Advanced procedural planet generation

Hey there!

I was wondering if we could have more options for the procedural planet generation (a bit like libnoise can generate earth like heightmaps by compositing textures). Currently, the options are very "light" compared to what should be possible to be done.

To my understanding, the planet generation is done by some kind of fractional brownian motion (recursive 3D perlin noise). Ice caps are decided depending on the "temperature" (which is only some kind of high-pass filter on absolute Y coordinate) and water presence is some kind of low pass on generated terrain height. Rocks (plateau) seems also to be done like this (sharp noise, high pass filter and a "all or nothing" to create the plateau). Biome scale is simply a scaling of 3D noise applied on the planet (but I suspect this not to be implemented as nothing really seems to change when I toyed with the cursor)

What i'd like to see (and shouldn't be so hard to implement as I suspect that most biomes are derived from earth biome with other parameters) is some kind of layer compositing for advanced users; let's give a simple example:

Suppose for the height, I'd like:
- low octave with high scaling for a base
- then a high pass filter on a low octave medium scaling multiplied by a on a high octave, low scaling noise

This would lead to a planet with moderate hills, with certains areas composed with very sharp mountains.

Naturally, the current system of planet generation would be left for normal users, but this feature could be enabled by anyone.

Edit: I'm amending my posts with more "features".

First, please allow us to "tweak" the sun. Changing it's size and color. Yes this is easy to do (a bit of color tinting in a shader, and a scale parameter that you may already have...) will allow us to personalize a bit further the system. Hey, let's be crazy, add support for binary systems! The top would be that the sun color's tinting planet so a blue sun would give a light blue tinting to the units.

Second, allows us to tweaks colors for biomes: a martian desert looks reddish, a earth like desert looks yellowish.

References:
Libnoise example: http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/examples/complexplanet/index.html

Can't you just mod all of this?

Ha, maybe... i'm not used to modding the game, sorry. If this can be enabled through modding, why not .