http://bieh.net “Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.” - Robert A. Heinlein Sun, 10 Aug 2008 11:35:47 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My roads (mostly) now form automatic intersections when I place them. This makes it nice and easy to do city-block style grids. [gallery] I just need some traffic lights and I'm set :) http://bieh.net/intersections/ Just because I could, the Universe client now takes a screenshot when it exits, and pushes it to my server. It's then displayed on the right, with a bigger copy below: This picture should change pretty often when I'm doing active development, but it might look kinda strange if I'm squashing ... http://bieh.net/latest-image/ I implemented some initial support for procedural cities tonight. At the moment this consists of one static 'building' made out of some primitives, and a road system (which is what I spent most of my time playing with). While this doesn't look particularly interesting at the moment, I now have ... http://bieh.net/buildings-and-roads/ I now have some initial support for multiple planets, and different kinds of planets. So, I made a 'moon'. It looks kinda neat, even in it's current semi-broken state. [gallery] It looks pretty nasty from height, though. Because there's basically only one texture and no distance fog, you can see the squares ... http://bieh.net/one-small-step/ Tonight I spent some time implementing a bunch of overdue optimizations and fixes to the terrain engine. Basically all the boring stuff I'd been putting off because it was going to be painful without much payoff :) It was totally worth it, however. FPS is way up, CPU usage is down, ... http://bieh.net/terrain-engine-fixes/ I hacked in a quick lighting effect for the planet atmosphere from space tonight. It looks kinda OK in that shot (and is almost free to render), but it's a fairly rubbish implementation. What I really need to do is implement Rayleigh scattering like in this article. That'd look a lot ... http://bieh.net/orbital-glow/ Today I started trying to improve the appearance of the planet from space. The biggest problem so far with the space scene is that the textures will degrade with the vertex complexity - so when you view the planet from far away, the textures look bad, due to the LOD ... http://bieh.net/space/ After reading some interesting stuff on how the Flight Simulator people did their cloud rendering, I decided to try my hand at it as well. [gallery] They're not much more than a quick hack at the moment, but the results aren't too bad. The biggest problem is the shading - it isn't ... http://bieh.net/clouds/ I found another couple of neat pics from today. Enjoy. [gallery] http://bieh.net/other-misc-pictures/ I recently re-enabled spherical planets again, and spent a few days fixing the myriad of issues that cropped up. It's finally looking a little less broken, so I took some screenshots of a transition from ground to space :) [gallery] Tomorrow I'll be looking at better atmosphere effects, and perhaps some clouds. http://bieh.net/spherical-planets/