So, way back when I started this project, I was using the libnoise library to generate my heightmap, but got rid of it after I couldn’t see a decent way to generate precise enough noise with the noiseutils wrapper I was using. Tonight I looked a little deeper into it, and found out how to get the precision I needed, which actually turned out to be pretty simple – guess I should have looked a bit harder last time. Anyway, I now have a height generation backend that uses libnoise, and it’s producing some fairly nice results:
That’s using mostly ridged fractal noise to generate mountains, with some additional noise modules to add flat bits. I really must work on the ground combat gameplay stuff at some point soon – those mountains would make for a pretty decent Tribes-style battle 
I recently did some more work on this old project. It’s now significantly faster and better, with a shiny new CEGUI-based interface. Hopefully this new client will make its way to the WAND project page at some point. In the mean time, here are some screenshots:
I also tried out this new-fangled Youtube thing, although the quality has suffered somewhat in the conversion.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXp2CuOd-Qc&fmt=18
Wordpress doesn’t seem to want to display the high quality version, but here’s a direct link to it.
Despite the long silence since the last post on this project, I’ve actually been doing a bit of work on it on and off. I completely reworked much of the the underlying systems, moving it to a proper engine. While it doesn’t look that much different, it’s much easier to code for. Pics:
I’m using atmosphere shaders based off those in GPU Gems, which still require a bunch of tweaking to look realistic. Even at this stage it looks a lot better than the old hacky atmosphere I used to have though. I’m also playing with water reflections in a couple of those shots, which has proved slightly annoying due to the curved planet surface messing up the standard methods to do reflection.
Behind the scenes there’s also a server that generates an endless procedural universe. It uses perlin noise to generate star and planet clusters and sends the relevent seed data for each planet to the client. As a result, all of the stars in the sky are actually stars with planets, and you can actually fly to them by pointing the camera at them and holding the up arrow for a while – if you have the patience, of course. I’m still working on implementing the different planet types on the client. In one of the screenshots above I’m orbiting a mars-like planet that I flew to from the earth-like one.
While it’s still a very long way off anything game-like, I’m not too far off having at least the ability to fly around the entire universe at will and look at stuff, which I think is kinda neat
I finally got around to upgrading this blog to WP2.7, only a month after it came out.
I also jumped on the stats bandwagon and set up Google Analytics. I’ve got a couple of posts saved up to make sometime when I get around to it, so now I’ll be able to see if anyone actually reads them
