Let’s Build a World
Since the last post, I’ve been working on what I’d like planets to look like. In the end, I’d like for planets to have visible geometry for their continents/mountains instead of just using a texture to fake it. To accomplish this, I’ll need to build a procedural sphere. There’s a few ways you could approach this, but I think the use of a rounded cube would be best for now. Catlike Coding and RedBlob Games were pretty useful references here.
After a bunch of trial and error, I was able to successfully get a cube to round! For now, I’ll just pick some random colors.
But this doesn’t do much good right now. Representing every planet in our galaxy at the scale of the galaxy map would probably be a performance hit, and they’d be pretty small. How about showing each solar system on its own when selected? Sounds better to me.
Our first solar system!
This condensed view of the solar system arranges and equally spaces the star and each planet in order, and assigns each a random color. For testing purposes, each is also scaled based on how far it is from the parent star. We still have a bit of a representation problem. The star is massive compared to each planet, and takes way too much screen space compared to each planet. By dynamically adjusting the camera position based on the size and location of a target, all of our bodies can occupy the same amount of screen space!
The labels note the name of the star/planet, and its classification. For now, I’ve pulled the types of stars and planets from Wikipedia to add flavor. In the future, I’ll make sure that various planet types only get assigned in a sane manner, but for now it’ll be as is. Similarly, I’ll leave our graphics this for now.
Next Steps
Currently, we have a galaxy, stars, and planets, but no one to inhabit our galaxy, so lets do that next!