The Eden Project

[dreyn74]

Just wondering if you've ever heard of a program called "Galaxia" by Dexyfex?
He uses voxels to render the bodies, but he provides some theory about tessellation and nebula rendering on his webpage.

https://youtu.be/gZQaNP7uZak?t=152

PS. Every galaxy in this demo(which is less than one megabyte in size) has thousands of star systems, and each one has planets and moons. There are even asteroids and blackholes.

[ioFlow Studios]

Hey there Dreyn74,

No I haven't seen that one, how awesome is that?

If I can get all my stuff going that nicely (but also with foliage and oceans) I'll pretty much be "mission successful".

Thanks for the new motivational fuel

[Dealman]

You guys are wizards.

[ioFlow Studios]

Just testing 3d noise textures in a volume mat on a beam particle in the new volume fog...



Pretty happy with the results

And yah, it works volumetrically.

The sheets in the particle beam basically sample a 2d slice from a 3d noise texture, so as you move around the particle beam and the sheets rotate to be camera aligned, they redraw using an updated 2d slice from the 3d noise at their new angle.

[ioFlow Studios]

That was billowed noise, this is normal noise:



Just have to implement this functionality here now and I can lay these out along the galactic arm splines:

https://answers.unrealengine.com/que...-a-spline.html

(big thank you to Eric for figuring this out)

[UnrealEnterprise]

PS. Every galaxy in this demo(which is less than one megabyte in size) has thousands of star systems, and each one has planets and moons. There are even asteroids and blackholes.

Nice! But as [MENTION=887]ioFlow Studios[/MENTION] likes to remind us, the hard work begins populating all these worlds with 'stuff'.

NMS / StarCitizen / Galaxia, often show a shallow atmosphere between space / terrain, but is that accurate???

(Zero time to descend + shallow-atmosphere / height vs highest-mountain-peaks vs terrain-at-sea-level etc)

[ioFlow Studios]

I think that's because they understand that gamers are too impatient to fly for the amount of time it would actually take to navigate through a life size(ish) atmosphere

Remember the X games? Flying, flying, flying and more flying omg I'm still not there yet. One of the real challenges of gameplay design in a space game...

Also, my space fog material is coming along nicely:



And I've thought of a bunch more ways to trick it up too...

[ioFlow Studios]

Was gonna try and do some fancy vertex painting stuff, but starting to think just manually mixing splines of different colors together might look perfectly fine...



Will add a curve though so you can control the tapering along the length of the spline.

[ioFlow Studios]

And a youtube of me playing with colors and splines in it:

[UnrealEnterprise]

I think that's because they understand that gamers are too impatient to fly for the amount of time it would actually take to navigate through a life size(ish) atmosphere Remember the X games? Flying, flying, flying and more flying omg I'm still not there yet. One of the real challenges of gameplay design in a space game...

Sure that makes sense, but it also kind of takes some of the realism away.
Like in a 'controlled drop scene' / dive in movies such as Alien / Aliens etc.
Equally for the ascent back up, better if its a full-on white knuckle ride.

[astearon]

Are you still developing this? I am searching for a planetary system like yours and it would sadden me to see you give up

[ioFlow Studios]

I still chip away on the weekends for an hour or two...

To be honest, at the moment I'm playing with the free voxel plugin that phyronnaz has made.

It's super cool, but the real test or course will be how large it can go planet wise (am testing this more today).

[ioFlow Studios]

Trying to port my galaxy stuff from 4.16 to 4.18 but have hit a brick wall with volume fog

This is my space nebula particle beam thingy in 4.16:



And this is the exact same thing migrated to 4.18:



Fwiw, the mesh on the particle beam is still where it should be:



Help me obi wan kenobi...

[AlonzoCPO]

Could it be something to do with the exponential fog's density and height? I did hear they changed some things with how the fog was working. But I cold be speaking out the ***.

Also, Ive been silently watching your project for a while and you've some awesome stuff!

[ioFlow Studios]

Hey Alonzo, nah tried all them... tried every hidden checkbox I could find in the material too (no joy yet).

Might have found another way to get it going though.

Just worried that I'm going to have to invent a new hacky way of getting it to do what I want every time a new version of the engine comes out : \