Recently I added support for ocean planets - the planets consist almost entirely of water, and can have oceans several hundred kilometers deep. Technically, these would be Terra planets (Earth-like planets with water) but without continents. I've also made the icy polar caps more bumpy. Theoretically, if ocean planets become cold enough, their surfaces may freeze completely, and these planets will become ice worlds, similar to Europa - an ice-covered moon of Jupiter which has a liquid ocean under its icy crust. From this point of view, all icy satellites of giant planets (and even icy planets) could conceivably be called a "frozen ocean planet," or vice versa a "hot ice planet." The boundary between these two classes of planet can be considered as the presence of open (unfrozen) water on a planet's surface.

Below, the first two screenshots show an ocean planet from space, with and without clouds. The third picture shows the surface of the polar cap boundary (Note that all ... Read more »

Recently I experimented with increasing the level of detail on planetary textures. Previously, each planet had a small texture generated (only 5x8 pixels) which contained the colour palette: The first axis assigned to point height/latitude, and the second axis assigned to point slope. The shader that generates procedural textures for planets, uses this texture to determine the colour of planetary surface points (IE the color of pixels from the generated texture). To achieve such great detail, it was necessary to significantly increase the number of octaves of various noise functions and write custom functions to generate textures of different materials (for example, in version 0.94 you can see the strata on the mountains - this would be an example of such a function).

Now the color palette texture becomes the surface material ID table. I.e. values from the texture are now interpreted as an index in the texture atlas. The texture atlas is a huge single texture, that contain... Read more »