My First Planet

For the longest time I’ve wanted to create a multiplayer game that focused on creativity and fun, where you could manipulate the environment in a fun way likeLittle Big Planet or Spore. I am also a huge fan of Ysaneya’s work on Infinity, quest for earth and Sean O’Neil’s work on his real time procedural universe. They’ve really pioneered the whole quad tree planet idea and proven that we can create an entire universe of planets for users to explore and play in. I want to take the quad tree planet and make it accessible on all major platforms (Windows, OSX, Linux) on both DirectX and OpenGL and use it as the environment for my multiplayer game.
I’ve chosen the Ogre 3D engine because it provides a graphics api that is a layer above DirectX and OpenGL and it runs on most major platforms. Ogre 3D is also an open source engine and is very versatile. Fortunately, I’m not the only oneattempting the quad tree planet on Ogre 3D and between guys like HexiDave and Sean O’Neil, I’ve had enough code and information to get started.
My current implementation uses Sean O’Neils chunked quad tree approach with cube to sphere mapping. The actual mesh object is based on HexiDave’s OgrePlanet code– it overrides Renderable. Each patch has its’ own vertex buffer, and has a pointer to one of 16 index buffers (there are 16 possible index orders). For project updates, check out http://petrocket.blogspot.com.
Planet Fly by with trees:

 
Let there be bogeys: