Starship EVO News

Here are the latest developments on the planet update!

I have been busy on improving the following aspect of the tech:

Atmospheric shader
The previous atmosphere was very flat.
The new atmosphere now uses realistic lighting and Rayleight and Mie scattering. It all sounds fancy but it simply means the sky will fade to white close to the horizon, and it will brighten up near the sun. It now has a much more interesting visual personality, with a nice halo around the sun and some color shift on sunset. As you can see on the screenshot the atmosphere color is also now randomized.



Clouds
Clouds are now fully volumetric which adds a lot of character to each planets. They use a realistic lighting and shadowing which gives them that nice dramatic presence. Furthermore each planet now generates its own cloud cover.
I tried to strike the best balance between visual and performance which is really tricky as any volumetric effect will be very expensive. They could benefit from further tweaks as they are too flat and same looking from planet to planet, this will have to wait a bit though as I need to move on to other area!



Biome randomization:
The progress continues on this front with some more terrain random parameters and a new color picking logic.


This planet I found for example features two biomes with different rock colors, which gives a fancy but not too wild rainbow effect.

Planetary Rings and asteroids
I had to get back to the asteroids as the terrain tech had to evolve so much for the planet. They now benefits from the speedup of the GPU terrain generation. Now rings can also be spawned on non-gas planets, and they will also be randomized with different colors, ring pattern and asteroid look.
It looks quite dramatic as you can now see individual asteroids from the ground!



I also did plenty of small and big fixes or improvements necessary before the release, like regarding the player movements and collision with the terrain. Player will now longer get stuck under the terrain and no longer slide on slopes...

Thanks for your patience, hopefully the release is not too far away!
Francois

Welcome to the latest update on our biggest update yet: planets!



Here you can see the tech in action.

The unique feature is that it combine deformable and 3d voxel terrain with 2d terrain map to give a nice HD look from space. 3d voxel engine appears very blurry and low res as they are super intensive to compute.
Here I also overlay a 2d map on the terrain to add more details. Other games solve this differently, No Man Sky for example is using terrain rock textures which gives the HD look, but dont look like the terrain you are about to land on which breaks a bit the transition from space to terrain.

Note there are a few things that will be improved, mainly:
- Clouds will be volumetric
- Tree will be added,
- Still some popping artifact to fix / minimize.

Also this is a smaller on at 44km radius. They are planet at over 100km radius (which is actually 8x bigger, not 2x, as planets are 3d objects.)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Here you can see the difference:
Normal 3d voxels:


And with the tech in action:


It makes all the difference in the world (you will have to open the image in another tab to really see it in HD - it is all about definition).

Thanks a lot all!
Francois

The planet update is still well underway, here is the latest progress made:

Ocean and Water
I have added ocean! This is so important, it gives a lot of personality to a planet when viewed from orbit and make it more fun nearby.
I had to rework the old water shader a lot, I hope you will like the result.
I added some wave movement, some specularity and a better shading overall. Waves especially where tricky as I had to rethink a lot of things like the way the water integrate with the atmosphere, how the transition over/under water is done and so on.
I have also improved the water buoyancy physics and added some drag. Oh and I also added some SFX.



[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Shore: beach and caves
To make the shore more interesting and more believable I added some specific elements to the terrain generation. Some beach will be generated and if the terrain nearby allow it some nice rocks and cave will also be spawned. It was already fun to look around for some spot to explore! It was tricky to manipulate the generation algorithm without giving glitchy result, but I will use what I learned to add more landform type in the future.





Craters
The game can now spawn craters of all size. Some biggy one can even be seen from space! This will be particularly helpful for desolate planets like our moon. This was also quite tricky, I had to completely re-engineer the way normal are computed to make it run fast enough.



Planetary Tech
When making a planet technology there is two approach: 3d/voxel vs 2d/heightmap texture.
3d/voxel is the way to go for Starship-EVO as this is the way to deliver interesting and minable terrain up-close.
2d is cheaper on the hardware so it yield much better visual result from afar whilst the 3d voxel will look quite low-res as you are quite hardware limited. You can see this on the various screenshots and videos.

One idea I had was to blend the 3d approach with a higher-res texture to give more details when viewing the planet from space. Good news: it works well! But before I unveil some screenshot of planets from orbit I want to improve that system a bit and have it work also from medium distance. I will generate a cascade of textures at different levels the closer to the surface the player will get.

This tuned for progress on this in the next devlog!

A few more screenshots for the road!

So I have been busy the latest couple of months working on my biggest update yet: fully explorable planets.
It is so exciting to finally experience some proper planets in the game. It is also a real challenge as I have to tackle hundreds of different problems. A lot of experiments and dead ends were taken, but now the technology starts to converge well to a solid foundation.

This very much work in progress. This is why I will not show some shots of planets from a afar just yet, as I still need to improve and add a few more features. I will do further update showcasing various part of the tech as I progress and get closer to a proper release. Right now I have been focusing on making a biome in the style of the habitat, but I will of course randomize biomes and add a lot more terrain styles! The planet shown is also a small one at 44km radius - some will be 2x or 3x bigger.



Planets are fully deformable and leverage on the terrain refactor introduced for the asteroids. I had to improve plenty of things though: for example in order for terrain to load fast I had to offload the density computation to the GPU using compute shaders. Terrain patches are now loading much much faster!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
A small mountain pass. There is a lot of popping especially on the large boulders, but I should be able to improve this significantly.

Work done:
- Various elevation style with mountain, valley, rolling hills.
- Word prop spawning (rock, foliage). These are fully integrated with the physics engine, so you can collide and take rocks for example.
- Terrain look and shader: I had to improve the base from asteroids. I can now overlay two materials and have a close and distant texture, which is really useful to improve the look of rocks and mountains for example.
- Snow can spawn at high elevation
- Atmospheric shader, I am really happy about that one but I cant show it to you yet as planets are not looking great from space for the moment...
- Cloud and cloud shadow:
- Gravity and ambient lighting.

Still to do:
- Use 2d map to improve the look from space
- Improve the randomization of the generation, so that each planet are unique and interesting!
- Add more terrain material type, including water and lava.
- Add various SFX and VFX
- Clouds are really basic for now, I will add volumetric clouds as I will want to use that tech for gas giants.
- Randomize the appearance of foliage, rocks and grass.
- Add tree and other aliens flora
- Add fauna. This will come much later on, once the survival loop is implemented.

The first release will contains the first 3-4 items. The rest will tackled in smaller updates after that.


Thanks for playing!
Francois

Hotfix build.

Community Suggestion

• #5017 Rounded block improvements
  

Bugfixes:

• #5018 Sliding door and canopy physics
  

Thanks for playing!