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More of the same [attachment=825:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-08 17-52-42-53.png][attachment=826:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-08 17-45-35-19.png]I can see a spot on Uranus.[attachment=827:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-08 03-30-03-70.jpg]

"s2odan" wrote:
I can see a spot on Uranus.
You can get a cream for that off the docs! <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_lol.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':lol:' />Seriously though, great detail on those planets s2odan and storms too! <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_cool.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt='8-)' />

I've run out of words of praise for your work, but like, wow man!

Thanks :DHere's a couple more terrain variations:[attachment=830:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-08 22-30-17-32.png]You'll have to zoom in to see this one, its a dark gas giant with purple/blue clouds, like a darker neptune:[attachment=831:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-08 23-14-49-22.png]

Whats new in these pics :[attachment=832:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-09 04-26-05-63.png][attachment=833:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-09 04-27-13-54.png][attachment=834:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-09 04-27-40-45.png]

As always amazing work s2odan! I absolutely love the clouds on the gas giants, and those new terrain features look excellent! I've always found the planets and terrains to be one of Pioneer's most interesting features.

Thanks dude
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Whats new in these pics
No-one guessed it but its wasn't too obvious,just a crappy fractal texture applied over the terrain. Here's some more of them:Grass and Forest areas:[attachment=837:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-10 01-57-30-32.png][attachment=836:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-10 01-57-43-28.png]This is sand and grass but the colours are wonky:[attachment=835:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-10 02-01-01-98.png]

Fantastic work s2odan. The Mercury terrain and Uranus storm are like pictures from National Geographic. Can't wait to try these out.

The spots are pretty random but roughly about 1 in 3 of gas giants of that type should have a good one like that, but there are 2 other gas giant terrains which also use the same storm spot pattern so there should be plenty around the galaxy.Providing the seeds don't require changing again Neptune will have a nice spot and saturn will also have a small one. Uranus won't, it was just my test gas giant, and I thought it was kind of amusing to put a spot on Uranus But Uranus now uses a more authentic although boring terrain/colour.All the Gasgiants bar Jupiter should look much more convincing next time around.I haven't changed the Jupiter terrain so that will still have the swirls and bands from before.I might try Jupiter again but its a very hard gas giant to simulate well :)More shots with terrain textures:Dirt/Rock:[attachment=838:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-10 04-18-22-53.png]Snow/Rock[attachment=839:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-10 04-31-06-45.png]Nice shot of forests:[attachment=840:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-10 04-34-03-38.png]

s2odan wrote:
Forests

This is neat

Nice work!!!Textures are picked based on height?To make it perfect we would need another "height-map" but for climate system and depending on this fractal(data in case of earth, if there is one ...) we would put various textures: sand, salt, red sand, savanna, jungle, various kind of deserts and forests, tundra and so on ... and we could make that fractal to slowly change/animate (or even evolute if we really want it) in some kind of periods of periods so that you can have difference between seasons. Once we have this kind of fractal we can even put models of various trees once ship is very near surface... after all, this one will also allow us to add weather simulation too ...

Awesome work!Is this texturing system done in a shader? Like texture splatting?Or is it still working on the fixed function pipeline?

Cheers
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Textures are picked based on height?
Yep, they just get placed in the relevant place on the colour scale... so low down is yellow for sand and that has a sandy textures, higher up you get light green for grass ect ect and the textures change to suit the landscape they are on.There are the following textures defined in the Earth colour: Rock, Rock2, Mud, Grass, Grass2(trees), sand, sand2 and waves for the ocean.
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To make it perfect we would need another "height-map" but for climate system and depending on this fractal(data in case of earth, if there is one ...)
That might not be so far off, we were discussing this yesterday in IRC
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Is this texturing system done in a shader?
Nope, but it should be. So obviously it slows things down a fair bit. Tbh I wouldn't know how to port it to the shaders. I believe if it were ported to the shaders it could be a vast improvement as theoretically you would always have textures of a higher detail being applied to the landscape around you because they would be calculated so much faster, so it would help disguise our slow terrain generation.But failing that, it can be optimised enough that the performance hit becomes worth the increase in quality, as its not that much slower, but it is noticable... Speed is probably around 70-80% of previous with this method. Which is probably marginally slower than Alpha11 or 10, before the octave optimisation that was done a while back.

Awesome pics s2odan, with a scattering of clouds that South American shot would be near perfect. Yes the terrains are certainly looking really great now <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Here's a video with some higher quality terrain than what would normally be seen in the game, just for kicks. It uses fluffy freak's threading code which makes it possible for the cpu to keep up, although it also turns it into a slideshow at points as the terrain threads fight with the main thread, fraps doesn't help either If you look carefully you can see the mountain I fly to from orbit

w00t!Glad that threading code make it kinda playable ;)I'll have a go at a proper system after the current thingy I'm working on... or maybe in parallel since it _really_ needs it

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Glad that threading code make it kinda playable

Its normally a lot better, although still jumpy. Fraps eats a whole core for the most part, so you can imagine that would play havok with it.But overall its very good, I can underclock my pc to 1.6ghz and still use highest quality faster than I would without threading with my pc at stock speeds

good progress on the multi threading

The particular experimental threading stuff s20dan is using is a horrific hack that I threw together just to see if I could better utilise my i7 CPU :DHopefully I, or s20dan, should be able to put something a bit better together soon that would be worthy of including in the mainline alpha releases.What I really really really waaaaaant to see is the terrain texturing stuff from earlier in the thread!

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What I really really really waaaaaant to see is the terrain texturing stuff from earlier in the thread!
Its in that vid but its just a bit crap there as it was all a quick hack I threw together to get the terrain a few levels higher in quality.I can see it on the rock, but I know what to look for.... the texture in that case is picking the wrong colours, red and orange and the mountain is already red... so it just blends.But the shrubland/whatever has the textures, as they are what gives it the shrub-like appearance.Oh BTW its also been included with master now so you can give it a whirl if you like :)Although I still have yet to fully implement them, for now they are active for Earth and 4 other terrain types, also any Earth-like world will use them but the terrain is not necesarily set to have them so the fractal scale could/will be wrong in some cases.To properly test them I would recommend changing this:GeosphereStyle.cpp line 436:
Code:
//m_terrainType = TERRAIN_HILLS_RIDGED;//m_colorType = COLOR_DESERT;
Just uncomment them and change colour to COLOR_EARTHLIKE and TERRAIN_HILLS_RIDGED can either stay as it is or use: TERRAIN_HILLS_NORMAL, TERRAIN_HILLS_RIVERS or TERRAIN_HILLS_DUNES. DUNES is the one from the video with the ridged terragen style mountain.And since you asked:[attachment=847:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-15 16-42-03-63.png][attachment=848:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-15 16-38-45-88.png][attachment=849:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-15 16-35-43-91.png]Thats straight from masterr.