Ditto above me.

The smaller planet looks squashed due to the perspective projection. You might wanna tweak that frustum a little :).

Otherwise, a masterpiece. I just hope my planets will look at least half as good as yours :D.

dsecrieru: that's very true, i noticed that myself in the screen but can't remember seeing that in real-time. The ratio of the image is 1.333 so i'm not sure what's going on here. I'll have to check my camera class..

noaktree: first, about performance: the fps is good (170 fps on a 2 Ghz + NV 6800, 300 fps on a 2.2 Ghz + ATI X850 ), but i'm not afraid of performance in space. Performance at ground level will be the real bugger.

Now, about "competition": all the good looking games that i know of have their art done by real artists, and not procedurally.

In the procedural field, you find (personal opinions "inside"):

- Sean O Neil, with an excellent (but slower) atmosphere model, average planet textures, and lacking details on the ground.

- Lutz Justen, with a good terrain engine and nice details on the ground, but so far he only uses real world datasets.

In the commercial field (generally non procedural, but artist drawn):

- Eve Online, with fantastic backgrounds (skyboxes, really), good lighting, and average planet textures. No ground landing possible.

- X3: Reunion, with extremely high-res planet textures and lighting effects, but uninspired backgrounds and weird atmosphere colors (IMO). Still no ground landing as far as i know.

There are more, but these are the main ones worth mentionning.

Awesome work there Ysaneya.
Is my first post here and im hooked to this Log for about 2 or 3 months. Im looking forward to your next posts.
Congrats again.

One more question: do your planets already have some kind of dynamic LOD? In the close-ups, I can't notice a jagged edge to the planets :). So weather they have a lot of polys, or they have a dynamic LOD :).

Thanks xnonix :) dsecrieru: i haven't reimplemented LOD yet, so they are just brute-force spheres at the moment (they have 64x64 segments per face, so 64x64x2x6 triangles per sphere, which is approximately 50,000 triangles).

You create the sphere by subdiving a cube's faces?

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You create the sphere by subdiving a cube's faces?

Yes, i do. It allows a better tesselation and less artifacts on the textures at the poles.

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When are you gonna do gas giants with good lighting :D

That's definately planned but not top-priority right now..

Did you try subdividing an icosahedron? Which one do you think it's better?

The icosahedron is probably better quality (gives less deformations of some triangles), but the cube fits pretty well terrain LOD techniques which assume the terrain area is square, so i think it's better for performance.

Looks like you've made it into the Eve Online forums :).

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=214380

Pretty cool, thanks for the link :) Some of the comments made me laugh.. especially the one about coders who shouldn't be allowed to design games :)

Hehe, no problem.

It's really fun to read online games forums. Personally, I think it's easier to code a good online game, than it is to handle the community afterwards :D.