I'm still progressing. Last week i've been doing a lot of work on the atmosphere shaders (will that stop one day?), especially the parameters at sunset. Another thing i still have to do is the transparency of the atmosphere at night, since at the moment it's fully opaque (so all you see is black, you can't see the stars).

Betelgeuze, a user on my forum, has been kind enough to make some texturing work, and i must say it's promising. He is working on some ground textures mostly for non-Earth like planets (since i've acquired a texture pack for Earth terrains). He's also working on some DEMs (digital elevation maps).

DEMs i hear you say ? "But i thought you were generating your planet procedurally".. ? And you're right, of course, but one problem with generating a procedural planet is that it's lacking "personality". So, what i plan to do is to generate a set of DEMs and to spawn them randomly on some planets, to make some places more interesting to visit. When spawning the DEMs, some parameters can be changed (for example: the type of terrain on which they are placed, can be perfectly flat, or already composed of hills or mountains; or their scale, etc.. ) which means that even if two planets use the same DEM, they will look slightly different. The DEMs themselves are pretty small, so they're covering a very small area of the planet (generally around 50 to 100 kilometers wide), but i hope that will be enough to give more style to the planets, and interesting location points to generate some cities.

This week i'm going to continue on the terrain, trying to fix the seams, and hopefully next week i should start on integrating the detail textures.