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[Iroquois]

We can all imagine a million things to do having a full Earth + Moon bodies to play around with. Even more with a Mars body as developers are planning.

However I believe that once the engine comes out commercial, there will be one thing and one thing only indie developers will be looking forward and dreaming about:

A RANDOM PLANET GENERATOR:
Capable or generating a celestial body (earth size) completely random. Non two alike ever. A hole new planet never before seen for the user to explore. Defining max height and total % of global water, vegetation or other variables and letting the fractals do the job.

I could take with no problem 10 hours of CPU work if the final result is a full "personal and mine alone" planet (and I don't even have to be an indie developer to enjoy this).

The generator could allow uploaded user textures (20 or 30) to be apply by height (x texture from 0 to 10 meters, U texture from 10 to 50 meters, J texture for 0 to -100 meters in water)... No need for animal life. No need for weather system, No need for wind (all of there could be added later with different plug ins if you would like to polish the planet).

Just think about it. Set the variables in the generator (bullsh*t variables I just made up  :
Min Height: XXXX
Max Height: XXXX
Vegetation: None
Global Water: 10%
Terrain distribution: Random full (no continents consideration, no mountain chain or tectonic rigging considered).
Sun (max 3 suns allowed): 1 Sol

And hit the GENERATE button and go off to sleep.

Wake up next day, make a cup of coffee, load the world. Set a UFO view or a vehicle mode and out you go to explore a FULL PLANET none has ever seen before!!!.

The fractals could really create amazing things if your could tell them in which way to build. Mixing and twitching randomly gigantic thin and tall skyscrapers like mountains or deserts ripped apart by thousand meter deep rivers. Valleys that go around the hole planet, or forests too complicated to navigate by foot that would represent a challenge in itself... whatever the numbers come up with. I believe there could be no bad results or unsatisfactory ones after the generation of the world.

You could be more than a full year exploring your new world with Ocultus Rift googles and never get tired.

You could even give a main map texture for the engine to build upon it the random features making the generation even easier (instead of earth or mars global map, your own). In just one JPG like the main guidance for the engine to build up upon....

Anyways you get the picture. And I know that once I have my earth to play around with once Outerra and Outmartem comes out commercial. And once I realize I have to spend a full year planning and building models for my app-game in the end they will occur in the same planet they all have...I would WANT a new own planet of course. Like any developer you want your own stuff, your own creation. Even of its random generated by an engine, it will still be better than "what everyone has".

This engine is the most impressive one I have seen so far (this one and the Dream engine, still this one is far heavy duty one). But pre-compiled planet is still PRE-COMPILED and not SURPRISINGLY UNEXPLORED, UNIQUE or ONE OF A KIND. If we have to wait for at least 2 or 3 more years for this project to be released commercial I think they could take a look at the possibility of creating a generator like this...

I would certainly pay a little more to have it with my purchase.

What do you think?

[cameni]

A planet creator would be indeed a great thing to have, if it was something that could be done easily atop of the rendering engine. Unfortunately, in reality it's a lot of extra work in addition to the engine itself that is going to render it. That is - if the generator should be something better than just a multifractal Perling that everyone is doing.

We could relatively easily make a planet generator based on some kind of fractal noise formula. But we really dislike what it outputs - while the terrain can resemble the real one, it also falls short of it and it cannot be fixed easily. It's a dead end actually. Much more complex stuff is needed to make it work in a way that would approach the shapes of the real (earth) terrain, especially if you want to walk on it, and if it should have real size.

Just think about it. Set the variables in the generator (bullsh*t variables I just made up  :
Min Height: XXXX
Max Height: XXXX
Vegetation: None
Global Water: 10%
Terrain distribution: Random full (no continents consideration, no mountain chain or tectonic rigging considered).
Sun (max 3 suns allowed): 1 Sol

And hit the GENERATE button and go off to sleep.

This would not need a night to generate that, it can be done instantly. Without the continent considerations, mountain ridges, dependent river basins it's just a local fractal noise function. But it's boring - fractal functions are by definition self-similar, and even if you applied a handful of various tricks (noise profile changing with the elevation etc), they would never generate consistent linear or branching features that are the results of erosion and flows, that make it much more interesting.

Our (long term) plan is different: a staged generation process where each stage can be either done procedurally by a specialized generator, or overtaken or augmented by an artistic input. The stages will be:

• continent shapes
• mountain ridges
• river basins
• volcanoes
• biomes

Each stage should have a specialized generator capable of creating interesting structures. For example, the continent generator creating unique continent and large island shapes, that can be modified or constrained or replaced altogether by user input.

We can all imagine a million things to do having a full Earth + Moon bodies to play around with. Even more with a Mars body as developers are planning.

However I believe that once the engine comes out commercial, there will be one thing and one thing only indie developers will be looking forward and dreaming about:

I'd certainly not say it's the "one and only thing" indie developers want, in fact it's just a small part of inquiries we are receiving. A majority actually wants the Earth in some specific age setting. And apart from the indies, simulator fans and military certainly do not want to play on an artificial planet either. So from the commercial point of view it makes more sense to initially focus on the Earth rendering. Besides, as I wrote earlier - the generator is an extra work atop of the work needed for the rendering engine, which must be done in any case.

[BenDragon]

I was randomly passing over threads when I stumbled across this thread.

During my break, I found a program called "L3DT" which is a terrain generator / creator created by Aaron.

Maybe instead of a random planet generator that generates terrain, have a generator that worked similar to this where you still reserve some control over how the new world is created in the way you can define oceans, mountains, meadows and plains, define where foliage and rivers are created all defined using large areas of the planet's surface using a similar manor to L3DT.

[PytonPago]

We could relatively easily make a planet generator based on some kind of fractal noise formula. But we really dislike what it outputs - while the terrain can resemble the real one, it also falls short of it and it cannot be fixed easily. It's a dead end actually. Much more complex stuff is needed to make it work in a way that would approach the shapes of the real (earth) terrain, especially if you want to walk on it, and if it should have real size.

Well ... trying to simplify a chaos theory effect on the fractal basis of the universe is kinda hard to try. The principles are simple, but the slight-differentiation is actually the outcome of matters being dependent one another in every state and time-depended derivation change at patricle-scale - for mountains in their mineral-basin and earth-core dynamics, for plants the environmental factors ... patterns will be always visible at a certain scale-frequency. Nature just has the upper hand of its base in the quantum-particle to big-ass universe scale whyle having the great powers of reality's energy itself. - for such simulations, vertex stuff needs a long way to go and processing power a quantum particle-state processing technology in PCs. ...

Our (long term) plan is different: a staged generation process where each stage can be either done procedurally by a specialized generator, or overtaken or augmented by an artistic input. The stages will be:

• continent shapes
• mountain ridges
• river basins
• volcanoes
• biomes

Each stage should have a specialized generator capable of creating interesting structures. For example, the continent generator creating unique continent and large island shapes, that can be modified or constrained or replaced altogether by user input.

Graphical-shape based differentiation generators might be the simplest way to achieve good results indeed. Planing to let the 5 stages to be generated and/or inserted in a form kinda as height-texture sketches (just that it would use all 5 stages in separate pictures and focus on the shapes in them, and a global scale map)?

[cameni]

Not necessarily as height textures, actually it is supposed to be mostly vector stuff, at least the first three.

[PytonPago]

Not necessarily as height textures, actually it is supposed to be mostly vector stuff, at least the first three.

... well, there is always a way to convert between vectorized data and a height-map. Youre right, that can be done in external software tools too.

[krz9000]

"just" copy the feature-set of worldmachine and everyone would be pleased you could do all the heavy lifting of calculations in the cloud this sentence much modern, so wow

[HiFlyer]

This seems pretty cool, even if its from a few years ago.

[PytonPago]

This seems pretty cool, even if its from a few years ago.

 ... hmm, makes me want to see an Solar eclipse in OT ... maybe a procedurally generated dynamic sun-surface. ( in UV, IR too !! ) 

[ProGamer]

Earth is shaped by billions of years of weather, water, plate tectonics, and other phenomenon that randomly generated landscapes fail to create. They don't feel real, especially if one has some geological knowledge.

[ProGamer]

Our (long term) plan is different: a staged generation process where each stage can be either done procedurally by a specialized generator, or overtaken or augmented by an artistic input. The stages will be:

• continent shapes
• mountain ridges
• river basins
• volcanoes
• biomes

Each stage should have a specialized generator capable of creating interesting structures. For example, the continent generator creating unique continent and large island shapes, that can be modified or constrained or replaced altogether by user input.

Could a real world data bases of things like volcanoes around the world be used?

[cameni]

Volcanoes are already a part of the topology. If you mean their other effects, like the plumes, they would have to be based on real data. Whatever the generator can do, can be overridden by external input.

[ProGamer]

Volcanoes are already a part of the topology. If you mean their other effects, like the plumes, they would have to be based on real data. Whatever the generator can do, can be overridden by external input.

My bad, I ment to say can I get the world location of real world volcanoes and then have them erupt? With the proper code for the type of eruption. Like say triggering Yellowstone national park, Mount St. Helens, Krakatoa, etc...

[ZeosPantera]

Well ground deformation is do-able and smoke works (sort of).. So what is a volcano eruption but a combination of those two things.

[Jagerbomber]

Uh... lava