Exploring Planets

Exploring Planets

Craig Macomber 16 Jul 2009 02:40

Yep, another news post. Today I have managed to get a basic first person style camera working to fly around the planet. I also got basic mesh deformations so the mountains actually stick up (really low rez and drastically not true scale though!). I should also mention that I got the new client to actually connect to the server and retrieve some data. Progress!

I also have been playing with planet appearance a bit. Nothing major though. Maybe I'll put up a new image and/or video soon.

Edit: Have a sunset! Ya, pretty crummy without atmospheric scattering, but at least the water looks somewhat nice.

Last edited on 17 Jul 2009 23:32 by Craig Macomber + Show more

Re: Exploring Planets

Phenoca 11 Aug 2009 15:18

It's beautiful Craig. I've never been able to see the stars from my own house.
So that is why it looks nice - you have lighting. Panda Planet is really beautiful when lit.
And very, very 3D. I can't wait to go into the client and spin my camera around it :)
And zoom-in with the changing LOD. Are the large white objects in the lower-left image stormclouds?

Re: Exploring Planets

Craig Macomber 11 Aug 2009 17:55

Thanks.

There are clouds and huge ice caps. No storm clouds per say though. I gotta get weather and climate modeling done first. Then we can have rain storms with lightning, and lots of other fancy things. Ha, those pictures are so out of date. That sun set has no fancy red glow, the land is all low rez mesh. Lame. I should put up a new pic:

There is a while pile of screen shots in my servers FG screen shot folder

Anyway, probably the next thing appearance wise is proper 3D clouds (thats going to be fun!) with shadows on the ground (cuz we are cool like that). Eventually I want to do automatic exposure adjustments, but that is actually kinda hard.

Currently it requires shader model 3 (directX 9 level stuff) for it's fancy mesh solution (fancy meaning it works ok and was easy to do).

Btw, you have dev permissions: if you have good enough hardware, and you want to go to the effort, you could run it now.

Re: Exploring Planets

Phenoca 23 Aug 2009 19:23

Btw, you have dev permissions: if you have good enough hardware, and you want to go to the effort, you could run it now.

Thanks :)
I'll ask on AIM if I can't run it.