I started implementing procedural galaxies. This is not a 3D models of galaxies, but generation of billions of galaxies in an almost infinite space. Procedural 3D models will be the next step, and until then, all galaxies are using standard models.The first screenshot shows some...
I have almost finished the Map Mode for SE. It is similar to Google Earth, but with the ability of scaling from a single planet up to entire clusters of galaxies. Below are a lot of screenshots showing how to zoom out from a moon...
Green alien skies...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J5L0lEvzs8...
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),...