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pioneerspacesim / pioneer

A game of lonely space adventure
https://pioneerspacesim.net
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Pluto looks ugly #3500

Open aidan-mueller opened 9 years ago

aidan-mueller commented 9 years ago

So I went to pluto recently, only to find out how ugly it is: Original Pluto

Bleh.

I'm sure a lot of you have seen the New Horizons' images: New Horizons is cool

Nice. So I thought it would be simple enough to change the color a bit and make some terrain tweaks. Key word here is thought. I was able to get something going: pluto_attempt

Um. Yeah. Better, but it still sucks. When I tried to land at the research base, I crashed into the ground because when I turned up the ice coverage, it made the terrain height go way up. The terrain generation is weird. You turn up a value to a certain threshold and suddenly it goes crazy. It felt kind of like a hack. The terrain looked kind of crazy from close up.

I'm sure it already known that the terrain generation needs work, but what is needed is a way to have more control over terrain feature intensity and scaling. There also needs to be a way to model surface composition. Pluto has 98% nitrogen on it's surface. I had to turn up the metallicity to get it to look a bit tan. I'm not really sure what the best way of fixing this would be, but I wanted to make sure that this is considered anytime the terrain is being worked on.

fluffyfreak commented 9 years ago

If you used our terrain system to get Pluto to look like that last shot then you did GREAT! :D

Yes the terrain generation is really weak, it's been on my permanent to-do list since I joined this project.

aidan-mueller commented 9 years ago

Well it wasn't easy. But the problem is that the terrain goes kind of crazy up close. The research base was underground and I crashed into it. I had to turn up the metallicity to give it the color. I read somewhere that pluto gets its color from ultraviolet reflections from the ice (or something along those lines). Color cannot simply be calculated. There needs to be a custom option.

impaktor commented 9 years ago

Is there an actual bug here, other than what we all know: pioneer terrain generation algorithm (especially height handling) leaves much to be desired?

I crashed into the ground because when I turned up the ice coverage, it made the terrain height go way up. ... The research base was underground and I crashed into it.

You mean it wasn't possible to land at the station? If so that sounds like a bug.

What is needed is a way to have more control over terrain feature intensity and scaling. ... Color cannot simply be calculated. There needs to be a custom option

So is there something, some variable, that needs to be exposed to the custom system scripts?

aidan-mueller commented 9 years ago

I was kind of trying to make a feature request, but yes, there is something. You cannot (as far as I can tell) explicitly define color. It just picks the color for you. You also can't pick the terrain generator being used. There also doesn't seem to be any parameters to the generator; you can't control heights, scale, etc.