NovaSilisko

This made it worth everything:

Not really anything important for the end user, but I made a simple GUI to help build planets for testing (and for the pre-made demo solar system) which makes it far easier to do, and uses the same underlying system that will eventually be used to handle procedurally-added noise generators. Random pictures, as the results have been rather photogenic so far (need a rock texture that looks less like tin foil though) A wide shot. At some point need to make a cubemap generator to control texture blending, to allow more surface variation... And another planet, the same setup again but with different settings: Note the brightness varies between images sometimes due to 1) me changing the material settings and 2) me changing the exposure settings on the lander's camera.

What? I don't see any mention of that in the paper.

Bingo. This whole "if one thing is unrealistic, nothing else needs to be!" thing is an insane fallacy.

Another random one. Just flying around the terrain generator scene seeing how it reacts. There's still the issue of moving so fast the collision system can't actually keep up, but there will be some working values somewhere, just have to find them... Currently each chunk can have up to 64 subdivisions - this comes out to a total of around 8700 triangles for a chunk at full resolution. You can go up as far as 128 subdivisions (which is kind of crazy), which yields I think something like 32,000 triangles, which is fine for a relatively recent GPU. Beyond 128 and you smash facefirst into mesh vertex limits. The problem is generating that much mesh data. 32 is about as high as you can go right now before you start getting stuttering, and 128 is basically unusable with how slow it can get. But that's with all of the generation on the same processor thread. The mesh generation will sooner or later be made multithreaded, which should make 64 subdivisions be quick enough as to be almost unnoticeable, and maybe even 128 will be smooth to generate as well. The maximum will be a game setting, going through Low (16 subdivisions), Normal (32), High (64), and Ludicrous (128). The collision, meanwhile, happens only when you go near to a chunk, to keep the number of active meshes (which are expensive to process) down to a minimum. The same mesh generator is used for the visual and collision meshes, the collision is just generated at a fixed number of subdivisions, currently 32. That may be a game setting as well.

Hmmm... reminds me of something...

I should probably restart this thread sometime soon... and the blog. Most of the information in the first post here and on the blog is already out of date for the third time.

Just screwing around flying around the terrain generator test scene at this point. I am... pleased with the results. Still kinks to work out though, the transitions between different levels of detail on the terrain chunks are fairly obvious, mainly because the method to choose which is needed is fairly crude. A curve will do a better job.

I feel this game has been a tiny bit spoiled now that you can specifically summon a user using @ whatever.

oops droped another 1 (still in the "debug lander" phase, no editor or anything yet, but this is a second example of a working terrain and collision system!)

mmm i sure am enjoying holding onto this secret gif o no i dropped it

Not Soon™ Eventually I still need to reboot the site/blog. Everything on it is already out of date, pretty much...

Did lots of stuff for the terrain generator recently. Works in chunks and is very fast to generate right now while allowing very high detail up close. It's very apparent when the level of detail changes though, mainly because the terrain shaders are based off of vertex colors to control distribution of textures. So when the resolution changes, those vertex colors are less and less fine, making it very quickly degrade. The solution there, then, is to eventually make a texture map, low resolution, to map onto the planet, and use that to control the texture distribution instead. This means the textures will look the same no matter what resolution the mesh has. That will come later. Generation can get a little bit stuttery right now if you move fast and especially so on large planets with lots of chunks, mainly due to the number of times the generator needs to sample the noise map (both to offset the mesh and to calculate the normals), but this will get much better (possibly removing the stutter entirely) when the mesh processing is made to be multithreaded. For collisions, the current notion is to first run a check of the planet against available rigid bodies at a low rate (say once per second), then another check (at a slightly higher rate, say 10 per second, or even base the rate on how fast the object is going) among those for which bodies are close to which chunks. The ones that are close enough will have collision meshes produced near them at a fixed resolution, and then have it deleted when the object is gone. Ideally it's smart enough to know which chunks have generated their collision meshes, so it doesn't keep erasing and deleting it every time, which would slow things down a lot.

Man, I thought this stupidity died like seven years ago.

Pirouette.

Still waiting on a good adaptation of Rendezvous With Rama myself...

As mentioned on my books thread, I've been rebinding two books I have that were broken. Here's The Andromeda Strain, not finished as, again, mentioned before - need to remove the green edging somehow.

[citation needed]

Knowing lego, it'll be for the low low price of $49.99...

Is there some secret settings panel that I've missed? There are abysmally few options in the account setting panel.

You could change it to more than ten before. In fact I'm pretty sure I had it at more than 25?

I really don't like how bright it is. A dark background + making the post fill area an off-white color would go a long way. And I do loathe having to use the WYSIWG editor. At least (some) BBcode things still work

So on a whim I just made this, a replacement for the default user silhouette icon. Dunno if that's even possible to replace by default, but if anyone wants to use it themselves, go nuts. It's 6 am and I felt like making something, demmit

Odd. The forum upgrade broke most image links but the first post's was fine. ed: Or seems like some might be slowly being fixed? Hell if I know.