Why not buckyballs?

Is that really the only reason?

Nope. Re-read some of the other posts in the thread.

Ok Sphere Cubes :





As you can see on the left, it is easier for this kind of sphere to layout the UVs with no stretching on the poles. Instead There is some stretching on the eight corners of the original cube, but mainly on the lower subdivision levels.

Remember that Spore and probably PA will generate textures, rather than hand paint them, and the generation of the textures counters the stretching at the cost of a little bit of texture resolution at those corners.

The largest bonus of this method, if the PA generation is going to be similar to the article, is the relative ease at which dynamic level of detail can be done.

It is also closer to a build grid than a standard cylindrical sphere and a icosahedron/buckyball sphere.

I will try to include the actual terrain deformation soon, stored into textures.

Remember I do this as personal research, but post it here when it is relevant and as a thank you of some kind.

Thats the way the planets will be build.

Actually a planet is nothing but a giant cube with a height map and vertex displacement. This way every closed, loopfree surface can be derived from a simple cube. You can either transform it into a perfect sphere or in a more irregular shape like meteors, they work exactly the same.

Why to use that technic? It's simple to calculate, very flexible (like i said, EVERY shape can be created, that includes advanced terraforming with concave areas!) and as a bonus: It provides a rectangular coordinate system which makes it possible to project any type of base layout onto the surface with simple transformations.

Anyone got insight as to how easy/hard it is to make the path-finding algorithms follow great circles to find the shortest route on a sphere instead of countering tiles on the underlying cube which doesn't work the same?

Path finding on the spherical cube is basicly unwrapping the cube into a map which reflects the distortion of the grid. Multiply this map with the difficulty of the terain (blocked paths, slopes, rough terrain). When you then run a slightly modified A* on this map, you get the shortest path around the body which is likely to be a straight curve. As you see, thats a very simple task and works excactly the same as when working in a 2D space.

Ok, I have now created something that is getting closer to what is shown in the visualization. The textures are straight from CGtextures, so not cartoony and all, but its about the idea. The planet is a bit bland compared to the visualization, because there are of course no props, like rocks and trees.

This is created from a sphere cube, following the methods described in the article, apart from the dynamic level of detail.




Same Planet with different settings, making it asteroid shaped. Both planets are generated procedurally.