First steps

This is going to be a pretty short post because at this point in my learning experience I was still following a tutorial.

Reimer does a great job in these tutorials.  XNA as a framework threaded the perfect gap for my level of knowledge.  It abstracted away enough of the low level boilerplate to keep progress fast whilst leaving enough intact to provide a great learning experience.

It did not take long to start showing results:

From there I decided to begin construction of the planet.
Taking inspiration from this fantastic blog i decided to follow his suggestion and implement a cubemap in order to project the terrain to the sphere.

All that was involved was to create 6 terrain patches and rotate them to form a cube.

I was able to port a terrain generator from my previous experiments with Roblox,
Then to project the cube to a sphere the cube verticies were normalised and then multiplied by the desired planet radius plus the height of the terrain at that point.


After some experimentation this is what I had to show for it:

Still a lot of work to go! But it was a start.