Sorry for the very late reply - went through a messy breakup and did a rocky style training montage.

Also got into Software Defined Radio and spent a couple of months designing a QPSK demodulator and LRPT decoder for Meteor M2 weather satellite images - that's all in the framework now and tied into the DSP parts of my JAM audio library - so that'll be used by precisely nobody which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Anyway back to the mansion!! the engine sorry - back to the engine.

I've cleaned up all existing code, ripped out all testing - fixed a majority of compiler warnings etc

The planet Renderer is working now although development was slowed slightly as I decided to add full GIS style support so I could use what I'd written to create a satellite tracking system + Radio heat map direction finding, then I got lost in adding support for various open source data-sets of street maps - again something that'll be used by nobody - I guess you could make a pokemon Go style thing if you really wanted to.

Back to procedural generation of planets! I'm using a cube-map style technique combined with a tessellation paradigm to render my planets so along with some 3D perlin noise and GPU based hydraulic erosion - the implementation has been quite a breeze.

I've expanded upon the Rayleigh/Mie atmospheric scattering implementation I was using for planar terrains to render atmospheres for planets - things are looking really pretty - I'm also playing around with some volumetric shadow and 'godray' techniques to try and get some sexy atmospheric projections of things like clouds and high mountain peaks - efficient and quirk free implementation is very tricky!

I'm currently brainstorming abstractions for generation parameters for planets - trying to come up with a fairly small set that will give rise to everything from rocky barren moons to lush vegetation filled oceananic worlds - I freely admit that I'm stealing heavily from concepts in 'Spore' here.

My game will involve a single planet and a couple of moons or maybe a large goldilocks moon orbiting a gas giant (which would look pretty damn epic through the filtered atmosphere) but for the sake of the engine it will of course be logically structured and capable of handling a large procedural universe.

I'll post some screenshots soon - planets and associated physics are the very last part of the engine to create - I've taken out the low res voxel implementation as mixing it with the other regions is aesthetically weird and for a pure voxel game you're always going to out perform my abstractions by coding for that style directly - one day all engines will be voxels only and it'll make everything in the engine redundant - when that day dawns I'll likely be working on a pure voxel engine.

Since it's so close to completion I'm now creating a website with documentation, examples, tutorials and all the usual gubbins that will get used be roughly nobody.

I'll be posting screenshots and videos soon and binary demos soon after that.

How long have I been working on this and posting about it now? like 8 years here? it's like duke nukem forever but hopefully it'll go down a bit better.