Growing Planet Surfaces

Last time we grew the galaxy. Now zoom all the way in — to the surface of a single world. In A Galaxy in Flames a planet's surface is generated from what the world is actually made of, so a glance at it tells you something about what's there to claim.

Art

Surfaces are built from layered, multi-channel shaders — several maps combined live, with FBM noise carrying the fine detail. The result settles into patchy, naturalistic regions with distinct mineral zones across the world.

The palette comes from the planet's resource makeup: feed in what the world holds and the surface mixes its materials to match — roughly a layer per resource — so a rich world reads differently from a barren one.

Surface features come from a library of stamps applied by planet type. Water-carved canyons and tectonic seams land on worlds that once held liquid; a dry planetoid gets entirely different terrain. Sobel-derived normal maps drive how the colour stratifies, so the patina settles into the landforms themselves.

Engineering

These maps read from the same generated values the simulation uses, so a planet's makeup is one source of truth for both how it looks and how it plays — the resource nodes you fight over sit on the very world the shader just rendered.

What's next

The part we're most eager to show: all of this running at scale, with a hundred thousand units moving in real time.

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