Rivers, canyons and cliffs

[nevilclavain]

Hi there Last week I read here in SSC forums or elsewhere (cannot remember) someone complaining that No Man's Sky landscapes does not have rivers. Far be it from me the idea to try to compete NMS of course, but suddenly it reminded me that I had planned to do this. So i started this WIP. I added two additional texture levels (one for rivers, and one for canyons) and modified the planets shaders code to reshape the contours generated by the fractals functions (fbm, iqTurbulence) and finally obtain rivers and high reliefs carved canyons. See pics bellow. Actually the additional data textures for these reliefs are hand-drawn. Next step should be those to be procedurally renderered by GPU or the CPU. We'll see. Thanks -Nev-

[Geraldine]

Now that you mention it Nevil, no I have not seen any rivers either in NMS. As I expected, you can go one better! :girlcrazy: Still hoping/waiting for the video Nevil..... :girlsmile: 

[Cody]

Close to the edge, down by the river! 

[nevilclavain]

Still hoping/waiting for the video Nevil..... :girlsmile: Hop là, here it is !  Again with EricMatyas great soundtracks ! To show the physics in action, I land my freighter in disaster, then I leave it in emergency, before it descends into the ravine... enjoy ! -Nev-

[Geraldine]

WOW, just the planetary approach was great but when the freighter starting slipping off the cliff....WOW :girlimpossible:Wonderful work there Nevil! :girlcrazy:

[Pinback]

Nice on Nevil when the ship ended upside down in the river valley it reminds me of my landings in Rodina :biggrin:

[fluffyfreak]

Stick some wheels on it and you can use that canyon as a half-pipe! :girlcrazy: That is very cool Nevil!

[XenonS]

Going through your numerous screenshots, Nevil, is a game on its own, simply beautiful  XenonS

[nevilclavain]

Going through your numerous screenshots, Nevil, is a game on its own, simply beautiful  XenonS Thanks for the encouragement words XenonS...

[fluffyfreak]

Hey Nevil, any updates on this? I'm still eagerly awaiting seeing more of this terrain stuff

[nevilclavain]

Bloody Hell I missed your post, sorry for the late reply !Since this last summer, I spent those last months on some sidetracks : writing a D3D11 rendering plugin, and [CEGUI]([url]http://cegui.org.uk/[/url] "CEGUI") Integration in my framework o/D3D11 rendering is now operational, but I still have to rewrite all my planet shaders from HLSL3 to HLSL4After that, next steps should be : adding various buildings/objects on planet surface, and gas giant + rocky planetsI confess I spent less time on these last days because of my IRL job change but I'm still on it

[fluffyfreak]

That's ok, now I've taken ages to reply! We've (pioneer) started the switch to IMGUI which is interesting and comes with a number of backends for different renderers so it's quick and easy to try out.I look forward to seeing what you get done whenever you feel the urge to work on it again anyway, it'd be great to get a description of how your terrain generation and rendering works. That's something that Pioneer lacks, and it's my fault, I just haven't gotten my head around what really needs doing yet :neutral: or how to do it.

[sscadmin]

What is happening with XFrontier Nevil?

[nevilclavain]

What is happening with XFrontier Nevil?

Please Forgive me for the late reply

The project's still alive.

One year ago I left the main engine development to a 'cleanup' branch where I'm making some improvment and hunting some
foolish things. I took over the upper layers of the engine (user API) to replace it with the outstanding
Entity-Component-System pattern, which is the lethal response to some of design problems that was hanging in the engine.
This give more flexibility and smartness to the applicative code.

Thank god I didn't have to rewrite everything; the low level parts of the engine are reliable and do not need rewriting.
Otherwise the planet engine still works, and just integrating it in the global ECS API is the last part I'm facing
to finish this huge task.

This is a thankless and painstaking job with no change on the graphical part, and so no new screengrab or material to show,
which is quite frustrating. I cant' wait to be back on more creative and fun task, like tweaking and polishing new shaders and effects.
I also have a lot of things to finish the planet engine; with, for example, objects and cities, or different types of planets, other than
earth-like type. I'm also interested to try to implement volumetric nebulae effects, like the one we can see in Elite Dangerous or No Man's Sky

That's all for today !

Nev

[nevilclavain]

For those interested, follow my progress on this clean-up topic here : [url]https://github.com/NevilClavain/DrawSpace/commits/cleanup[/url]
I'm pushing new things almost every day

[Geraldine]

Great to see the progress you are making here Nevil. I am still amazed at the freighter video you did back in 2016!

[Cody]

Hey, Nevil - good to see you're still about.

[nevilclavain]

Hey, Nevil – good to see you’re still about.

Semper Fi !