We’re well aware that Europe is completely flooded and we’re working on a fix (even if it may be an accurate representation of what human-caused climate change will do to Earth…). Please note that you can safely ignore the incorrect water levels right now.

While it’s not realistic and we plan to tone it down for the default setting, we are considering exposing this value and letting anyone set it to however they prefer. In the screenshots below, the bumps are very pronounced and make for surface features that wouldn’t be discernible when viewing from space. For a lot of visual effects, we often start with more exaggerated settings then dial it back and tweak it until we reach a more realistic appearance. The normal mapping creates the effect of bumps and ridges, or in other words elevation changes for things like mountains and crater rims. This includes 1) getting the basics down for the shaders handling different materials and phases, from water to snow to molten silicate 2) getting all of Earth’s vegetation in the right spots 3) adding lighting, including effects for diffusion and specular and rim lighting for solar and atmospheric effects 4) and adding normal mapping. In the past few weeks, our graphics developer, Georg, has been taking the visual foundation that was built into the last version of Grids and plugging it into the new model. Read: Surface Grids & Lasers are not yet available in Universe Sandbox! Anything discussed or shown may not be representative of the final release state of Surface Grids. Keep in mind this is a development log for a work-in-progress feature. It also makes it possible to add tools like the laser, which is essentially just a fun way of heating up localized areas of a surface. In effect, it allows for more detailed and accurate surface simulation and more dynamic and interactive surface visuals. It’s a feature we’re developing for Universe Sandbox that makes it possible to simulate values locally across the surface of an object. We still have another round of improvements and bug fixes planned for galaxies, but we’re proud of what we released and we’re shifting our excitement back to Surface Grids & Lasers.Ī primer on Surface Grids for anyone not familiar:

We hope you’ve been enjoying the new galaxies we added in Update 23. If you haven’t seen them yet, check out Dev Updates #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, and #6. Here’s our round seven update on the development status of Surface Grids and Lasers.

Universe sandbox 2 laser