Planet 182781

I have worked through some of the more annoying planet generation bugs and landed on something that looks like this.  This crusty plant has a low laying sea in the north and normal ice cap in the bottom.  One large ocean and some smaller land locked ones with some significant mountain ranges I'm sure are filled with mineral deposits. 

I wonder if Planet 182781 will ever appear in your galaxy?  More than 4 billion planets are possible with this algorithm.

Anyway, I'm happy for the moment with the planets that are generated.  They are enough for the next phase of the game, which is surface building.

I decided that I wasn't going to have players build on life size planets in the BETA version of the game.

Tectonic Plates

To generate a planet, one must first figure out where all the tectonic plates are.  This picture shows the initial assignment of plates on our randomly assigned planet.  Colours indicate the plates, the black identifies the plate edges.

The next code to write is figuring out how the plates will collide with each.  Either to create mountain ranges or spread apart creating a subversion and ocean.

Tectonic plates with exaggerated plate elevations.  The white spikes a the centre of the plates.

Early Planet Generation

Well, I know this doesn't look remotely like a planet, I had to figure out how to draw a planet in Unity3D in a way that didn't have holes in the generation like some of the other generators.

These are three generations of the planet generator, with medium, high and extreme vertex resolution.  For the moment I'm going with planets that have a high resolution.

Medium; 2,562 Vertices and 15,360 Triangles

  

Large; 10,242 Vertices and 61,440 Triangles

 

Huge; 40,866 Vertices and 245,760 Triangles