Here’s the first video showing the planet with textures and atmosphere shader. I used fraps (windows only) and recorded it while running in OpenGL mode. DirectX would probably be smoother but I haven’t ported the shaders to HLSL yet.
My First Planet – Work In Progress – Ogre3d Engine from petrocket on Vimeo.
Now I’m still working on a simple way to pull terrain patch textures and normal maps from the disk when they’re available instead of creating them on the fly – this way I hope to be able to modify the diffuse textures and customize the planet (so easy to say, so hard for me to do).
My first idea is to create a resource pool for the terrain patch diffuse images and normal map images and then load files from disk into those resource pools as need from the build thread. Not sure if this will work well enough because it may just not be loading enough images in advance to keep ahead of demand.
I should probably create a second thread that is a low priority thread with an entirely different quad tree based on the camera position in the future (assuming the user keeps moving in the same direction). I could update this quad tree and load images for this future position when the real camera position based quad tree isn’t updating/building (and when would that be???)