I paid for a Space Sim, not a buggy mess with immersion killing pop up menus.

[Trailstorm]

If you're concerned about technical details, don't worry, I'm a graphics programmer and have written a terrain renderer some years ago. I'm fascinated by terrain generation techniques, especially planetary or large scale terrain.

So by limitations, do you mean you would be mixing the noise generation with other procedural techniques, ensuring that the "rolling hills" created by e.g. Perlin noise don't over power more prominent features?

Edit: I saw your video, my concern would be that a planet generated entirely using that technique might look quite repetitious. You would need to mix in other forms of generation to mimic natural planet formation to create features like rivers and volcanoes and so on.

That was a really rough setup I put together in about an hour. Today I have gotten more experience with it and have managed to make better terrain.

 

[nosleepdemon]

See, another expert.

Ever built one yourself? Have any insight view to Hello Games which showed you how they came to a solution? No?

Again, advice is great, Ideas too, qualifying things as "very easy" is just an unsubstantiated speculation.

I'm almost 99% certain that games like NMS that render terrain in chunks instead of as heightmaps all copied their idea from a GPU gems article about terrain rendering using marching cubes. At the time it was quite GPU intensive and not suitable for large scale rendering. It certainly doesn't require a doctorate. I personally built a large scale terrain generator using geometry clipmaps, which are concentric grids of triangles centered around the viewer which get larger the further away they are. They offer a natural level of detail scaling for far away features. I expect that's a little out of date now though.

 

[Vernier]

I don't know anything about rendering methods, but do these picture help explain how Elite renders the ground texture? I just posted them on another thread in which the OP wanted to see texture-related problems. Photos are from Wregoi JG-Y d24 2C.

https://flic.kr/p/2m9ouTt

https://flic.kr/p/2m9sKTC

It seems as if the engine stamps circular blobs of high-resolution on top of a low-resolution base. I've seen this on planets with more than 2 species in the same location. The base planet is a drab, featureless expanse with oases of life -- these locations have those polka-dotted textures. You can see the boundary where the polka-dots become sparse.