XNA Planet Renderer - Terrain & Ocean

[@descai10]

Those waves are like 3 miles high.

[@SMGJohn]

+RobloxDev On some planets they really are 3 miles high, gravity is a scary thing.

[@Utroll]

+SMGJohn yep right - but surface tension and viscosity have to be different as well, because for the same liquid 1m high and 1miles high waves do not look the same at all.

[@jon327]

* cough * interstellar * cough *

[@LoisoPondohva]

@an actual sasquatch they were around 400 ft considering camera hight.

[@καλαμ]

@@LoisoPondohva Height*

[@the514]

One of the best ocean render I've seen in a long time. And it was in 2011.

[@thedrumminggamer1064]

this is absolutely amazing, especially since it was made 11 years ago

[@PeterLakeTV]

Holy crap! So cool, I can't begin describe how amazed I am that you've done this. I looked at the updated version too, so cool. Keep up the rad stuff!

[@tom.looman]

water is looking incredible.

[@Wbfuhn]

O.O Whatever you're doing, keep doing it. I nearly lost my breath at the close zoom in with the water.

[@calebkierum6871]

WOW! Your water simulation is soo good!

[@GaryMcKinnonUFO]

Impressive, not a trivial problem in XNA.

[@tobytoxd]

that waves even scared me! :O very good job! looks damn good man :D

[@thekkl]

They might scare you a lot more when you look at the altitude indicator.

[@Dan-Mezza]

This implemented on Space Engine would get some really nice results...

[@droptheghouls4618]

Imagine this on every planet, like gas giants, underwater planets, that would be BRUTAL laggy, it could be fixed by just splitting all the water into 999999 particles that will make your pc explode ;)

[@as12df12]

Allow me to answer: the sphere is actually made of a cube with vertices displaced in a clever way to map this cube on a sphere with as few distortion as possible. What this means is that you can take a square patch of land and subdivide it in 4 smaller squares, with double the resolution of its parent. Then it's just a matter of assigning the new vertices elevation from a higher resolution data-set, or in the case of random terrain, evaluate the noise function at the new vertex' position.

[@AdamVeldhousen]

Awesome tip, I hope the project keeps going well for you and I'm seriously stoked about your next blog post, can't wait to hear about the techniques you used for occlusion culling.

[@Titans4life92]

The water looks really realistic and the way the land looks from sea level looks really nice! I would really love to get into programming that kind of stuff!

[@SigJohno]

this is absolutely outstanding, I have NO idea about XNA or programming, I'm just wondering around KZbin, and you really have some talent!

[@krakenofdeath1701]

If you developed this alone, I am openly stating that this is the best engine or game dev result i saw any solo dev make EVER. If you were a small team, my statement stands. I greatly respect you as a programmer and i hope you succeed in the future. Thank you for your inspiring videos.

[@supermole4654]

Nice...ok, Im returning to my cube

[@Schmerzgott]

hehehe

[@63fan]

We need a space game to take control of this feature...

[@Masonly2]

No man's sky does this. Although not released it looks amazing.

[@Rhedox1]

Star Citizen.

[@loopysausage]

Elite Dangerous, Space Engine. :|

[@Masonly2]

Tried to land on Space Engine. Had no idea how to.

[@Masonly2]

***** Thanks

[@thinkpad20]

this is absolutely gorgeous. I was floored when the ocean details came into view. Nice job, to say the least.

[@asilviu2008]

@ZeroDominance The waves are rendered in a 256x256 heightmap using a Fast Fourier Transform implemented in a pixel shader. The heightmap is then tiled over the entire ocean.

[@xanderjuneau7937]

A game with water and terrain like that is a huge "want" for gamers.. we always like to see developers pushing the limits. Some people forget that video games are partially eye candy, that is what gets us so hooked to them :D Great job, looks really good.

[@asilviu2008]

Each normalized vertex also has a 3D coordinate for its position in space relative to the planet center. I use that coordinate to look up the height value in a 3D fractal noise volume. This way you don't have compression at the poles like you would if you would do geographical coordinate conversion to look up a value on a 2D heightmap.

[@imagine-games6677]

first of I gotta say it is truly impressive... having said that now i will say that the water is missing "foam" which floats randomly and also seems to appear when water hits a surface such as rock or sand... i just came back from the beach today so i can be considered an expert in the matter... lol.. but seriously... once you add that we can call it perfect... but i could never do this so i am just saying it could be something for you to consider, and i salute your work keep doing it!

[@DRAGONMASTER412]

Shut the fuck up and leave him alone. I'd like to see you do this

[@imagine-games6677]

+DRAGONMASTER412 did you even read my comment. I said it was awesome abd recommended he do somehting to make it even better... it is totally up to him to do it or not.... i of course wont and dont see why you should be upset about it...

[@shreemandpe]

+Vee REX Tech Gaming Apps Reviews Cool Stuff "Yeah I just came back from the beach so you can call me an expert in that matter" I can totally relate. I ate some bread earlier and I'm a baker now.

[@krakenofdeath1701]

I realize my comment is late but Imagine Games is perfectly fine he may have had a slightly unwanted use of words to you guys but he has a decent suggestion. He himself said he cant do it and expressed respect to him so stop being a hater to people who suggest stuff dragon. Imagine i am sorry you have to deal with this hate.

[@dhuyd]

Looks awesome. One thing I'd add is the ability to go under water with some sort of image effect shader. This way you can create the color and distortion of underwater, giving it a nice little touch of realism.

[@Namaka101]

I am thrilled to hear that, i would love to see that come to life. I dont know how hard it is to make such a game, but thank you for trying i hope to be playing your game in the future.

[@mariobyb]

Reinventing the wheel my friend is how you get things done properly! Amazing work here! Sincerely Another wheel maker :)

[@ductri__17]

I can't believe that made all by XNA, incredible. AWESOME!

[@PetrSmrtka]

This demo has most realistic looking water I ever saw, wonderfull !

[@IanBuchanan0]

This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen! Those graphics are absolutely amazing! I really hope you finish the game, because I would definitely buy it!

[@mario2872]

the ocean looks perfect :D that water... how did you made it? :D

[@CosmographyCo]

2:00 700m high waves, love it!

[@asilviu2008]

@stevenazari @webgier Thanks, these videos were all recorded on an ASUS G73JW laptop (I7 CPU: 4 HT Cores @ ~2 GHz, 8 GB RAM and a GeForce 460m GTX video card with 1.5 GB dedicated VRAM)

[@Saromus]

holy hell, and this was done in XNA!?!?!? o.O That water looks AMAZING! I almost forgot this was just a rendering lol. Only thing that could use some touch-up is the coastline shore splashing, that's kind of where you get to that point where you realize it's just a rendering, because it looks so plain.

[@asilviu2008]

When you first create the 6 quads (when each quad = 1 node) you set their neighbors manually and then update them each time you split or merge a node.

[@asilviu2008]

Thanks, that's exactly my plan. I'm trying to get a demo out by the end of the year so stay tuned :)

[@NimerionTech]

I assume you do the subdivision with a Q-Tree? How do you make sure you've got no holes between different levels? Is it a famous way to traverse the Tree? Also, I am absolutely amazen how well you keep the Frame Rate up in 2011. This is a graphics gem for sure.

[@asilviu2008]

@crzykd1305 That might also be a solution but It still implies transforming all the vertices twice whereas in deferred shading you only need to transform them once and I really have a lot of them to transform. I will give it a shot however and compare the results. Thanks for the advice.

[@replay2011]

Wow, that's easily the best water I've ever seen in XNA.

[@asilviu2008]

@crzykd1305 Yes, I am already half way through implementing an occlusion culling mechanism using bounding boxes for terrain patches. I will also stick to deferred shading for now, I just added a material type for water and it works fine. The z pre-prepass is also a good idea. I will keep it in mind in case deferred shading turns out to fail in some cases.

[@DylanWeigle]

This is amazing. If I may, this could be the best RPG ever made if you headed in that direction.

[@as12df12]

To clarify, what you see from far away is not actually a single texture per se (at least I wouldn't do it that way), but a lower-res version of the terrain mesh with everything shaded exactly the same way as when you're up close.

[@asilviu2008]

@ZeroDominance No, I sample the heightmap texture in the vertex shader and displace the vertices accordingly

[@Whatever4690]

Nice water.

[@royaltyfreeprince]

Amazing job! I can imagine this in Black&White or Populous. It look fantastic.

[@UnrealSpartan]

I can not even begin to explain how impressed I am..

[@greenleaph5145]

This is nearly as good as GTA V water detail...Good job.

[@ARBB1]

It's better than GTA water.

[@n8style]

love the sunlight on the water, and the water is really cool too, loved it!

[@coffeediction]

this is awesome, never seen such greatful effects.

[@TheMonkFilm]

This is truly beautiful, really inspiring for people who want to become programmers!

[@asilviu2008]

You need to keep track of them i.e.: for each node, keep a pointer to each of it's 4 neighbors and update the pointers when you split or merge nodes.

[@as12df12]

Other more technical problems you're likely to encounter are floating point accuracy and z-buffer issues due to the enormous scales involved. There are advanced techniques that can get rid of both, but at the beginning you should probably stick to using doubles and at least 32 bits for the z-buffer.

[@asilviu2008]

Yep, that's the plan. I have some awesome things in mind but it takes a lot of time to develop. After all, I'm just one guy working part-time on this but if I manage to implement all of my current ideas, it will be the "awesomest", "epicest" thing ever. However, I will probably not do it very soon, that would be to awesome :)

[@asilviu2008]

@stevenazari Until now, I only added a ship that you can control and fly around (check my other videos). Adding objects to the planet surface is only a next step, nothing impossible there. I have no idea why game companies have never developed a game like this. I will however continue to add features to this engine and I will also try to make a game myself with the limited resources that I have.

[@mavensound]

@OmegaEnabled Agreed. Especially for the fact that he's dealing with procedural noise (from his blog) and from the start of the animation he can only control the generation through variables. It's like coding but being miles away from the runtime product..

[@vanamsaimadhukar8792]

can you help me I am doing a project of life size planet where we can land on it but i can't find any important.

[@MrHakLaw]

Wow, I always had it in my head that when I get the time, I wan't to make a space game, where you can visit the planets, and here you are already making it! :(

[@asilviu2008]

@jimli570 Thanks, I did not write any report about it but I will start a development blog soon and I will post the link in my next video. For the terrain I did not follow a specific paper I just evolved it from simple perlin noise. Recently I added gpu voronin noise and tried out different effects like using one octave to distort the input of another one and so on.

[@apo5]

I hope that water in next few SPACE ENGINE patches gonna look like this one. Great job.

[@asilviu2008]

@crzykd1305 Thanks, the version from this video is done using forward rendering and I'm only doing view frustum culling and horizon culling. The terrain patches are not even depth sorted, that's why the framerate drops so much on closeups. In the version I'm currently working on, I'm using a deferred renderer and depth sorting of the patches. I'm hoping to get better performance this way. I'll post the results when finished.

[@matthamrick7039]

That ocean looks fantastic!

[@AriesT1]

This... is... fucking brilliant. I can't believe this is ingame and not prerendered. Dude, you should make such a space sim / shooter with like one solar system but 10 different planets. Would be enough. :D

[@donboy65]

It's a wonderful work. I'm impressed.

[@YouuTubeKinG]

WTF !!! Holy Shit ! Water is so cool like real life ocean. Great job Silviu Andrei ! I admire your works of graphics motions.

[@ZeroDominance]

Wow, that is really sweet. I'm really getting into graphics programming but I can't do much with water and terrains yet. Still got a lot to learn about shaders. The wave deformation is incredible. Is that all computed on the vertex shader?

[@DashW0]

That is painfully beautiful!

[@blackwersus]

there should be a bigger atmosphere IMO but on the whole, I can't wait to see what comes out of this project. :)

[@axosi]

The water is just amazing. Good Job

[@barushm]

Amazing, looking to see more work.

[@barushm]

Really, it's so beautiful.

[@matthew798]

Wow this is really good... Nice work!

[@SystemCruntchsness]

THIS SHOULD BE IN A GAME ALREADY by a Major studio. guy making the game. kudos to you for workin on something like this.

[@asilviu2008]

@KingHaggis Thanks, I plan to. Hopefully I will have a downloadable single player alpha sometime next year

[@asilviu2008]

No, the version from this video is in XNA 3.1

[@asilviu2008]

Sorry, the current version is not available for download but I will try to get a playable demo out by the end of the year

Awesome LOD effects really impressive.

[@KorsAir1987]

Amazing work man, you are very talented!

[@asilviu2008]

@Uncompetative Yes, you have a point. I've had my doubts about the name for a while now. I just needed another opinion to confirm it. Thanks!

[@Chemicalnurd]

I don't really know what this is, or what purpose it serves, but it is AWESOME.

[@christophern.vandijk838]

Those are some of the most realistic ocean shaders I've seen. We need people that will take this kind of stuff a bit further and develop a 3d sim earth type game where players can actually sculpt a planet using natural parameters and see it happen in this perspective. Screw Spore, micro manage a planet and multiple species...

[@dirkie15]

Hey Silviu. This looks really good! I have a question. Are you making a space simulator like Space Engine or is this just a planet renderer?

[@lllllsp1d3rlllll]

wow thats the best stuff iv seen somone do in xna so far megga props nice man.what did you for the water or how did you make water?

[@angelojulioth3616]

This is impressive, what skills do I need in order to achieve something like this? I'm learning C, C++ and Java...I wan't to get into OpenGL,Vulkan and computer graphics in general but I don't know how to get started, my main goal is to develop simulations able to run on multiple platforms.

[@asilviu2008]

@termuralliance Thanks, actually I am starting to have thoughts about switching to another platform. There is enough space for optimization but it frustrates me that XNA is limited to DX9. Each time I implement a new feature I think about how nice it would be if I had DX11 features. So my dilemma now is SlimDX vs raw C++. I'm inclined towards SlimDX cuz I really like the development speed of C#

[@asilviu2008]

Thanks! Yep, it is, I should have a new video soon and a playable demo later.

[@SiththeSmith]

I am utterly stunned.

[@shade1978x]

This is stunning! Is this software that's being used to develop an actual game? My head is spinning at the potential. The thought of populating such a huge gamespace with content is enough to give anyone a migraine, though! lol Beautiful work!!!

[@EricDaily]

This is incredible. I'm amazed!!!

[@igorarestov5252]

speed/planet/waves/rocks scales mismatch. but looks very well

[@michalkleszcz]

this + universe sandbox = mind blown

[@AwesomeFaceHD]

Where does somebody learn this stuff? Can anybody please link me to some good documentation for something just like this?

[@krakenofdeath1701]

Reborn math was used SOOOO much for sure lol

[@asilviu2008]

@hellsing80h Thanks, it's all real-time. I'm working on a space-sim game and I hope to release a free demo somewhere in the second half of this year. The game will be called "Bow Shock". There is a link to my blog in the description. Also, a google search on "XNA tutorial" will give you plenty of starting material

[@MaxArceus]

although it looks really really cool, this would be one tiny ass planet I estimate this planet at less than 1000 km in diameter, while earth for example has 12000 km in diameter. But it does look really awesome, those waves are really cool

[@andrewdavis8576]

Where could I get a copy of the code for this? Would you mind sharing by email?

[@OfficialTeslaGames]

This is great. Here's some feedback about the water though, it's too "big". Roughly around 1:19 or so you can see the waves on the shore are very large relative to the landscape. It should be much smaller to be realistic.

[@shawson]

Incredible- nice work. Is this being developed into a game at all?

[@asilviu2008]

@crzykd1305 Hmm, interesting, but then I would have to use a compute shader to transform all the vertices because I don't think it's possible to pull out the transformed vertices from the directx pipeline after the vertex shader.

[@Codefortyseven]

Oh my god this is awesome... I'm out of words.

[@NextLegendsClan]

really amazing, no other words for it

[@SCjake333]

Scale down the water, move it slower. Not only more realistic to the islands size (think of how much time there is between every wave hitting a beach, bout 5 to 10 seconds), also fps can be ket in harmony this way.

[@yksnimus]

you created all the shaders yourself? its amasing, the atmosphere glow/fog thing and the water its very impressive

[@travistrue2008]

I think this is probably the best water I've ever seen yet. I'm actually trying to develop water effects for lakes and oceans right now. How did you learn about implementing it?

[@omfggoodwill1234]

Simply incredible.