This thread is dedicated to indies that are trying to generate planets like our beloved INS is doing. Feel free to post anything you find.
Some of these projects date to '010, I wonder what happened.
One year since last video.
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Now that seems some cool stuff. I wonder however if the forest is generated throughout the whole planet ? Also, I guess there’s only one planet, right ?
Guess it’s only Earth. And yes. Forests seem to be global.
And this is one of the coolest thing imo:
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This one is fresh.
some of us actually tried to use this engine to make a game
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Another fresh one.
These are some best procedural clouds and rivers I have seen…
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Are they flowing down? Interesting.
I suppose that is not in a planetary scale.
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Not sure if they generate the whole planet, but that terrain is huge and even the foliage is really good.
Having that kind of terrain generation on planets would be really cool.
Though I guess not every planet should be that flourishing with life, as all planets that we know of currently are void of life.
Anyway, I’ve watched the earlier minutes of the video … some of the developpers are fans of half-life I see 
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Would like to know @INovaeFlavien s view on this one. Have these people solved the impossible procedural rivers problem or is this something that couldn’t be applied into something like Infinity?
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it’s never really been impossible, just if you try your rivers will likely be unrealistic and not always flow in the correct direction… if you look at that video closely, well at least i notice some rivers that go up in both directions.
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It looks nice, but nothing says it’s being rendered in real time. It’s not on a planetary scale ( in the video you can clearly see the limits of the horizon ).
The paper is about terrain generation, nothing to do with rendering.
The main problem is that the terrain is generated through an algorithm that needs to know about all the terrain, and not just as a function of a given planetary position.
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That XNA Planet Renderer with the ship flying around looks a lot like the Infinity 2010 Tech Demo (although much less refined). It even has similar looking wedding cake mountains.
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It surely must be possible to have realistic procedural rivers on a procedural planet, yes the water flow is dependent on the actual height data instead of just some position seed, but there must be ways around this. Splitting/generating terrain to the lowest/acceptable level around the river, so that you can generate river data comes to mind…
Yes, it does look a lot like Infinity @LucasFIN, he might be using a similar algorithm for the height data that INS is using.
Found a fun game/project over at RockPaperShotgun
http://megatonrainfall.com/press/
Innovative visual effects
Featuring procedural real time exploding/slicing/collapsing of buildings, and an Universe-scale rendering engine.
What engine is he using? Space Engine?
Another Interesting scene from that trailer:
Found a video with not so seamless planetary transition, though other interesting things:
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So… Play as Super Man against Martians?
And take out a building full of people if you miss with your lazer beam 
Sounds fun to me. And surely something to do with such an engine. Fly arround blow shit up
I think it would be pretty revolutionary to create hydrologically (semi)-accurate river structures in a single-pass of procedural terrain generator - and IA, please correct me if I’m wrong, but the Inovae Engine’s terrain heights are generated in a single pass (are you still doing lateral vertex displacement? If so, perhaps that counts as a second pass).
If you’re willing to make several generation passes over the data, however I can see it being very feasible to develop an algorithm which only depends upon local data (i.e. only on neighboring patches) to approximate flow basins. I bet to make it really good, however, you’d need to do multiple iterations upon that, which is where the real performance hit comes from. Not sure though, I haven’t studied the existing techniques.
*Offtopic - @InfinityAdmin (hah, nope… but I’m leaving that for old times’ sake) - @INovaeFlavien I’m curious, when computing dx and dy for your terrain normals, are you using a differentiable noise function, or do you use a second pass and measure finite differences?
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