Planet Diversification

main thing that bugged me about planet generation is the patches of color on the ground don't seem to have any relationship to clumps of foliage

real forests have roots, moss, and under-brush where tree coverage is thick enough

I'm also noticing that vegetation doesn't seem to be too affected by water location. Is that something they'll be adding in later, or is the random planet truly random?

Wow definitely a +1 from me OP. I think they look great, i'd probably prefer to play on more realistic Biomes most of the time but anything that offers more easy map variety to players like this is a super idea.

Yeah that occurred to me too, I don't think it's a big deal. Minecraft has a similarly unrealistic biome generation and it doesn't bother anyone.

+1
Love your ideas.

I like the idea, fingers crossed something such as this will exist later

Love it

I've been thinking on this and how it would affect moons - for the most part everything would remain the same. One exception however is the "moon" biome, which at the moment is exclusive to moons.

Perhaps the "moon" biome should be repurposed to a craters/wasteland biome and then the colors could be played with from there. Mars would be a red wasteland for example while Earth's Moon is a white wasteland. What do you think?

nice idea
+1

In minecraft, where individual trees are an element of the game world you interact with, a more complex biome generation would be great. In fact it's almost inexcusable biomes are so simple in minecraft. The whole point of simplifying the graphics to voxels is so more complicated systems can be added without worrying about fancy graphical representations.

In PA, trees are completely incidental and nobody would notice the addition of more realistic terrain. "Forest" terrain is a stylised token denoting the presence of a forest.

Can't disagree there :lol:

Yup, although forests could have some affect on gameplay if they blocked projectiles. That's something I'd like to see.

+1
Very great thread! I really like your ideas.

Thanks for all the +1's!

Here's the (concept) ring creator tool I was talking about in my last post:

It would be a sub-part of the planet maker utility. You can see a preview of the planet with rings, as well as a flattened view of all the rings in the upper right.

The three checkboxes in the upper left toggle the solar system ecliptic, the xyz axis, and the rings in the planet preview.

the X and Y control the tilt of the rings respective to the ecliptic (automatically set to 0)

The 'Inner' and 'Outer' values control the inner and outer edge distances from the planet.

You can add or subtract rings depending if you want several rings at different angles (as seen)

The line going through the rings allows you to line up specific rings, so 2 different rings at different angles don't occupy the same orbit (which wouldn't make sense)

To make the actual ring stripe:

The idea is that the utility automatically rotates the stripe in a circle around the planet, creating a ring.

Simply clicking in the ring structure box creates a vertical line denoting a specific ring, and dragging horizontally creates wider rings. You have options to control the color, the shininess, the transparency, and the brightness of specific lines. Keep in mind that most gas giants have rings, but most of them are invisible from the Earth, as they are carbonaceous instead of icy like Saturn's rings.

This thread is amazing and exciting! I hope we see this kind of depth in the planet creator!

good stuff

Yeah most defiinitely. this will really add to the game.

I would pay for this if it was a dlc!

This thread has some excellent ideas! I totally agree. There's no such thing as too much planet customization, but even if it was just colors and distribution of landmass that would create a hell of lot of possible planets. I hope Uber has time to make all this stuff a reality, but I would especially like it if different biomes and different planet types affected resources. Like a planet with high gravity has better metal extractors and a low gravity planet has better power generation or something like that. It would really add a lot to the game to have the player decide he needs more mass to build a ground army on planet A so he travels to planet B that'll give him better mass for his time than another planet C that has an energy bonus. It would make more sense if there were more types of energy generators though (like TA had solar and tidal for example).

This thread is full of win! I think all of these ideas are good and should be in the game.

I hope Über has seen this thread...

Yeah, I figure the biome color selector would give the most bang for the buck when it comes to the effort put into making it and how much customization and variability it would add to the game. If the devs get anything out of this thread, I hope it's a color selector tool!

I agree with your other points too, picking between metal rich and/or power rich planets makes for an interesting strategic element when before you would just expand to whatever planet was closest. Good suggestions!

did'nt red the four pages, but i think the idea's great.

however, maybe some combinations of colors will probably be so ugly that you'll want to level the planet with asteroids just to stop seeing it ^_^