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This could have been a WiP post but since it is not really a work in progress but more of a stupid little experiment I thought I'd post it here.

Basically I wrote my own calculation for a (very detailed ) sphere and added in some height data obtained from height maps I found on the internet (most of it came from NASA anyway, so it's probably Public Domain, but don't bet on it). Thrown some satelite imagery on top as texture et voilà - my own little planets to fool around with - please note that the earth texture isn't properly aligned, causing the land to have sea textures near the shores.

Amazing how high you can kick a polygon/facecount if you calculate structures yourself:

This planet is maxed out, 32x32 chunks each consisting of 140x70 height points. Runs very slow, but it also boasts 22 MILLION faces for the entire planet. Nice to see that DBPro can handle it - despite having to divide the planet into many chunks to avoid a 65k limit on the indices. You can see the border between two of these chunks in Tunisia here.


Another view of the earth. This one has just 8x8 chunks, around 1.3 million faces for the entire planet. Oh and I drained the oceans.


I also tested it with Mars. The texture and the height map are nicely aligned here, but due to some points sticking really far out (Mount Olympus), most of it turned out a lot flater than expected. If you look at it from angles it looks quite nice though even with the default light. Also 8x8 chunks.

I've added a download for you to fool around with Mars if you like. You can change the chunks and the resolution in the settings file if you like. WASD will move you around, Space will lift you up, C pulls you down. Oh and + and - on the numpad raise and lower the sealevel. So if you ever wondered what Mars would look like with oceans, here you can try out

As I said this was just an experiment, I don't know if I'll ever put this to use. Maybe someday in a sandbox space game or something, but nothing is planed as of yet. Still working on my other game

That's cool, but very exaggerated. At those scales you wouldn't see any lumps or bumps, which sort of defeats the point of this so I'll shut up.

lol, you are right it's exagerated, that's because I did not use any real measurements here, I just scaled the 256 values of the height map to 0.2 units height difference and added that to the sphere's base diameter of just 10 units - I always view this as meters for convenience, but if you move in close you'll see that it is far too small to do anything useful with it

But in the end, it's just an tech experiment, which I think is promising. The chunk setup (albeit forced due to the limited indices count) makes it possible to create smaller parts of the planet without the rest, possibly for close ups or doing stuff on the surface, whilest still being able to move up into orbit, say by filling in the rest of the planet in a lower resolution.

So it would be interesting for space based games or a zoom-in location or a zoom in map for surface based games.