So I have been busy the latest couple of months working on my biggest update yet: fully explorable planets.
It is so exciting to finally experience some proper planets in the game. It is also a real challenge as I have to tackle hundreds of different problems. A lot of experiments and dead ends were taken, but now the technology starts to converge well to a solid foundation.
This very much work in progress. This is why I will not show some shots of planets from a afar just yet, as I still need to improve and add a few more features. I will do further update showcasing various part of the tech as I progress and get closer to a proper release. Right now I have been focusing on making a biome in the style of the habitat, but I will of course randomize biomes and add a lot more terrain styles! The planet shown is also a small one at 44km radius - some will be 2x or 3x bigger.
Planets are fully deformable and leverage on the terrain refactor introduced for the asteroids. I had to improve plenty of things though: for example in order for terrain to load fast I had to offload the density computation to the GPU using compute shaders. Terrain patches are now loading much much faster!
A small mountain pass. There is a lot of popping especially on the large boulders, but I should be able to improve this significantly.
Work done:
- Various elevation style with mountain, valley, rolling hills.
- Word prop spawning (rock, foliage). These are fully integrated with the physics engine, so you can collide and take rocks for example.
- Terrain look and shader: I had to improve the base from asteroids. I can now overlay two materials and have a close and distant texture, which is really useful to improve the look of rocks and mountains for example.
- Snow can spawn at high elevation
- Atmospheric shader, I am really happy about that one but I cant show it to you yet as planets are not looking great from space for the moment...
- Cloud and cloud shadow:
- Gravity and ambient lighting.
Still to do:
- Use 2d map to improve the look from space
- Improve the randomization of the generation, so that each planet are unique and interesting!
- Add more terrain material type, including water and lava.
- Add various SFX and VFX
- Clouds are really basic for now, I will add volumetric clouds as I will want to use that tech for gas giants.
- Randomize the appearance of foliage, rocks and grass.
- Add tree and other aliens flora
- Add fauna. This will come much later on, once the survival loop is implemented.
The first release will contains the first 3-4 items. The rest will tackled in smaller updates after that.
Thanks for playing!
Francois