I fixed a small error that caused was a big disadvantage: Tiny landscape nodes (greatest level of detail) have too big initial BBoxes, that makes them visible from very long distances. The node's BBox recalculates node generation by using actual node height values, and become...
Recently I added support for ocean planets - the planets consist almost entirely of water, and can have oceans several hundred kilometers deep. Technically, these would be Terra planets (Earth-like planets with water) but without continents. I've also made the icy polar caps more bumpy....
Recently I experimented with increasing the level of detail on planetary textures. Previously, each planet had a small texture generated (only 5x8 pixels) which contained the colour palette: The first axis assigned to point height/latitude, and the second axis assigned to point slope. The shader...
This is a first implementation of black holes. Rendered as a sprite withe the shader which takes the background image as a texture and warps it. So some pixelation and other artifacts appear close to the black hole. The better way to render black hole...
I finallt implemented triple and multiple stars, and ran into "interface problem". More precisely, two problems. First, I will describe the structure of the system. Each star can be binary. In this case the star is reaplced with the barycenter of binary and two stars orbiting...
New appearance of stars: static procedural texture and atmospheric scattering. You can see the effect of mutual illumination in close binary systems (heating of the side of the star facing the companion, sunrise/sunset on the sun). Up close, the texture looks quite descent (excluding solar spots),...
I added a feature to the engine: if real (catalog) planet has only height map defined (like Venus and Titan), then the color map is being procedurally generated from it. I need a reverse feature also - if there is only a color map defined...
Gas giants with 7 cloud layers. All layers are rotate around the planet, from afar it looks like gas flows are moving in opposite directions. The screenshots show a consistent dive to the very "surface".Theoretically, if one make the atmosphere thicker, so that the horizon...
Fimally we have a good Moon textures! Data release from LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter), the device has a cool name LOLA (Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter). Before this there were silly small textures 2048x1024 for the entire Moon, or even fake ones. There are screenshots with...
New pre-release video. New engine features:Lighting effects: illumination of planets/moons by other planets/moons, solar eclipses, lens flare from the sun (actually old featrue). Attempt to animate Jupiter, if it works - I'll do the same for procedural gas giants (watch in HD). Solar system browser (2-dimensional). Procedural planets:...