Full sized planets for Unity3D -- interesting?

I just found a HUGE BUG within the fractal generators, which I inserted a long time ago. It probably never worked under nVidias...

Also, as this is quick to do, will be adding the separate normalmap for the water so that will improve overall quality.

Will be releasing a new update in a few hours, working correctly both under nVidia and ATI.

Very thank you all for your great patience until now. =)

imerso

 

Its good to here that you can work so fast . I am happy that water will have separate normalmap it will indeed make water much more advance. Though i have still question about the atmospheric part of the plug-in do you have estimated time where we can expect it, and of course do you have any tips on how i can make collisions ? Now you can fly threw the planet i would like to avoid it haha.

Plus yes i am doing a lot of experimentation with this plug-in i know how to make Moons and Asteroids with it its very powerful when you start to know what is what.

 

Hi Imerso,

Just so you know, I'll happily buy in as soon as an indie free version becomes available.
(I simply don't have $1500 to spend on a game engine sorry).

 

Nvidia fix is working great. Keep up the good work.

 

I need to fix Mac OSX, then return to the atmospheres/hdr/bloom and finally add water animation. Collision with the planets work using builtin physics (instead of moving directly the camera, you need to use forces and move a body through the world so it collides against the planet), but I'll be adding an alternate collision which is faster but simpler.

[]s

 

Okkei happy to see that work is still in progress and yep you were right with the collision, now it works perfectly .

 

As I still don't have access to a Macintosh, I'll be trying to solve two problems with one take: this weekend I'll make some related changes which will probably make it run under Mac AND as a gift, run under Unity Indie.

Unity Indie and Mac will have a similar alternative code path which is slower but more compatible.

Next week I'll be finally finishing atmospheres and hopefully fixing one annoying little bug that sometimes happens in some edges, showing little spikes over parts of the terrain.

Pre-buyers of course will get the upgrade for free.


[]s
imerso

 

That's good to hear i had problems with those spikes but i thought it was my settings fault happy to know it was not .
You say that it will be slower dose it mean that everybody will be slower or will you release alternative for Unity Pro and for Indie users ?

 

The extension under Unity Indie will be a bit slower but still nice. There will be a boolean flag within the code to switch between Pro/Indie paths.

Under Mac will be slower for some time.

Under Unity Pro will be always using the fastest path.

 

it just seems to me that some developers are going to quickly throw things together to where each planet is just going to be Fallout: New Vegas, all over again. like there's just going to be maybe 5 uninteresting cities on each planet and the rest of the planet will only be completely barren and boring wastelands.

This sort of thing really seems like it would require a team of people for you to make anything stellar with. You could use this by yourself, but realistically it'll take you a LONG time to make something massive. Maybe I'm just being a downer.

Although I can't wait till someone makes something great with this.

 

I managed to get the extension running under Unity3D Indie as well --- using a slightly different code path.

Not all features are enabled and there are some details here and there, but it definitely works, and I'm quite happy with the actual performance and visual quality of this new version.

This version probably runs under Macintosh, and is a bit closer to running under iOS and Android.

More on that until the next weekend.

Atmospheres are next...

 

By saying atmospheres are next you mean next weekend or sooner ? I am sorry but atmospheres are very important to my work right now thats why i am bugging you with it so much .

 

Yes! Very excited to hear about it working in Unity Indie! You promised that it would and now you reached that point. Great work! Keep it up and keep us updated!

 

Watching this with great interest, will it be possible to export out data about the generated planet so that players can leave the current planet and later return to it? My system set currently consists of 2,500 planets with all sorts of information, so what I would love is that if I can pass in data about the planet and have your plugin generate the planet and then store it for later retrieval.

 

I just could not resist...purchased the pre-release to test and give feedback. Great concept! I even registered the first time on the forum to be able to tell you that, imerso! =)

 

Very thank you!

I have just uploaded the new code that has preliminar Unity3D Indie support and which runs under Mac as well. With this code path enabled you won't get full lighting yet (normals are not being fully calculated yet), but at least people with Macs or Unity3D Indie will get their planets running.

If you're using Unity3D Pro you should not enable the new code path and continue using the code normally.

The extension is still raw and a bit hard to configure, but if you have the time to experiment with all the parameters until you understand how they work, you can get some great configurations already.

Thanks all,

imerso

 

Well, it works that way already. A planet is always the same if you don't change its configuration. And configuration is a few parameters which are stored in just a few bytes in disk, but always reproduce exactly the same planet topology every time you return to it.

 

imerso: It's "seed based", your system, no? So you can simply save the seed and then regenerate the planet anytime from that seed, yes?

 

Next weekend =)

 

Yes, but there are other parameters which affect the overall topology of a planet.

 

imerso i send a letter to you from email you provide, did you receive it ?
Or did my program crash again -_-... ( i hate you Windows Mail sometimes )
BTW. Thanks for adding " dropping objects on the terrain " that's really nice to see how physics work !.
Problem is that when its a sphere, it will move even when finally landing on the ground its like the gravity point is not a planet it self but in center of it making terrain block sphere while still something wanting to drag it inside.
Plus i see To Do list finally i see what you plan to do really nice imerso. ( very handy )

 

Yes, I'll be replying in a moment. Yes, now I did notice the physics is broken again and will be fixing it asap, thanks for noticing!

 

Your welcome i found few other things but i will type it on the next email. After you will send yours.

 

Imerso when will you have a version for Unity3D standard edition? I dont have pro, I am very interested in trying the plugin but until its available for standard unity I will not be able to spend the funds to get this plugin until I am sure I will be able to use it.

 

Servo-27 look at page earlier. Imerso just did that Plug-in works now not only on Pro and Indie Unity but also on the Mac so don't wait and buy the plug-in and next time please read everything before posting its not yet that long only 17 pages .
So yes it works perfectly so buy buy buy and don't wait this is must have for everybody who thinks about creating the next generation game.

 

lol Thinker, people will start thinking we are working combined. =)

Just kidding, thank you for the nice comments.

I have read your email, but as that is long and I will need to make a long reply as well, I will do that this night when I get back home.

Thanks!

 

Of course we working combined 50/50 remember ?
Nah i am joking just wanting to see this plug-in to work i see big potential in this.
Plus i know how it is, how a little money can improve work and make it better for everybody.
Btw. i was testing a little more of this version and sow few errors ( not in code just in realistic behavior ) i will explain everything on the next email.

 

imerso, did you already send the version with Indie-support to pre-buyers? Thanks for the info in advance.

 

I think i can tell that imerso did send version working on indie .
I have it right here and it works fine still lacks few things but it works fine.
If you didn't get anything than i am afraid you need to send PM to imerso so he can re send it to you.
Btw. imerso i hope that in 2/3 days we will have our atmosphere update .

 

ok I will, thx!

 

A new update is coming with the atmospheres enabled, probably at this monday.

 

Superb i can't wait to finally see atmospheres.

 

Just to check, does the system in it's current state allow for any manual customization at points of interest on the terrain surface?
Also, is there a "stick to surface" function available?

 

Last adjusts for the atmospheres release...

 

There is a coarse "shape texture" which affects overall terrain formation, but at a very coarse level. The current extension is not for manual terrain editing at all.

And no, no "stick to surface" yet.

 

imerso how can i make all the information's that are on the left side disappear ? It's hard for me to make good screen shots with it .

 

In the end of CPlanet.cs

[]s

 

Thanks a lot .
Btw. i found a bug that is very annoying. When i set a skybox atmosphere stops working.

Also i found that you lower the resolution of planets because of the limits from Unity Engine is it possible that you could add simple option that will allow people to lower or rise resolution of Planets ? You know simple 3 buttons on the sides ( poor, good , very good ) or something like that it would be extremely helpful.

 

Hmmm will be looking into that. I will be revisiting the other shader which supports the builtin lighting, that one will be the final one, but it is broken right now, so we're using the alternative one which does not support the builtin lighting nor shadows.

It must support skyboxes, of course. Thanks for reporting.

In reality, the new version is more powerful, as it supports uncapped split depths! Very soon now, I will be sending an email to the private list explaining a lot of things --- all the parameters, and why things are the way they are now, including this part you're mentioning here.


[]s
imerso

 

Thanks for all the updates imerso.... I am just sad I havent had the time to get to have a good look at all the updates youve sent

Maybe this weekend

 

Wait, is not that exactly what "Patch Quality" and "Normal Quality" controls always did? I did not read correctly the first time, but this control exists from the first released version. =)

Will be sending you an e-mail. =)

[]s

 

Hi imerso! I'd also love to receive this list This weekend I finally had the chance to experience the latest updates. I must say impressive! Although only the unfinished indie version it is very mindblowing already! Here and there I experience FPS drops (above the atmosphere about 20-30, beneath often times 5-10 or lower). Especially with the atmosphere enabled I notice this. I think I have a pretty decent system (quad core, 1024 mb ati graphics). Will you further improve the indie version and take these performace into account?

BTW, I had to comment out lines 476 - 487. Otherwise would get a lot of compiler errors like

Type `CPlanet' does not contain a definition for `AtmosInvWaveLen' and no extension method `AtmosInvWaveLen' of type `CPlanet' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

Last question: How do I go about to create different planets? I copied and pasted the existing one, the continents stay the same right? How can I create planets with more landmass or entire waterplanets? Thank you very much in advance!

 

Hello Softrare,

Yes, I'll be revisiting the Indie code for some optimizations, but please note that Unity3D Indie is quite smart on limiting what we can do. Also, it's possible to tune performance by balancing noise resolution, patch quality, etc. I really need to finish that guide.

Yes the last release has Indie broken by a few lines! If you compare it with the Pro version (which all of you have, of course) there is a small difference on this place, which I forgot to test/clone to the Indie cs.

As I'm almost finished with the atmospheres and will be releasing a new update with far better atmospheres support, I'm holding the Indie fix to come together with this new update.

Changing the seed (Noise Offset) will change a lot of the planet appearance already. Changing Persistence and Frequency (with very small values as they're very sensitive) will completely change appearance as well.

Indie is currently working a bit differently and has not all options working.

Well, I'll finish that guide this week yet, I understand that without some documentation it's quite hard to understand all those parameters, so lets put some priority to that now.


Thank you for the nice comments!

 

A new update with the finished planetary atmospheres will considerably enhance the overall visual quality. Coming this week.

 

I know I tried before what you accomplished.. failed miserably, also because of these limitations, also because of my limitations

Sounds great! Patiently waiting

 

There is a new update today, if you bought the extension but is not in the mailing list or did not receive the update email, please contact me.

Regards,

imerso

 

Very nice!
Now you only have to add the tool to scatter meshes on the planets for making cities, forests and such, and THEN it will be complete!
As it is, you can't do much with it.

 

With every update this is more and more stunning but i must say that, they bug with the spikes on the planets is back.
Plus the water looks great you can see threw it but sometimes there are errors where waters moves up ( i am sure you are still working on it ) but still it looks amazing. Really good job my friend !.

 

I'm really excited by this project. Is there any word on whether this will be supported on mobile? I skimmed through the 18 pages of this thread and didn't see anything.

 

Well you must understand that Imerso is doing everything him self so its more of a question
" If there will be enough support by buyers will be there an mobile support from this ? "
But i can tell you know that this already expend much more of what i expected and it was good spend money.
So if you want to buy it just to use it later on Mac or PC for any of your game project i would consider buying it now before it will be sold on Unity shop. ( now its cheaper )