Planet Diversification

Yeah, I think a color selector would be a really great addition to the planet maker.

Also, for the galactic war, there could be a range of possible foliage or arid colors, so each planet will randomly look a little different than the next. Some will have redder arid, or yellower foliage, to spice things up a little. Once in a rare while, you'll stumble upon a planet with pink oceans, but very rarely.

You can simulate some planets we've theorized and found with telescopes, like ones with methane/ethane rich atmospheres, Mars-like colors, and carbon planets to name a few, just with a few color tweaks.

Eh, a colour selector sounds horrible to me as its quite hard to get pleasant looking colours. And I'd rather not have to play on random planets that are puke green or flesh-wound red or bile-yellow.

Yeah, the biome designs clearly use a very considered palette. Check the concept art.

The current system is already a very pretty looking environment. There are still a few issues such as the polar caps being perfectly round spheres, but it's starting to look pretty natural already. The only thing that I am confused about is why they decide to split the tropical and earth planet type. It seems perfectly viable to me to have both climates on the same planet.

Though I must admit I haven't seen much "riverosity" in the game yet, but I guess they might still add that.

Rivers would be kewl.

Aren't those already there in the form of canyons filled with water?

Yup I just wish they were a bit more of a prevalent feature.

Well, you wouldn't be forced to use it, lol.

It would just be an extra option. Earlier in this thread, someone made the arid texture a baby blue color, I think it looked pretty cool, very alien. I don't think randomly colored planets will look quite as horrible as you suggest, I envision a bell curve, with most planets only slightly varied in color from the default palate, with more extreme colors less frequent in occurrence. Also, there would be some logic to it, so you wouldn't get pink mountains with blue arid, there would be themes.

The way the planet maker is set up, I don't think you're going to have a way to mix and match different biome types. Would be nice to have that level of control I think, maybe 2 planet makers, the one already in game that randomly generates planets of a certain size and type (also used to generate planets for the galactic war), and another that allows you to directly paint terrain type and elevation onto the surface.

For rivers and that sort of thing, Sketchup has a cool feature that allows you to draw lines directly on to surfaces. You can get some natural looking shapes:





These can be made into boolean meshes. I think they should be deeper in the middle, so they appear to fade into the ocean. I /think/ you can have rivers oriented so they drain at large bodies of water, in the same way mountains don't show up on coastlines/in the water.

You can set a biome's parameters to specify spawning meshes a certain distance from water (via the "water_distance" attribute). Orientation towards the water on the other hand, doesn't (yet) appear to be an option.

I thought that might be the case. If the river branched off in 3 directions, there's a good chance that at least one of them will connect with the ocean or a lake.

If you can have them spawn a certain distance away from water, you should also be able to have a distance limit too, right? Like it won't be able to spawn x distance from water because it's too far away. If so, you can set the distance small, and have the center of the mesh right on the shore, and the center of the mesh could be the river's end.