Chocolate flavoured galaxy

[s2odan]

Just for fun I was fiddling with some settings last night to try and increase the detail to excessive levels:[attachment=583:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-02-28 00-14-42-47.jpg]Yes textures would probably be a good thing. I was against them at first until I saw a video of Artlav's 'Spaceway' project, which uses procedural textures very effectively.I don't know how it would reduce CPU overhead though, if anything I would think it would increase it, as its just yet another set of calculations that would have to be run in real-time.I suppose it might be possible to reduce terrain quality a bit to compensate, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of increasing visual quality.

[Coolhand]

well, like your last shot there, you could get that level of quality and skip a few levels of detail with the fractals... Having built a procedural world or two myself, i know this makes a difference. I've attached a texture if you want to try stuff out, how you want to try it out, or not, is up to you. it was meant to represent perhaps a few square metres, but it might work better over a larger area.

[Cavefish]

Some grayscale noise might be enough to break the evenness... and only visible on low altitudes or you'll start noticing patterns.

[Necalli]

I agree. A simple detail noise will be enough to deal with the "silk fabric" effect on cliffs. Though, having something like Photoshop render > fibers filter instead will be better.[hsimg]http://demiart.ru/tutorials/2/vintage/fibers.gif[/hsimg]This plus debris (rocks, boulders) scattered around over the terain, and we might get a tangible sense of scale at close-ups.Nevertheless I like all the improvements that are made. Good work, S2odan!

[ollobrain]

the variance looks good the procedural fractual generation might be a goer will we be seeing this in alpha 9 ?

[s2odan]

ollobrain wrote:
the variance looks good the procedural fractual generation might be a goer will we be seeing this in alpha 9 ?
No, the last pic is just for fun. It takes way to long to calculate that much detail. But the pics before of swooping into a canyon might make an appearance, although it may get a little toned down as there's a lot of perlin stuff going on in that, which means it takes a litle longer to calculate the high detail terrain.

[s2odan]

It's getting there:[attachment=600:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-03-20 08-21-32-63.jpg]Beach:[attachment=601:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-03-20 04-32-46-17.jpg]Mountain:[attachment=602:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-03-20 01-41-30-87.jpg]

[robn]

Oh! These are lovely. I need a holiday...

[HawkerT]

s2odan wrote:
It's getting there!
Absolutely marvelous s2odan, simply gorgeous!Seeing Gaia like this, smiling to us all from her journey through the vastness of nothing/something, never fails to touch me.s2odan, you and the guys are doing a tremendous job, thank you!All the bestFrans

[Marcel]

Quote:
Seeing Gaia like this, smiling to us all from her journey through the vastness of nothing/something, never fails to touch me.
Yeah, there's no place like home!

[s2odan]

Thanks people :)Here's a couple of other pics for fun..;)I may of gone a bit overboard with adding angry spots to gas giants, but tweaking it down a little should look better:[attachment=610:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-03-21 04-54-56-37.jpg]Are those waves?:[attachment=611:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-03-16 00-38-03-50.jpg]Maybe they aren't but its getting there
Coolhand wrote:
well, like your last shot there, you could get that level of quality and skip a few levels of detail with the fractals... Having built a procedural world or two myself, i know this makes a difference.
This is most likely what will happen, although it will slow things down a bit... perhaps a lot. But the increase in quality is worth it.
Quote:
I've attached a texture if you want to try stuff out, how you want to try it out, or not, is up to you. it was meant to represent perhaps a few square metres, but it might work better over a larger area.
I'm dead against using any pre-made textures. If you use them, your world is no longer truly procedural... it seems like too much of a cheat to me.Its far better to have fractals do all this for you, costly yes, but the image quality will be far greater and have the correct natural variation you would expect to a landscape.

[Geraldine]

If that planet in your last post was re-scaled and tweaked a bit s2odan, it would make a pretty good Venus type world. The colour is spot on, if you pardon the pun <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_redface.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':oops:' />

[s2odan]

That could certainly be done. I'd say the only issue with that would that all the terrain would get coloured as well... But then the atmosphere is so thick on a world like venus that the terrain is already a funny colour.. I'll give this a try

[Geraldine]

Here are some pics of the real Venus. Do you see how much they look like your last picture s2odan? The Ultraviolet pic was taken by the Pioneer probe by the way <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

[s2odan]

I'm now torn between what is cool and what is real :)Venus in Pioneer actually looks a lot like the 'real' pic... but obviously the enhanced pic is way more cool

[Geraldine]

In my view, cool is better (nothing wrong with a "little" poetic licence <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' /> ), besides, the second picture is a very low res shot, likely ground based. So exactly how much detail Venus might actually have in it's atmosphere if you were looking at it from orbit, is anyone's guess. I am pretty sure the colour differential, although subtle, would be noticeable.

[s2odan]

@ Geraldine. I suppose thats the approach I have taken with terrains as well... generally things are more cool than realistic Such as mountain height.New terrain type in the works, its actually a very highly detailed terrain far more so than before with many terrain features. The way the terrain is built is a little more advanced and far more logical. It is built in layers such as(This is mainly so I can get this down into words and analyse how the lands are put together):1: Continents are randomly placed, a noise pattern is then subracted from the continents to produce nice continent shaped land.2: A basic structure to the land is added, this is at a very high scale using very large noise patterns, which gives the land a very gradual but large change in height.3: We now fill out that structure with some smaller noise patterns of the same type.. IE if we used ridged before, its good to use ridged now, the patterns will complement each other. This breaks up the gradual change in height with lumps and mountains.4: More of the same, even smaller detail applied by height over the mountains.5: Now the mountains are looking pretty real, its time to sort out the rest of the landscape. Whereas the functions for the mountain would all increase in aggressiveness with height, we dont want that any more... we now want features to start at nothing and end at nothing and be large in the middle... hence hills and rolling landscapes for the low-lands. So the same kind of procedure is added for the hills as was the mountains, but using different noise patterns.6: Same process but for sandy areas now, so they start low, quickly get large then quickly die off to nothing. This allows us to have sand dunes only in sandy coloured areas. And as the colour changes, so does the noise pattern... kind of like textures applied to a material.7: Final process is to add 3 different noise patterns to the varying heights, these are tiny noise patterns only really used for texturing and help make the land look far better while the player is landed.And there we have pioneer's most advanced planet so far... we use a lot more aggressive height based effects and a lot more random noise for the distribution of features. But believe it or not, the terrain feels quicker than the previous less detailed 'high quality terrains'.Anyway...

[s2odan]

*continued*

[s2odan]

Here's a tweak to Jupiter type worlds by Firemark:[attachment=621:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-03-22 18-21-52-34.jpg]

[Geraldine]

Yep, shaping up very well s2odan <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' /> Do you know if the pioneer engine will ever have the ability to render smoke? I would love to see active volcanoes on planets like Io and Venus, heck even the Earth too. Another thing was,in the original Frontier, if you shot at a ship while travelling at a low absolute velocity, smoke used to come off the hull when you hit it with your laser (or forgetting to fit an atmospheric shield while lifting off from a ground based starport <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_redface.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':oops:' /> ). Same was true for missile exhausts too. Would be nice to see smoke in the game, not important by any means, but it would be a nice touch. What do you think?