Game Engines

[vecima]

at a distance, the "planet" would just be a picture... these can be procedurally generated. It's called image based rendering. When you get close enough to the planet, it switches to a polygon sphere painted with very high altitude surface details. If you do this right, no one notices. as you get closer, the detail on only the closest n polygons is bumped up. eventually you're on the ground looking around at a regularly detailed area.

This idea can be made scalable, and with "streaming" might even be able to avoid load times, at least partially.

Maybe with a slight blur of some type.
But also I think cameras in general need to be re-designed.
I was thinking about this last night.
How they used to make a 3D walk through for existing places, in certain encyclopedias.
And thinking about how I've been to some of those places and what there missing.
And the difference between mapping and just a camera.
Even though its true I don't think a view port needs to study all the physics, you see.
Maybe if there was a way that the game just knew where objects were in a less intrusive way.