For my solar system survival game I created some tools that would allow me to use a 2D grayscale heightmap to create a similar in-game representation of real planets using smooth terrain.
I created this because I wanted all planets in the game to be scaled replicas of real life celestial bodies. This way, planetary terrain relief can be almost perfectly accurate to what it is in real life.
Image2Array extracts brightness value of each pixel
Generation script uses value for each pixel to determine how high the corresponding terrain voxel should be
Materials are also dynamically selected based on the height of a voxel so that I don’t have to manually paint the planets. This way I can add for example Ice at elevation above 50 studs and basalt at lower elevations.
Here is a demo of creating Jupiter’s moon Ganymede using the real-life heightmap.
Some images of how this terrain looks while playing:
Im aware they had such tech previously, but there’s was a lot more primitive compared to mine (planet rotations, dynamic coloring, etc). Obviously not a lot is revealed in the video however this tool offers a lot of control over how we generate planets. Mine also uses a different terrain filling method to prevent the many issues that the SSE2 one has, and I also made my own image decoder and stuff so the internal working is definitely different.
SSE2 is one of the best roblox creations ever in my opinion though, even though I have barely played the game the idea behind it is amazing and I look forward to be able to expand the space genre on Roblox.
nice! I also have made a planetary gravity controller aswell, which i recently posted about on my account.
Sidereal’s “unofficial” sequel to SSE2, “Space Pioneers” actually has a much more improved gravity controller that prioritizes the classic roblox controls over realism. It is a pretty neat system, I’ve helped develop the game so I’ve seen how its been made!
