Things have been going on with the model and I haven’t had time to describe it all. Some of the things that were implemented this past year are pretty innovative. Just to give a summary:
- An on-rails orbital mechanics model that can derive average insolation for any solar system over timespans ranging from seconds to millions of years.
- A physically based tectonics model that derives plate velocity from the density of oceanic crust.
- A climate model that provides realistic estimates for air temperature in less than a millisecond for any point on the surface of a planet
- A fast, physically realistic atmospheric scattering system that entirely eliminates a costly nested raymarch loop using a closed form approximation
- A physically based rendering engine
I need to create a series of blog posts to document these features and how they were implemented: what resources helped me, what I did different, what it delivered. In order to do so I need to change my style a bit: less well polished, more down to the point. The idea is simply to write all this stuff before I forget it.
More to come.