Jink Engine

[phibermon]

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.

My current design is an attempt to generate successive levels of detail that are deterministic based upon the previous level of detail - this would go hand in hand with mip-map levels in a way and allow for distant planets to be rendered in low detail before moving onto generating the next level of detail.


In terms of variation of terrain I'm using concepts from the terrain generation tool L3TD - where the lowest level of detail is like a a patchwork of 'biomes' (to use minecraft terminology) which are used at the inputs for detail generation - then to make things more realistic I could have pre-rendered heightmap templates for mountain ridges and the such that are 'stamped' onto the heightmap.


Then to make the terrain more seemless I was going to use hydraulic and/or thermal erosion passes to blend things together.


There's lots of problems here of course - even with my GPU implementation of hydraulic erosion I'm very limited in the number of passes I can process on a planetary scale to keep things 'real-time'


I was thinking one cool hack would be to not process erosion on certain flat plain style areas - perhaps blending the generated heightmap with raster techniques as seen in the impressive lithosphere tool (http://lithosphere.codeflow.org/)


The key goal here is to not have to rely on generating the entire planet at any given detail level just to see one part of it while still ensuring the end result is identical for any given seed.


it's really difficult - possible of course but of those systems that do this well already? the developers are not very forthcoming on their approaches.

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?

You know I honestly don't know - KSP seems to function well at the large scales but performance isn't great (although I attribute a lot of that to unity) if you've got thoughts on the matter then I welcome them

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.

I guess my confidence isn't very high of late - thank you very much for your kind words, they're very much appreciated