15 Nov 2018 07:50
The development of Space Engine is impressing me much, but my question is if there will be more variety of terrain generated. The land on current spaceengine appears to be very random on rocky planets. Look at Earth, Mars, Venus and Titan. Such worlds have very unique forms of lands or seas. I mean the form of continents. On the other hand, the continents on planets generated appear very similar each other. Spaceengine could have a type of generation code to allow the presence, in the same planet, of retangular, triangular, curved or even continents of irregular shape. I mean, more variety of kinds of continents on the same planet.
Example: A random planet with a continent similar to South America and another similar to Australia. It don't have to be equal to those continents, but more like a default setup. It could also allow you to draw custom surfaces, not just texture, but the relief itself. With that worlds in spaceengine will look more unique each other, not so similar.
I will give another example... mainfreq, marefreq and maredensity. Instead of marefreq and maredensity generate more cratered-like terrain (the program already has crater settings) mainfreq could be used to give more detail to the continents and relief themselves. Marefreq could be used to determine the amount of continents or plate tectonics. Maredensity could be used to increase the distance between lands, without lowering the terrain height, so that continents appear more genuine, like those on Earth. More codes would be necessary to add a more variety of shapes to islands and continents.
It could have a code to make continents more or less fragmented, maybe.
I just think the terrain generated on earth-like planets appear too generic.