pegwars : political economic and galactic warfare

I've started work on the procedural planets, here are some initial screenshots.  Like everything in Pegwars, it all has to be seamless, from flying in outerspace to orbiting planet and moon surfaces to landing and running around. Each planet's geometry is formed by tessellating an icosahedron.  This shape was chosen to help make each vertex as equidistant as possible in the final mesh; tessellated icosahedra perform better in this regard than tessellated cubes or parametric spheres, and have the added bonus of having triangular faces, making it easy to tessellate and render. Each triangle face of the icosahedron is recursively split at the edge midpoints to generate the next level of detail of geometry, as needed.  For performance reasons, as you don't want to be allocating GPU resources at runtime, Pegwars has a fixed set of vertex and index buffers for planets and moons - meaning a maximum of 10 planets at once, each with up to 3 orbiting moons.  Once I...

A seamless universe is important to the Pegwars experience, and that means procedural atmospheres you can see from outer-space all the way down to the ground. The Pegwars atmosphere shader is drawn in screen-space, and composited over the screen using the depth information from both near and far depth textures.  The shader itself simulates Rayleigh and Mie Scattering by ray tracing through and integrating against the atmosphere volume, taking into account the air density at any point based on altitude and what's in the depth buffers, the relevant ratios of gases and particulates, as well as other procedural variables. As well as drawing to the screen, the atmosphere is also drawn into the near cube-map for reflections, ambient lighting and the all-important SSDO.  This way objects fit in the scene nicely, no matter what planet you are flying around.