Terrain Texturing

[FluffyFreak]

This is a plot of the rough length calculation based on it's "depth" within the quadtree
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

[Keeper]

Not completely following the code (no real programming experience beyond tweaking values of things and adding some "if" and "else" etc., so terms like "quadtree" are alien to me). But if in the following if statement I were simply to add *2 to the value centroidDist = (campos - centroid).Length() wouldn't that then double the distance at which an LOD split is drawn? I'm assuming "centroidDist" is a variable related to the distance, which is what I'm after. Or is it too naive to assume there's an easy way to just add a multiplier to the LOD distance algorithm?

[Keeper]

Turns out I had to divide the value rather than multiply it. Added /5 to the value i.e. centroidDist = (campos - centroid).Length()/5; and wow, it looks stunning. So many geologic features I'd never seen before in the game because they'd always blur away into Low-Poly Land by the time I got enough altitude to see them!

[bobtheterrible]

Screen shot??! :)

[FluffyFreak]

I tried this, it took memory consumption upto 3GB of ram :D

Did look pretty though, and it ran ok on my fairly high end PC

[impaktor]

@fluffyfreak any point in making it an in-game option? "delux rig"

[Keeper]

I could see a terrain multiplier option that would simply divide the value by 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, etc. with a warning that that also increases memory usage.

Here's a screenshot after launching from New Hope. Keep in mind I also use a realistic FOV setting as well (and a custom skybox that's at 4x higher resolution as a result, though I don't think that's evident here).

http://www.keeper1st.com/pioneer/screen ... 161550.png

[FluffyFreak]

<The-EG> fluffyfreak: yeah height and temp would be good for planets with atmosphere. and for the multiple LUTs...maybe use different channels? Each LUT could technically have 3 different versions in a single file...
<The-EG> not sure if I already mentioned that or not
<The-EG> or even 4 if you are RGBA

So that I do not lose this train of thought.

Instead of having height+slope, switch to having height+temperature.
These values are stored per-vertex currently which seems... not ideal but it's been ok for development so far

Other things could be stored in the Green/Blue/Alpha channels of the LUT as well, but not sure what or how I'd use them currently.

[The-EG]

Other things could be stored in the Green/Blue/Alpha channels of the LUT as well, but not sure what or how I'd use them currently.

What made me think of that was you had made a comment about having multiple LUTs per planet/terrain type. I think you gave examples as, a volcanic planet vs. one with an atmosphere or something. There's nothing saying you couldn't have separate files for them, but why load 3 textures when you can have it in one (and those channels aren't used anyway)?

This could also be used to bring some variation to the planets as well. You can make 4 different versions of the texturing and use the planet's procedural seed to pick one is used. This would obviously be a 'nice to have' for later on down the road...

[testadilegno]

Justin stumbled upon this website providing some textures (CC license) for the solar system. Apparently used in some oolite mods.
https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/