Some New Planets

[Ryder P. Moses]

I've been working on finding a way to turn out high-quality, procedural-based worldmaps in order to give systems a certain appearance of individuality (especially since most of the systems I've been constructing are 90% barren rocks). While the best approach I've found really won't pay off until VS has bump maps, here's some preliminary results for any who're interested.

Note that not all of them are yet formatted for spherical mapping, so the edges'll look kinda funny if you slap 'em on a world now. These aren't production sets, they're just testers.

A basic gas giant. looks much better wrapped around a sphere, and even better once I've got the faked fresnel "atmosphere" working.

A more detailed gas giant, using another method. Which I'm not using again.

Slightly stretched lunar map. Kinda meh now, looks much better with the bump map.
(and the bump map, for those with proper 3d programs who're curious. I'm not sure what the difference between the old graygrade maps I've always used and MAX's freaky texture-baked normals maps is, but most games I've broken apart lately use these so I'm guessing... yeh.)

A bumpless procedural I thought was interesting.

...Clearly, because I made a whole shitload of them using the same solution.

Another bump-reliant tex output, but okay enough in raw difmap form to show I guess
(And its bumpy, just 'cos.)

Variation on the solution from before.

Ayup. The cracks become canyons with bump, and I'm working on a solution for a glowing 'city map' that follows the cracks.

You noticing a pattern in the planet-types I'm focussing on yet?

A little variety. Europa-like ice moon.

(warning, still in TGA format for some reason) an Earthlike world. Needs some work.

[chuck_starchaser]

Awsome! This is exactly the stuff we need. The only one that looks so-so is the earth-like one, but those are particularly hard to do; I have a program somewhere that specializes on generating earth-like planets, with mountains and rivers and all, but it's still not very realistic looking.
Soon with Ogre we'll have shaders, and I've worked on a shader for planet rendering with atmosphere. You should take a look at it, it's a thread in this forum titled "Shady Planet".
Are you able to generate seamless wrap-around textures?

[Ryder P. Moses]

I can do seamless now. Had to figure out how to work around MAX's fixation on box-mapped skins. The problem now is that a lot of the textures have a fresnel effect I can't remove.

Lunarcell gives passable Earthlikes and wraps seamlessly, but the results aren't as varied- it pretty much only does one thing, with variations in the specific landmasses and colors.

[chuck_starchaser]

I can do seamless now.

Yey!

Lunarcell gives passable Earthlikes and wraps seamlessly, but the results aren't as varied- it pretty much only does one thing, with variations in the specific landmasses and colors.

Here's the thread I was mentioning:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 6698#36698
What I got there is
* per-pixel fresnel reflection by the water, without a specular map (I use the water's color for color-keying reflectivity).
* per-pixel atmospheric "fog" effect
* cloud shadows (temporarily faked, not true perspective)
* city-ligths map that is per-pixel modulated by incident sunlight
in addition to per-pixel lighting.
Also, I don't have normals or UV-coords in the mesh; I put code in the vertex shader to generate them automatically.
And it does all this in a single pass. And it was my first shader; there's much room for improvement and optimization; I'm sure I could add bump-mapping to it. Ogre integration is coming real soon so go crazy with bumpmaps

[Ryder P. Moses]

Ooh, nice. I was just going to stick an alpha mapped tex on a circular plane and put it on the stock planet mesh as a turret, so it'd always face the player. Having an actual shader would work much better.

[chuck_starchaser]

Ooh, nice. I was just going to stick an alpha mapped tex on a circular plane and put it on the stock planet mesh as a turret, so it'd always face the player. Having an actual shader would work much better.

That's exactly how atmospheres work right now; there's a funnel like thing always facing you. At one point I wanted to improve on it and was told not to bother, since we'd soon have shaders. That's why I started working on a shader to do it. Now "soon" is "imminent", and I've already got the code. What we'll need is precisely what you're working on: good planet textures and cloud layer.
If you need special, custom meshes for particular moons, asteroids, or planets with high mountains or deep craters, let me know. Just get me pictures of it and I'll do a quick mesh for you.

[Ryder P. Moses]

Thanks, I think I'm set where freaky planetoids are concerned. It's the freaky stations that are giving me a headache. But I'll let you know if I run into any trouble.

[chuck_starchaser]

If you can get a procedural to make earth-like planet textures like this one, we're all set.

[Ryder P. Moses]

This is the closest I can do right now:

http://www.penguinbomb.com/donate/Spher ... eteMap.jpg

[hurleybird]

Not bad. Poles could use some work. I'd suggest darker water too. Some of the montains are downright amazing.

[chuck_starchaser]

That's very good. Do you get a bumpmap with it? I could write a procedural to add rivers to it. What are those bright spots in the ocean? If they are sun reflections, we don't need them; we got per-pixel phong reflection of the sun, by the ocean, in the shader.

[Ryder P. Moses]

The bright spots are just highlights from my lighting; they just show up 'cos that was a complete run of bump and spec and everything. They won't show up in the production colormaps.

The poles, though, I can't much control. Which is kinda annoying me. I could make the terrains a lot more detailed if I could up the scale of everything else without the area of the poles increasing exponentially.

[chuck_starchaser]

We can put perma-clouds on the poles; hide them completely.

[Ryder P. Moses]

Lunarcell does better icecaps, but I don't think that I like the landforms as much.

[Zeog]

So, just for the record: what types of planet surfaces can you cover so far and therefore replace the in-game ones?
You've showed us (unfortunately pictures are gone now):

• gas giant
• rocky surface
• ice covered planets
• earthlike planets

each in many flavours with quasi-infinite variations.

Can you somehow input the planet's/moon's size into your method? Or would the surface of a smaller planet have much more smaller details? (a pixel of a 2kx2k-texture would be much larger on a giant that on an asteroid)
What input do you need exactly in order to generate those maps? I'm working on an improved autogen(tm) and would like to know if you need more input than a random seed and the planet's size and the "type" of surface we want to create, because that's all I want to give you

[Ryder P. Moses]

Well, if you have more ideas for types, I can probably do them. Currently working on one for volcanic newborn worlds, once that's done I'm quite open to suggestions. Earthlike worlds are still tricky, in no small part because they have to look a very particular way whereas nobody much cares if a barren rock world doesn't closely resemble Mars or Callisto or whatever. But I'm still working on developing a good-quality output, and I'm making some progress (already sorta worked out how to get rid of those damn icecaps).

As for the generation method... I think you're misunderstanding how this is meant to be applied. There's no way that these textures can be procedurally generated ingame- they're baked pixel shaders, they take several minutes to render just for baking, even if I could add the software involved to VS (and I can't, it's very specifically not designed for that) having any planets use the raw output would drop the game immediately to something like .001 FPS.
The idea is to work out and establish rendering solutions in certain graphical software, so that I can manufacture large numbers of high-quality bitmap textures very quickly and add them to game resources, as a faster (and thus more varied) alternative to handpainting and a much prettier alternative to the current texture set. Not to auto-generate textures on the fly as a player navigates the game universe.

As such, I can make custom textures for any size of world (within reasonable limits) with minimal difficulty

[Zeog]

Well, that's really different from what I had thought. I didn't know I takes such a long time to generate these textures. That means we have a rather large library of pre-generated planet textures which are than applied in-game. This way, one will always find that some planets look the same (depending on how large the library is, of course, which in turn depends on how large the game should be or how much are people willing to download -- maybe offer additional planet texture packs).
I had thought the gerneration process is rather quick, so that textures are generated once you enter the system and are unique to planets, which would include the calling of the generation process by autogen(tm). I wanted to discuss the interface, sorry for the confusion

[chuck_starchaser]

There is a third alternative: To have the generator generate textures for planets when the game is run for the first time. It would drastically reduce the size of the download if we could do this for all planets, or as part of the universe generator; --which is what matters most, as hard drive space is not much of an issue these days.

[klauss]

A better one: the "planet texture pack" could be a small download of an app that generates the textures and modifies the corresponding files.
(That way you can skip it... I'd hate to wait a full hour for the first time VS launches - while it generates 15 textures - not to mention the time it would take to generate, say, 30 or 40).

NOTE: however, that I'm not keen on procedurally generated textures for planets. They always look artificial. I prefer hand-drawn ones.

[chuck_starchaser]

Yeah, I'm not too keen on the state of the art either, but it's a just matter of advancing it...

Another possibility would be to make generation part of the installation process. Same difference, one might say, but people are much more tolerant of installations that take time, than they are of programs that take long to boot, even just the first time. And as long as there's a legend saying...

Creating the Universe
************************************* 100%

Creating Planets
************************************* 100%

Generating Planet Surfaces
**********************************--- 97%

... might even be fun to watch...

[klauss]

And empowering... mostly if it takes 6 days

[chuck_starchaser]

Spiritually enlightening if it takes 11 years...

No, seriously, I guess generation would have to take less time than downloading; or else we wouldn't do it.

[CoffeeBot]

but people are much more tolerant of installations that take time, than they are of programs that take long to boot, even just the first time.

I guess I'm not people.

I can't count the times I've given apps the 3-finger salute, just because they take a long time to load. Of course, I wasn't that interested in them

But yes, better to have it take the time during install than during the first loading sequence. Unless we could hide it behind a mandatory first-time intro video

[Ryder P. Moses]

Not likely you're gonna be able to run complicated image-generation algorithms hundreds of times over while there's a freakin' FMV sequence shuffling through your RAM.

Really, all of this would take longer to load, involves more work, and is likely to produce worse results than just premaking lots of bitmaps. You can pack a whole lot of fairly substantial .jpgs into a relatively small archive these days.

While it'd be kinda a nice idea to dynamically generate textures for each planet so that no two are the same, it'd basically mean either literal days of pregeneration and a game too big to fit on most any hard drive (what, 2000 systems with around four to eight celestial bodies each?), or a big slowup in the game as they're dynamically generated as needed and discarded when the game forgets about that particular system. And nobody would really notice the difference between that and, say, having 20 different textures for each planettype, except in that the dynamically generated textures would be uglier and create lots of annoying wait times.

[chuck_starchaser]

Depends on the algorithm. This guy is producing pretty realistic planets in real time, not even at install time...
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums ... er=ysaneya