The planet update is still well underway, here is the latest progress made:
Ocean and Water
I have added ocean! This is so important, it gives a lot of personality to a planet when viewed from orbit and make it more fun nearby.
I had to rework the old water shader a lot, I hope you will like the result.
I added some wave movement, some specularity and a better shading overall. Waves especially where tricky as I had to rethink a lot of things like the way the water integrate with the atmosphere, how the transition over/under water is done and so on.
I have also improved the water buoyancy physics and added some drag. Oh and I also added some SFX.
Shore: beach and caves
To make the shore more interesting and more believable I added some specific elements to the terrain generation. Some beach will be generated and if the terrain nearby allow it some nice rocks and cave will also be spawned. It was already fun to look around for some spot to explore! It was tricky to manipulate the generation algorithm without giving glitchy result, but I will use what I learned to add more landform type in the future.
Craters
The game can now spawn craters of all size. Some biggy one can even be seen from space! This will be particularly helpful for desolate planets like our moon. This was also quite tricky, I had to completely re-engineer the way normal are computed to make it run fast enough.
Planetary Tech
When making a planet technology there is two approach: 3d/voxel vs 2d/heightmap texture.
3d/voxel is the way to go for Starship-EVO as this is the way to deliver interesting and minable terrain up-close.
2d is cheaper on the hardware so it yield much better visual result from afar whilst the 3d voxel will look quite low-res as you are quite hardware limited. You can see this on the various screenshots and videos.
One idea I had was to blend the 3d approach with a higher-res texture to give more details when viewing the planet from space. Good news: it works well! But before I unveil some screenshot of planets from orbit I want to improve that system a bit and have it work also from medium distance. I will generate a cascade of textures at different levels the closer to the surface the player will get.
This tuned for progress on this in the next devlog!
A few more screenshots for the road!
