Planets

I have been having a lot of fun messing around with my new shader. In addition to stars, now planets use a combination of grayscale textures and the new shader to display a lot more variety. So, I thought I’d show off how spacedust planets have evolved over time.

SPOILER ALERT

Long before anyone other than myself knew about spacedust, I had these magnificent placeholders:

Pretty boring! They lasted a while until I was ready to think about having different kinds of planets.

Boring gray planets became slightly less boring colored planets:

I had cold planets, hot planets, habitable planets, special planets, and gas giants. Eventually these needed an upgrade as they were still pretty basic.

This time I used built-in textures from gimp to give them a bit more character:

I even gave the gas giants rings:

Not awesome, but passable for the time being. Planets stayed this way for a long time.

With the switch to OpenGL 2.0 and shaders, I decided to give planets a well deserved makeover. Now planets have a ton of variety and a unique look for each type. Here are what just some of the new planets look like now:

A huge improvement! Additionally, gas giants can now be any color.

Next, I will be updating the textures used in exploring the surface of a planet to match. And after that, I can finally get to adding plants to the surface of habitable planets.