Is it possible to make caves when making new planets?

[johnnyhandsome]

See the title, just curious if it's possible and if so, why no one seems to have done it yet.

[The_Rocketeer]

I believe it is possible, but only by adding them as 'surface features' and not part of the structural model of the planet itself. The planet's collision model can't be 'inverted' to create overhangs, because it only has one surface elevation for each location, whereas an overhang or cave would need 3, one for the cave floor, one for the cave ceiling, and one for the ground above the cave.

[Vaporo]

As far as I know, no. Terrain in the game is created from basic heightmaps which, while convenient, makes it impossible to add any kind of overhang without adding some way to represent them on a heightmap. Even if you do find a way to deform the terrain mesh to create them, Unity's terrain systems probably gets some performance enhancements by assuming that there are no overhangs in the terrain. Creating overhangs could cause some interesting bugs.

[jonasrosland]

Perhaps by modifying something like the arc on Mun and put it on top of the planets plane?

[The_Rocketeer]

Perhaps by modifying something like the arc on Mun and put it on top of the planets plane?

That's what I mean by 'surface features'. There are caves in fact on one of Jool's moons (Tylo?) but since a patch a while ago they're now underground. Go figure.

[Grumman]

Caves cannot be implemented with a single heightmap, but it would be possible to do so by a number of other methods. You could create a canyon and then add a mesh to form the roof, you could create a canyon and use a pair of smaller heightmaps with a transparency layer to form the roof, or if you only want basic overhangs you could use procedural generation to deform the heightmap.

[Hagen von Tronje]

Sure. It's just that the cave always leads to an explosion.