Before falling asleep last night I had a great idea, or so it seemed at the time. I was thinking about the ages of planets and how plate tectonics evolve over huge lengths of time, just like Pangea evolved to the continents on Earth today. I might visit a certain rocky planet again, years later, yet it has not developed as it would have in the natural world. Since I've been playing around with converting videos to gifs, I thought it would be cool if the texture maps for the planets were actually moving pictures rather than static, that could be used to create the 3D mountains and rivers and such, but over millions of years they would spread apart or sublimate under one another just like on Earth. Of course you'd need data about how plate tectonics create the surface of a globe, how that relates to mountain formation, where they spread apart as great cracks in the globe, etc. It would be hyper-realistic and would add a large amount of realism to an near perfect program already. However, I realized since you're able to land on every object in the game, using anything but static pictures would require re-writing the entire engine. Or it could be as easy as generating a gif rather than a jpg. The gif wouldn't be actually used directly as the texture map, it would be to the side and based on the year a certain frame from the gif would be used to substitute the jpg texture map. Just a random sleepy thought.

The amount of VRAM required to load all those frames would be absurdly huge.  Even if it isn't a gif being loaded for the terrain map, simply applying what you suggest would still be outside the scope of feasibility.

Nifty gifs, though.

Before falling asleep last night I had a great idea, or so it seemed at the time. I was thinking about the ages of planets and how plate tectonics evolve over huge lengths of time, just like Pangea evolved to the continents on Earth today. I might visit a certain rocky planet again, years later, yet it has not developed as it would have in the natural world. Since I've been playing around with converting videos to gifs, I thought it would be cool if the texture maps for the planets were actually moving pictures rather than static, that could be used to create the 3D mountains and rivers and such, but over millions of years they would spread apart or sublimate under one another just like on Earth. Of course you'd need data about how plate tectonics create the surface of a globe, how that relates to mountain formation, where they spread apart as great cracks in the globe, etc. It would be hyper-realistic and would add a large amount of realism to an near perfect program already. However, I realized since you're able to land on every object in the game, using anything but static pictures would require re-writing the entire engine. Or it could be as easy as generating a gif rather than a jpg. The gif wouldn't be actually used directly as the texture map, it would be to the side and based on the year a certain frame from the gif would be used to substitute the jpg texture map. Just a random sleepy thought.

Found a very good simulation.

I can imagine accessing a file every time you move the mouse to compare the age of a planet to which frame from a gif to use in a certain map texture can compound access and computation time to a point it becomes too sluggish for use.

I've seen "Bump" maps used to create the illusion of shadows from mountains on a flat texture stretched on a globe in another space simulation program called Celestia. They are simply grey-scale bitmaps. Even smaller file sizes using a grey bmp wouldn't help enough with speed. Clouds in Space Engine are a whole-nother image but they don't seem static at all. I'm not sure how that works and if it could be used in a similar fashion as I suggested in the OP.

Either way, there are plenty of other things to explore in Space Engine!

Thanks Destructor1701, I made them all on my phone!

Cool spaceguy! That's the realism I'm talking about!

I planning to implement plate tectonics simulation in future. Obviously, full planet must be simulated, so resolution of that simulation must be limited. Then terrain engine must take the simulated map as a base level and generate procedural hi-resolution elevation maps, post-process them with an erosion argorithms, then generate a color texture based on elevation, surface material and local climate, taken from a global model. All this are fairly complex system, and implementation of this will take years (probably). But it is possible to keep all these in real-time, at least planet loading time will be not much greater than in current version of SE.

I love how you always have a solution to making my dreams a reality! I can't think of a better reason to help fund this project!

here's an active simulation for the browser
http://davidson16807.github.io/tectonics.js/

[quote="Gnargenox"]Before falling asleep last night I had a great idea, or so it seemed at the time. I was thinking about the ages of planets and how plate tectonics evolve over huge lengths of time, just like Pangea evolved to the continents on Earth today. I might visit a certain rocky planet again, years later, yet it has not developed as it would have in the natural world. Since I've been playing around with converting videos to gifs, I thought it would be cool if the texture maps for the planets were actually moving pictures rather than static, that could be used to create the 3D mountains and rivers and such, but over millions of years they would spread apart or sublimate under one another just like on Earth. Of course you'd need data about how plate tectonics create the surface of a globe, how that relates to mountain formation, where they spread apart as great cracks in the globe, etc. It would be hyper-realistic and would add a large amount of realism to an near perfect program already. However, I realized since you're able to land on every object in the game, using anything but static pictures would require re-writing the entire engine. Or it could be as easy as generating a gif rather than a jpg. The gif wouldn't be actually used directly as the texture map, it would be to the side and based on the year a certain frame from the gif would be used to substitute the jpg texture map. Just a random sleepy thought.
[/quote]

I really like this idea but there's just one problem, how to get the view from the ground to match what is happening in the gif from space. well.. maybe thats not what the problem is but the gif format is limited to a palletized 256 colors, which means that your grayscale gif would create a lot of steppyness in the terrain if it were gif formatted height maps. You would inevitably end up with spikes from bright spots in the image too. This means that anything like that would need to be some form of animated 16-bit grayscale image which is an image format that would have to be invented to fulfill the requirements for this suggestion. only problem is that they would be incredibly large in size and would take a lot more time to load into memory and would just bog the computer system down with these tasks.

The other problem with the plate tectonics is that essentially you're saying that all really young planets would have the land on one side and the ocean on the opposite side, and then the land spread out from some kind of thing.. like a bump on one side. I have taken notice that in the model of earth the Pacific side can be pieced together just like the Atlantic side can. So I'd say that the continents would be more like the bones in a skull than a jigsaw.

Actually now that I think about it, plates take a really long time to move so, maybe you only need to pregenerate up to 3 frames at a time.  could be millions of years to see the changes, so as long as there is a cap on how fast you can set the timescale then you should be able to increment the seeds that the noise generation algorithm uses to build the terrain.  this however would not work on gas giants because they are changing much faster, although it would help.