Ok. I had a post recently, talking about putting a plane over a sphere. I was going to use that idea as a skirt for a more detailed terrain. The concept depended on the plane being wrapped over the sphere in a fashion that kept each square of the terrain a constant size. This is an utter failure! It is NOT possible to do that-- there will always be a "crumpling" of the vertices at one edge or the other (at least).

My desire is to create a terrain that would move with the player as he crosses over the planet's surface. This approach would give a little detail to an otherwise smooth sphere. As the player gets closer to the planet's surface, the detail would become greater. All of this should happen in real time. I'm shooting low on the detail to keep it fast, but as I said, my earlier approach failed.

I'm looking at an article http://acko.net/blog/making-worlds-1-of-spheres-and-cubes/ to generate the terrain. The article uses a cube that is projected into a sphere. This cube is made up of 6 quad-trees. I'm slowly trying to understand how to implement a quad-tree, but I think I need to be able to convert a spherical coordinate into a plane coordinate in order to know where on the quad-tree the player is.... How would you do that?

I wasted about a week of programming before discovering my flaw; I hope I'm not going down another dead-ended road.

I'm still trying to figure out how to do this...... I've never done a quad-tree, so this is a hard concept to wrap my head around.

I think I need to make 6 quad-trees, one for each face of the cube. Then, for each mesh created (depending on detail etc...), I will have to convert the flat planes into their spot on the sphere. Then, using some noise function (like perlin noise), generate the elevation (which is in/out from center of the sphere)..... This is getting complicated.....

The problem is that I can't take this "one step at a time", because I can't see true results until I get it nearly finished.....

I'm already at the beginning of step 4 because up to this point, I can see it in my head. If I made code to visualize these, I would have to make it in a different way than is needed for the final product. I can make a single plane to visualize step 4 before implementing all 6 cube faces though.....