I’m currently working on a better looking blending method for terrain textures.
It’s based on a height map in the textures alpha channel and uses the “heighest” value found in all used textures or blends between them if the difference in height is small.
Also I’m playing around with steep parallax mapping for terrain.
More images : Gallery
Pretty neat.
@Perjin that looks incredible! I hope you’ll share your techniques. A lot of games could work really well with this look.
Well I guess some of you already know what I’m up to, but here’s my movember screenshot. Been working on techniques to get the vegetation to place in realistic positions, and just recently added the quick select inventory bar that appears when you scroll your mouse wheel. Placeholder art for the win.
Thanks all.
@erlend_sh I’m currently cleaning up the terrain shader and test if everything works as expected. I’ll open a separate topic later where I post the code.
@EmpirePhoenix The basic thought is the same. I don’t need a normalized opacity map though.
@jayfella Looks really cool, I’ll probably need something similar for my game. So I’ll keep an eye on your development of that terrain system you have there.
Working on a small adventrue, placed in a desert like environment.
@8Keep123
Thank you! 
Targeting both. I’m baking textures in Blender and I keep an eye on geometry count etc. Every once and a while I test it on my Nexus 7.
How do you guys pluck up the courage to develop for android. So many versions, so many different phones, so little oomph to play with… I don’t mind saying it sounds like an idea from hell to me. I admire your mindset.
I’ve adapted @t0neg0d 's SkyDome into something more to my taste. There’s a video demo on YouTube:
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsJRM6tr3oQ[/video]
If you wish to browse code, start here.
I welcome constructive feedback. I’d also appreciate advice on how I should package this up for distribution. Could I contribute it to the JME codebase? And if so, what changes (if any) should I make?
@sgold sweet! really excited for this! In your assets, I noticed the star images are circles of starts for north and south, how did you go about making these so I can make my own? I want to make high resolution realistic stars, same with clouds, though your cloud images are the same ones from t0neg0d.
Wait, I realize they are made from your MakeStarMap headless application… But would it be possible for me to make ones in photoshop and have them look correctly in game?
@8Keep123: In order for a texture to look right when applied to a dome, you need to use the same projection as the mesh does, in this case an “azimuthal equidistant projection” at the appropriate scale. I don’t know how to do this in Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, which is why I wrote MakeStarMap.
Generating higher resolution textures ought to be as simple as increasing the textureSize constant in MakeStarMap.java. Doing so, however, will make the stars smaller and harder to see, and at some point you may need to increase luminosity0 and modify plotStar(BufferedImage,float,Vector2f) to generate larger star images.
Do the images have to be seamless? That would be pretty hard to do with these circular images… If they are two different textures used at different times then I could do that.
@jayfella what kind of crowds do you hang out in? Most of the developers I know are textbook masochists 
@8Keep123: The star maps and sun/moon images need not be seamless. However, I recommend using seamless textures for the cloud maps.
The northern/southern star maps are used only with star motion, which is currently disabled. For the first half of the demo, I used I used the Wiltshire.png star map, which is specific to 51.1788 degrees north latitude and 10h33m local sidereal time.
@sgold, that’s pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.
What did you change from tonegod’s implementation?
Also the only minor issue I’d see is that clouds seems to move from bottom to top, with no real parallax, looks more like smoke rising. Maybe the clouds’ horizon line should be higher than the real horizon line.
@thetoucher So, everything get exported to jME? or just the bone and their vertex binding, and their key frame animation?
@nehon said: @sgold, that's pretty cool. Thanks for sharing. What did you change from tonegod's implementation? Also the only minor issue I'd see is that clouds seems to move from bottom to top, with no real parallax, looks more like smoke rising. Maybe the clouds' horizon line should be higher than the real horizon line.
Thanks for your interest, @nehon.
I had intended to tweak SkyDome slightly, but ended up re-doing everything except a few textures.
SkyControl allows the sun and moon to both be visible at the same time. It puts cloud motion under the control of Java, so you can easily pause the clouds or make them go backwards. Its interface is based on simple concepts like time of day and cloud density instead of a calendar and cycle in/out functions. It permits the sun and moon to be scaled, rotated, and precisely positioned anywhere in the sky. (Scaling gives higher resolution using smaller textures.) You can easily change the number of polygons in the mesh. It generates realistic star maps, and will soon have moving stars. That’s all I remember off the top of my head, but there may have been other important changes.
I agree that clouds near the horizon look like smoke, and you’re right that this is due to a lack of foreshortening. I believe SkyDome deals with this by flattening the dome for both stars and clouds. A better approach, I think, would be to put the clouds on a different geometry from the stars. I haven’t tried this yet, but I’ll prioritize it and report back on the results.