Planet size?

There was a thread on the Thrive subreddit about this. I (CouldSholder) dug up some threads on the original Thrive forum to contribute.

m.reddit.com/r/thrive/comments/3be4nf/how_large_are_the_planets_going_to_be/

Going on that thread alone, there are two options. The most feasible is planets that are larger than Spore's, but smaller than reality's (due to the sheer number of them). An example Sciocont gave on one of the old forum thread was a planet half the size of Manhattan.

However, moopli put forward the potential for planets the size of Earth if the cards of rendering and resolution are played right.

Personally, I think the team will eventually think up a balance between making planets small enough to render well and large enough to be believable and interesting while not being unreasonably huge (if someone made a bet to the devs he could fully explore an Earth-sized home planet before the next update, he would probably lose).

Pretty sure that's what they intend to do. Sure, there might have to be a pre-made environment for them testing out the stage for the first time, but I think they'll eventually switch to a generated world. Continental drift might even be a thing, since it's an important mechanism of evolution.

Quite frankly, if there's going to be a game world with multiple planets and moons, making them procedurally generated is arguably easier than pre-making a whole lot of them for the game to use. That, and variety.

Cool, I love talking about planetary generation. Here's something I wrote recently on the subject (which mitobox may have been referring to): forum.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/planetary-map-data-model/94/1

The basic idea is that we might be able to generate much larger planets than we previously thought, despite not being able to simply generate on-the-fly (as games like Minecraft and No Mans' Sky do), because for most of the planet, we don't need actual terrain data (not even very rough terrain data, like, say, a height field with one-kilometer resolution), but only some basic information like rainfall, approximate elevation, etc.

But this is all speculation from me until I get a working test of the concept.

Johnnykun, since this is your thread I won't try to nudge you back on-topic (but I will take the chance to warn you not to keep going off-topic on other peoples' threads). Your home star could be many things, yes, possibly even a binary. Procedural generation doesn't just mean "like spore" -- there are a ton of different ways you can procedurally generate things. For example, in Ultima Ratio Regum (www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/) the game generates chairs, buildings, religions, and entire nations procedurally. In No Man's Sky (www.no-mans-sky.com/), star systems, planets, space ships, and organisms are all generated procedually. In Minecraft (minecraft.net/), terrain is generated procedurally. And this is barely scratching the surface.

So, yes, similar in a way to how Spore planets are made, but only in as much as they both involve procedural generation, and are both intended to produce planets. However, my planned method for planetary generation is completely different from Spore's. Spore's is very interesting, they use a system of brushes and palettes to, essentially, stamp/paint features onto the surface -- which is how they can make such artistic-looking planets. Ours is based much less on aesthetics, and more on modelling the results of real processes (for example, modelling tectonics by incrementally rotating polygons over the surface of a sphere).

Speaking of No Man's Sky, I've seen a video where they explain how they made procedural sounds for creatures: uk.ign.com/videos/2015/07/24/the-otherworldly-sounds-of-no-mans-sky-ign-first