Since the last devlog for this update I decided to remake (from scratch) the terrain of five objects, that being Phobos, moon of Mars, and the Galilean moons. To go over everything that entails would take too long to write, so let's try going over it quickly.
Phobos
Phobos' terrain is connected now, and its DEM is more detailed as I used a real DEM for the shape and another one sculpted in Blender to dig out the smaller craters and grooves from that. To get the crater Phobos is recognized for look right (Stickney), I mapped an image on it of itself, just under flatter lighting.
Before and after revamp.
Io
For Io, I split the terrain into three parts based on a fictional height map made by Bjorn Jonsson combined with parts I made. There's the volcanic pits, with lava if they're deep enough, then the flat yellow sulfur plains, and rougher mountain regions. Parts of the surface which are bright enough are considered ice, and have the corresponding splat map texture.
Europa
To recreate Europa's terrain procedurally I used cellular noise to generate the labyrinths, and to dig out smaller cracks I used the noise used for Orcus, which also happens to be cellular but there's different stuff done to it. One of Europa's large scale surface features are "cracks", which interestingly first go up, and then down, not the other way around. I kept that in mind when making the DEM.
Ganymede
Ganymede was the hardest of the bunch to remake, and it's annoyingly the one I'm least proud of, even though it took so much time to finish. Namely the problem was that the data we have of Ganymede is low quality, and that includes very few elevation mapped areas, so I had to improvise and to do so I decided on making a map of the dark areas, which I could make higher like in KSP2's Tylo (who's directly inspired by this moon, btw). Turns out that didn't look so good, and I wasted like a week of work, so I bit the bullet and started anew on a DEM, and used the dark area map as a biome map.
Callisto
The cool thing about Callisto is that it has ice spikes, so I wanted to highlight that. Apparently, Callisto has these "knobs" instead of mountains where they would usually be concentrically around craters, and that is in fact what makes those bright concentric circles around the two big basins exist. Now I didn't want to have to draw specific spots on the map like that to decide where there's a higher concentration of these spikes, so I used the brightness of the surface as the decider. Basically I implemented it so where it's bright, there's a forest of these spikes on that area. Otherwise, they're pretty rare.
If you're saying "why should I care about this, I can't run it on my phone anyway", I am planning on this having a cut-down version to run on phones after release, which I'm thinking would only include Earth, Moon, Mars, Venus, Sun, at a lower resolution and using less textures, less expensive generation etc. (sort of like how RSS 1.4 had RSS lite, if anyone remembers that)
Anyway, I'm thinking of taking a big break from at least RSS development so I hope I'm leaving you with a big and polished up product for you to enjoy (or even expand) during that time. I think I'm the most aware of all that it isn't perfect, but for what it's worth it's as close as it possibly could be, and it's miles better than what it was when it started three years ago.
Cannot WAIT for the release of the next full version!