutorial to explain you how to set the best game design. Making a video game, including in a non-professional level, requires many more proficiency than programming skills. At game design stage you're in the middle of a crossroads with dozens of possible ways : arcade gameplay/physics vs realistic gameplay/physics ? Should I manage one or many ships ? Should I include resources crafting or not ? Will I be able to leave my ship and and walk in the cities/stations ? In this case, up to what level of complexity will I manage interactions with the environment?  (interesting example of topic discussion here) How will I create all the resources (textures, meshes) for it ? Full procedural (as it's done by Limit Theory or NMS) ? And what about game UI ? How UI will be integrated in the game ? Will my game be monolithic, or moddable ? if moddable, up to what extent ? You can try to go through a stage where you put on a document all those questions and set an answer for each, and once it's closed you must stand on it until the end. And it's hard because in the same time you look at what others are doing here and there, and one day you say to yourself "WOW what an awesome idea, I MUST include it in my project" and depending on your initial software design, you can easily include it, or you cant, and then either you feel frustrated with your project, and you start eating your hat and deal with it or lose interest to the project or you have to revise some parts of your design, which can lead to project death, simply.
3. You get out of your lines of code, and then you look around you, and you see full of projects ended or already virtually ended : E:D, Infinity battescape, NMS, Rodina, Pioneer. So you say to yourself "How can I fight? What are the new ideas that my project could bring over all these heavyweights?" (and then you loop to point 2). "Why should I bother me to make a game while others do it so much better?".

I'm not saying I will not try to make a game. I 'll try to do something that looks like a game. Again. I just did a recall on all these points to try to explain why there are so many aborted project (like this one?)

After all these years, I was able to identify two important points that can help lead to something (more or less) achieved:

• Procedural generation for content. As I'm programmer, not graphic artist, I have no talent to produce game GFX content and plus I deeply hate it. Procedural can do this job for me (see NMS)
• Modding. I know SOH, but I'm not expert in it. You're certainly better than me to judge how to make an improved version of this game. On my side I have a vision of the game I'd like to make, but it is likely that all gameplay points that I imagine will not please everyone. So rather than a complete, achieved game, let's try to make something anyone can deeply adapt to his taste. 

Even in this way, it remains a monumental work for get something achieved though.

-Nev-

Writing planet renderers is fun, writing a game UI is horrible.

That's why there are lots of planet renderers on YouTube, and very few UI ones.

Completely off-topic from your video, which is awesome by the way, but do you find that you have to force the game to use the nVidia GPU otherwise it chooses the integrated Intel GPU (which is naff) or does everything just work for you?

I just ask because I recently found the solution to making it automatically use the dedicated GPU on laptops by adding this in the Pioneer code:

extern "C" {
// This is the quickest and easiest way to enable using the nVidia GPU on a Windows laptop with a dedicated nVidia GPU and Optimus tech.
// enable optimus!
__declspec(dllexport) DWORD NvOptimusEnablement = 0x00000001;

// AMD have one too!!!
__declspec(dllexport) int AmdPowerXpressRequestHighPerformance = 1;
}

Yeah I faced exactly the same problem ! To run my app on the dedicated GPU rather than the integrated one I must select it through the Windows NVidia Panel. I'll give it a try with your magic code; 

Hell where did you find this tip ?  🙂

Found it the usual way: Serendipity 🙂

I was Googling for something else and the nVidia flag got mentioned in an unrelated thread on StackOverflow. Once I found that I Googled "NvOptimusEnablement AMD equivalent" and found the AMD method on their developer forums.

Both of them should really advertise this more since I see a lot of mentions about it in bug reports, Q&A's, FAQs and forum posts but no-one ever seems to get an answer other than forcing it on in the control panels.