All three of those screenshots were created by modifying the values of our automatic planet creation system.
It's our expectation that you'll be able to create craters like that by smashing a planet with asteroids, but we don't have that working yet with this system.
Turns out making a robust, awesome looking, reasonably accurate universe simulator is hard work.
1. Will planets simulate effects of temperature and other factors?(e.g. Earth's oceans freezing due to increased distance from the sun; Earth's oceans boiling away due to heat or a huge cosmic collision.)
Probably not in the initial release, but this is something I'd like to eventually do.
2. About that fluid particle hydraulics you're implementing, will you use it for planets, such as simulating the effects of huge collisions?(You may have talked about it before, but I'm not sure.)
We're working on two methods of handling collisions. SPH and a much less computationally expensive method (similar to how collisions are currently handled, but much more impressive and realistic). Our implementation of SPH is still very experimental so we'll see... The idea is that you will be able to use SPH for planets, probably, eventually.
SPH is this...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothed-particle_hydrodynamics3. About the landing feature, will you be able to actually move about on a planet? And will the atmospheres simulate a sky? (It may be obvious, but I could be wrong.)
Move around on a planet... eventually (planned, but not implemented).
Not sure about how well we're going to handle skies yet... something like that eventually.
Mr. Dan Dixon, do you have a date of when the Universe Sandbox 3 Beta will come out?
I'm going to stop promising dates because I'm always wrong.
What "Reduced" Functionality do you mean?
You won't be able to generate these textures on the fly. We'll provide some kind of fallback system, but it won't look as good or work as well.
Anyways, like Kevin said, could we see a video of it?
The video would be of me changing values, not actually impacting the planet. We'll get there...
The disadvantage of starting from scratch is that we're having to implement everything that was already working. The advantage is that the internal workings of the simulator (the code) is so much more robust and future-proof. So while we are wanting to add new features we also have to add all (or most) of the features that already exist.
Topic: Before & After the Impacts - New Screenshots - Oct 2012 (Read 37202 times)
