| Wed Oct 29 19:27:10 2014 by Ron Vantreese |
| Are there any plans for generating craters in planet.exe? |
| Thu Oct 30 09:19:11 2014 by Torben |
| No. There are lots of things that have higher priorities. You are welcome to add craters to the code yourself. If you get something useful as a result, I'll be happy to add it to the official code. |
| Fri Oct 31 20:03:54 2014 by Ron Vantreese |
| I might be able to assist with that. It may be a while, but I think I can help it to happen. |
| Mon Nov 3 00:49:47 2014 by RGT |
| "A lot of things"? I thought this generator was done! Any cool features that will come eventually, Torben? :D |
| Mon Nov 3 09:12:15 2014 by Torben |
| No immediate plans, but I would like to look at a climate model, so colours are not just a function of latitude and altitude. That is, however, fiendishly complex to do in a zoomable way. Rivers, too, are very complex. In general, I would prioritize Earth-like planets over moon-like bodies, so craters are far down my list of things to add. |
| Mon Nov 3 15:03:39 2014 by Ron Vantreese |
| I find it interesting on the timing. The developer maintaining the NetPBM has defined a new image format called "elevation" and is supported by the PAM-type file format, which is "P7". It was designed to handle terrain-type data. I'm prepared to support it once I learn more about it. And I would like to help out with the planet generator in this area. Rivers? It seems tricky to me too. Has anyone done this? I'm thinking of picking a point and tracing the path where that point will travel by picking the biggest negative change in elevation with the neighboring pixels. Perhaps apply the sin() against the neighboring negative changes to see where the water goes next. But I don't know how bad that kind of calculation can get yet... hehe. |
| Mon Nov 3 17:14:13 2014 by Torben |
| An extra complication with rivers is zoomability: If you only print a local map, you need to figure out where the rivers enter the area. You might have to model rivers globally even if you only need a local map. I have a feeling that real modelling of flow will be impractical, so I was thinking more of co-creating elevation and rivers using a recursive method. But how this should be done I don't quite know. |
| Fri Nov 7 03:33:21 2014 by RGT |
| Cool, glad to see planets will eventually have varied biomes then, so much green is hard to rationalize when using them as maps. ;P (So glad you are still improving this generator, it's the best I have seen so far, makes very realistic looking world when rendered <3) |