Planet Textures & Details

[yuyingchenk]

Hello Everyone,

Just tried to land on different lanets and found it looks like the planet textures and details are limited and not enough ...

For example, I am landing on a planet with Toliman A e: A massie ice world with Carbon Dixxide atmo, I found everywhere looks the same, the same color, without any physical features, the ground is all flat ...

What you are thinking about this :)

Cheers,

[FluffyFreak]

Yep it's a problem.
There's some discussion on this already about rewriting the terrain generation (http://pioneerspacesim.net/forum/viewto ... ?f=3&t=103).
I've started some early work about splitting off the Gas Giant generation and rendering (http://pioneerspacesim.net/forum/viewto ... ?f=4&t=119) for which there are two branches (https://github.com/fluffyfreak/pioneer/ ... iant_split & https://github.com/fluffyfreak/pioneer/ ... nt_stripes) where I am trying out some ideas.

I also recently started hacking around with placing instances of "things" onto the terrain (https://github.com/fluffyfreak/pioneer/ ... te_patches) but there is nothing to see there yet, I'm just looking into possible algorithms and finding out what I need to know before it can be done in our engine.

There's also an older branch which I've abandoned now where I removed all of the colour generation as I hoped to use real textures for the terrain. In the end I decided to drop that approach because it was too ambitious to do in a single go. Instead I'll probably follow the plan described in the first link at the top.

Been thinking about this for a while and it is on it's way, just very slowly due to the day job getting in the way :)

Andy

[yuyingchenk]

Hello Andy,

Many thanks for your reply,

Very happy to know we are on the way to address this issue and make thing better :)

Also, I found in some other planets, the textures and details looks better such as landing on Europa:

Alt 1701m:
http://imgur.com/dbkqsLy

And when landing on:
http://imgur.com/QRCYtLg

Cheers,

Yingchen Yu (Cook)

[yuyingchenk]

Hello Everyone,

Just have another 2 suggestions:

1. Normally we can search system's name to find a specific system in F2 portal, however, sometimes it doesn't help (the system name is not unique), it would be better if we can use coordinate to find a system as the system position is fixed.

2. Can we add more halo for all of the suns so that it looks better ?

Let me know your thoughts, cheers

Yingchen

[bszlrd]

You can search for coordinates. Just divide them with space (,comma works too if I remember correctly).

[impaktor]

You can search for coordinates. Just divide them with space (,comma works too if I remember correctly).

Didn't know that. Something that would be nice to have in the manual. (haven't checked if it's there)

[FluffyFreak]

We have a manual? ;)

[bszlrd]

Workin' on it :), but let's not derail the thread.

[yuyingchenk]

Just be advised by one of my friend that previously Pioneer has got a very detailed planet textures, even can be compared with Space Engine, but now it does not get too much details now ...

I did not get a change to play with the previous Pioneer, was the model of planet details changed or ?

Cheers,

Cook

[FluffyFreak]

Take a look in the options screens, you can change the detail settings in there and there is one marked "detail textures".
It doesn't actually use textures at all! It just forces the terrain to keep generating to greater detail, a very nasty hack! But it does look quite good.