I've made a lot of progress recently focusing on refining my procedural planets and atmospheres. Added into the mix are multi-core particle systems, procedural nebula and AI. I'm almost ready to post videos but am excited that I have now fully tied in the galaxy to the rest of the engine, meaning totally seamless travel between every star in the galaxy all the way from warp-drive-speeds down to landing on and running around planets in first-person. Enough talk, here are some screenshots of my recent explorations : Some kind of desert planet, looks a little bit like Australia! Here's a shot of my prototype cloud system. The clouds are image based, the idea being to use a particle system or maybe cellular automata on the GPU to create procedural cloud maps for each planet. The clouds are incorporated into the atmosphere scattering shader, meaning that they get nice sunset lighting and they also cast shadows into the atmostphere. Plus you can p...
New Nebulae Recently I began replacing the old particle-based nebula standin with proper volumetric nebula shaders. The nebulae need to be many and varied, and so I want to procedurally generate them like the rest of the universe. After being introduced to some awesome volumetric nebula examples on ShaderToy, I thought I'd too have a play around with ray-tracing a noise field to create procedural nebulae. The end result looks something like this : Ray Tracing a Noise Field The general algorithm for rendering a volumetric noise field: - for each pixel on the screen, cast a ray from far to near (or near to far based on your needs) - at each step, accumulate density by looking up procedural noise functions - in this case, a fractal brownian motion function. - return the accumulated density, to be manipulated for the final pixel colour. This is a very basic implementation of volumetric ray-tracing, and runs very slow for the output quality. ...
Pegwars, or Political Economic and Galactic Warfare, is my hobby computer game that I've been writing since, um about October 1997. That's 12 years ago! For anyone that has been around computer games a long time, the word ELITE should mean something to you. Something special. ELITE was the game that hooked me for life. Until ELITE, games were a fun curiosity, usually involving run and jumping a little man , llama or 'Horace' around 2D levels, requiring pixel-perfect accuracy and some bleepy soundtrack that these days is considered somewhat 'retro-cool'. ELITE was a full 3D (wireframe) space combat exploration and trading game, which involved 8 entire galaxies, alien races, missions and more. All of this on a 48K ZX Spectrum. For an 11 year old boy, that was quite something, and my mind was truly blown. Ever since university and being able to write somewhat coherent code, I've been writing PEGWARS, my interpretation of this genre. It's my hobby pro...
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