How to modify terrain

@JastroOne1 so how can I use my own texture？

@sflanker damn those were super impressive answers, amazing job there

I would like to add some things:

• Nathan told me a couple days ago how to use textures to affect the terrain and he's implementing a new method to do so for specific areas (now you can assign them to faces of the cubemap, causing distortion in the edges) based in flat projections over the sphere. I'm experimenting to see how this can be used, what tools can make the job easier and how to optimise things as much as possible to then tell the community the procedure I used.

• He also told me that the file hierarchy for solar systems is going to radically change soon, with every planet being in it's separate xml and the orbit positions, launch locations... in another xml too, preparing for planet studio so we can share planets separately. This means people will be able to download specific planets and moons and customise their solar systems, but this also means that starting to learn how to edit the xml right now may not make much sense, it's going to change before you get to understand what you're doing @sujun.

@sujun the entire solar system XML file controls the planets, it's broken into sections for each one. There are hardcoded textures and stuff which are referenced in the code, but it's mostly self contained.

@sflanker There are some hidden texture (such as Planets/Textures/PlanetRingsUrados) I can't find it.

@sflanker @sflanker My file storage path seems different from yours. My store path is "/ storage/emulated / 0 / Android/data/com. Jundroo. SimpleRockets2 / files/UserData/SolarSystems/"

@JastroOne1 Can you tell me which piece of code you are referring to in the XML? By the way, is the shape of the land random?

Hi, as mentioned below, the terrain in game is controlled by xml code in UserData/SolarSystems.

It is possible to use image files as input for biome and height mapping, but we haven't used this in ESS.

So currently all terrain in game is made using mathematically generated noise, although it's correct to describe this as random, there are many ways to influence how these modifiers actually look. For example using math operations, or remapping etc.

@Insanity ah good point, see comments on this post for more about launching and using PlanetStudio. And of course in some future release we should be getting Planet Builder a more full featured UI for editing solar systems.

@sflanker im certainly no expert in the field but i have taken a small look at it and was even able to make my own small moon, though i must say you have to really work yourself into the matter to be able to make something proper, as a lot of the individual settings are quite sensitive and a small change can suddenly result in a huge unwanted change, i myself have struggled to find out how to make your own biomes and i just used preexisting ones.
One part about this which is basically necessairy is the planet studio, which can be accessed via the dev console by writing PlanetStudio (the name of the planet). This allows you to see real time updates to the planet.

This is a great question, and I wonder if the creators of Enhanced Solar System (@JastroOne1 and @pedro16797 I think) might be willing to to share some of their knowledge with the community (or if they can point to something they're using for documentation). Although I know they're probably super busy working the next version of ESS.

ESS 2.0 is not really a Mod per se. It is a custom SolarSystem.xml file which lists planetary bodies, there orbital and physical properties, and a set of procedural generators and transforms used to produce their terrain (elevation, color, and texture). However, what exactly all of these procedural generators and transforms do is a mystery to me. As far as I can tell there is no way to make deliberate adjustments to the elevation or biome map for a planet (i.e. the exact shape and placement of land masses or geographic features). However, with almost 4.3 billion random seeds to pick from, you could just keep trying until you get terrain that looks the way you want (given the right set of modifiers layered on of course).

From a SolarSystem.xml file SimpleRockets2 will automatically generate texture bitmaps and normal maps (which is a way of measuring the angle of a surface in order to give a surface the appearance of depth/texture when it is lit from the side). You can theoretically modify these bitmaps, however this only affects how your planet looks in map view!

• SolarSystem.xml is located in your app data folder (~/Library/Application Support/com.jundroo.SimpleRockets2 on mac), in the UserData/SolarSystems/[YourSolarSystemName] folder.
• Solar system textures are located in GameData/SolarSystems/[YourSolarSystemName] folder.
• You can make a copy of the current solar system for a sandbox with the CloneSolarSystem [NewSolarSystemName] command in the dev console.