Looking for similar work
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I been working on developing a new method for rendering planet size objects. I wanted to be able to fly off an planet through the atmosphere and return or land on another.
I know there is some games that created a universe using pseudo random numbers.
I am looking at handling detail of the terrain on planets down to 1 yard triangles or slightly smaller. That means for a planet about earths size about 9000 trillion triangles would be needed. I actually calculated for a planet with a 31,400 miles circumference.
Anyway the current routine I came up with should drop it down below 200k visible and handled triangles.
Now for the question can anyone point me to a game or simulator that runs on a pc that you can seamlessly fly to and from planets?
I'll try and put a demo out some time in the near future when I got more added to it.
how exactly are you going to do this? I'm going to attempt to do something similar once I complete my physics engine.
I believe that the biggest challenge you will face is problems with the z-buffer. Most cards have 32 bit z-buffers, which will break down when the near and far planes are at high distance ratios (i.e. about 10km viewing distances). This totally kills your ability to simply render the planets. You now have to resort to imposters, even when the planet is very near (i.e. even in orbit). I read an article about doing a simulation like this, where the writer clamped the near and far planes just far enough to render the planet, rendered it to a texture, then rendered that to the screen as an imposter.
I already have a method worked out for subdividing the faces of an octahedron recursively depending on distance to the planet, and a way that random terrain can easily be generated - using a triangular version of the diamond-square algorithm that takes the midpoints of each edge plus/minus a random amount. This works well, but having dynamic LOD for something of this scale is quite difficult, a challenge that i'm not ready yet to undertake. I'm gonna wait a few years for the hardware to catch up.
I don't recall any planet simulators right off hand, but i have seen some, although they aren't near the level of detail that you want.
I believe that the biggest challenge you will face is problems with the z-buffer. Most cards have 32 bit z-buffers, which will break down when the near and far planes are at high distance ratios (i.e. about 10km viewing distances). This totally kills your ability to simply render the planets. You now have to resort to imposters, even when the planet is very near (i.e. even in orbit). I read an article about doing a simulation like this, where the writer clamped the near and far planes just far enough to render the planet, rendered it to a texture, then rendered that to the screen as an imposter.
I already have a method worked out for subdividing the faces of an octahedron recursively depending on distance to the planet, and a way that random terrain can easily be generated - using a triangular version of the diamond-square algorithm that takes the midpoints of each edge plus/minus a random amount. This works well, but having dynamic LOD for something of this scale is quite difficult, a challenge that i'm not ready yet to undertake. I'm gonna wait a few years for the hardware to catch up.
I don't recall any planet simulators right off hand, but i have seen some, although they aren't near the level of detail that you want.
Frontier: First Encounters did this, albeit in a crude way, but that was already back in 1995.
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