When building new planets in the system editor, it would be nice if the "preview" button only rendered a preview of the planet, and not all of the planet textures. For making any planets larger than about 700 radius, it can take a little while to fully build and render all the huge textures. In order to explore seeds and build a good planet, it can take forever to tinker with the settings enough when you have to rerender each time. Assuming the majority of the time spent chugging on planet generation is building and mapping the textures, replacing the high-res textures with basic colors for each biome would significantly reduce the time between previews. After you get all planets where you want them with the preview, you could use the "build" button to do the major texture generation for all the planets at once. Also, it would be nice to see metal spot indicators (ctrl-n style) in the system editor, but surely that must be a coming feature. Thoughts? Anyone else have slow planet "previews"?
I doubt your idea about textures is right because planet geometry generation is done by the CPU and it's very CPU-intensive process. And textures are generated by GPU only (they only stored in video memory) and this is pretty fast on most cards.
Hmm. I'll have to do some testing. You may be quite right. Hopefully it is just a case of needed optimization.
You can do that: Open directory where game installed. Open "media" subdirectory Create "user" subdir and open it Create "log" subdir and open it Run game and start planet generation There will be created log file named like that "PA-18-13-59.225.txt" You can easily find planet generation times here, this is without any texturing because it's pretty fast as I said. Example: Code: [18:19:34.730] INFO Building planet of radius 800 detail 2 [18:19:35.070] INFO 26351 decals generated. [18:19:35.531] INFO 41733 total planet faces. [18:19:35.800] INFO 134 feature decals generated. [18:19:36.294] INFO build complete: 1.56 sec PlanetBuilder::buildAsync: 1.56 sec GenSurface: 3.19 msec PreviewSurfaceIters: 46.3 msec genHeight: 1.58 msec computeWaterDistance: 23.1 msec genBiomes: 9.07 msec computeBiomeDistance: 12.2 msec computePoleDistance: 292. usec other: 7.45 usec UpdateBVH: 10.8 msec GenBrushes: 280. msec PostCopyDecals: 1.57 msec other: 278. msec PreCsg: 94.8 msec Create Surface Meshes: 69.1 msec Connectivity: 53.4 msec other: 15.8 msec other: 25.6 msec Csg: 382. msec UpdateBVH: 16.5 msec other: 365. msec GenWater: 8.28 msec BuildMeshes: 492. msec Final: 32.2 msec SetupVT: 449. msec Water: 11.3 msec other: 4.59 usec Flow Water: 12.9 usec Features: 246. msec generate: 245. msec PostCopyFeatureDecals: 1.81 msec other: 2.44 usec other: 867. usec other: 1.14 usec [18:19:37.183] INFO 56094 features generated.
