Starship EVO News

Planet have finally landed!
Fully explorable and procedural planets are replacing the old prefabs.

Dont fall in love with a planet just yet as they will likely be tweaked further which will impact the terrain generation.
Likewise export your ground structures so you can reuse when this happens.

Bugfixes and improvements:

• Player no longer sliding on slope
  
• Settings might get reset in some conditions
  

Thanks for playing!

First sorry the update is still not out! I want to release it when I am satisfied with the result and I have a few items on my list to tackle.

To be honest I have spent a lot of the time on tracking and fixing bugs...
A few things I added where tree and monoliths though:

Trees:
They are randomized to an extent: their color of course but also their bark and leaf texture are swapped randomly. The color will sometime matches the ground color and sometime be of an complementary color. The tricky part was working on a LOD tech so they are not too resources intensive.
I would like to spend more time to also generate procedurally the trunk but this will have to wait for another update!



Monoliths and ore veins
Of course the ultimate goal for exploring planet will be to harvest resources and mine ore especially. I added ore veins with that in mind. Another feature was the monolith: most of the time these will be standard rocks but once in a while you will see more exotic shapes like pyramids, prism or else. And if you are lucky they will be made of raw ore! As they are visible from afar this will be quite convenient to mine large quantity of metal.

I leave you with a few screenshots! I am not satisfied with a 100s of little things but it is getting there!









Cheers
Francois

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!