Jink Engine

[SilverWarior]

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.

Are you generating planets in one go or are you also using some post-processing?
When I was tinkering around the idea of procedural planet generation I never managed to generate a planet that would have so much diversity as earth does.
For instance if you go look at our "little blue marble" you can find areas with high peaked mountains and also areas with high but smooth sided mountains. You can find areas with smooth sores areas with cliffed coasts.
I never managed to convince any of the algorithms that I tried to be able to generate such diversity. I either got all mountains to be spiky or smooth but not both at the same time.

So I started doing some post-processing to smoothen or roughen different regions. For this I created another texture/height map which would control smoothing/roughing process.
And it performed quite well. The only problem was that this smoothing/roughing effect was also applied to the regions where it wasn't desired (it could roughen the valleys which would then become all spiky and ugly.

Because of that I started thinking of doing this post-processing in multiple stages for areas of different elevations. F
or instance all areas with elevation between 20 and 40 were considered as costal regions (sea level is at 30). All areas with elevation between 40 and 100 were considered as valleys. All regions with elevation between 100 and 150 were considered as hill regions. And all areas with elevation above 150 were considered as mountain regions.
Now this has been producing much more desirable results but the planet generation time has been increased greatly (even up to 15 minutes). Now this became a little concerning.
While it wasn't great concern since my plan was to be generating planets in neighboring solar systems in the background during the gameplay and you probably would not be able to reach those neighboring solar system before the planets are already generated (traveling between solar systems would take time - no warping between them).

Any way in the end I realized that wile my terrain generation algorithm can make very detailed 2D height maps with all the above mentioned variations projecting such height map onto a sphere actually screws up lots of that details especially when you are getting closer to the poles.
So I put this algorithm of mine aside and started thinking about creating a new one which would be working with spherical coordinates instead of a 2D coordinates from the very beginning. But I never got it implemented as I could not wrap my head around on how to actually make a 3D sphere from these spherical coordinates

planets and associated physics are the very last part of the engine to create

What is your plan for doing planetary physics? Are you planning to implement multi-body physics or will you use SOI (sphere of influence) approach as KSP (Kerbal Space Program) does?

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.

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.

Aren't you a bit grim about all this?
Good things take time to be built. Yes you are working on this project for 8 years which actually isn't so long especially when you take into account that you are basically working on this alone. Even a half dozen sized team of experienced AAA game developers would probably spend at least a couple of years working on similar project.
So don't be too hard on yourself. Instead be very proud of yourself for this.