I know this development took a bit a longer than the others. Besides being busy with life I had some difficulties as always but before I go on, like always I encourage you to watch the video :)
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In this development I tweaked a bit more on the atmospheric scattering so it can look a bit a better. It is still not perfect but for now it works. I also added Xbox controller input which I am excited about. It's not like its difficult to implement but its great to be able to play my game with a controller ^_^
Most of my time went into implementing water into the planet. I am a little confused about it though since this is the first time I am ever doing it. The way I did the water is depending on the height of the vertex. The lowest vertex height ends up being water which make sense right. But since I made the lowest vertex water, if I want to go underwater I cant because I am using the "underwater terrain" as the water/ocean. I am not sure how to handle that if I want it to have underwater. Should I create another sphere that would resemble the water so that I don't use the planet's lower vertices as water and use it as an underwater terrain? I think its easier when it comes to regular flat procedural terrain since its just a plane but a planet I am not so sure about. If any one has any ideas I would love to hear it!
Anyway since this space shooter game I will not be able to walk on the planet at the moment then I decided to not worry about it. Going back to how I implemented the water, I started working on the water movement first. It still needs a little more tweaking but it works for now as version 1.0. After that I added a bump texture to create some ripples and animated movement. I wanted to create a reflection texture to would create reflection on the water but I am having difficulties on that at the moment. I am not sure how to handle the reflection texture and where to position the camera when creating it. I know when it comes to a flat terrain, you know where the water height level position is since its a plane but when it comes to a planet I dont know where to position the camera and I cant really turn off the water since its part of the terrain. If any one has any ideas on this as well then I would love to hear it!
After I finish implementing the water I updated the planet to use noise instead of a heightmap texture because I want to create different kinds of planets and noise would be easier to do it.
Oh here are some awesome screenshots that I took while tweaking the atmosphere. I am underwater when I took these by the way, hence the lines on some of them.
That's about it for this development so thank you for tuning in and hope to see you on the next one. I am planning to work on Occlusion Culling since it looks like I will need it :)
