i wonder if it would be hard to adapt the code from “3d engine design for virtual globes” (http://www.virtualglobebook.com/) into an open source project. it was written in c# and the c sharp version is already open source over at GitHub - virtualglobebook/OpenGlobe: A 3D engine for virtual globes (think Google Earth or NASA World Wind) designed to illustrate the engine design and rendering techniques described in our book. OpenGlobe is written in C# and uses OpenGL 3.3 core profile (via OpenTK). See the web site linked below for more information
i also love the work of eric bruneton (much of which is open source and related to realtime planet rendering)
Eric Bruneton
Some of the features already exist and have been partially implemented by users already. Maybe not exactly as the OpenGlobe project, but similar effects.
It probably wouldn’t be all that hard to adapt to jme if you wanted to give it a try. You would have to get intimately familiar with modifying and creating meshes.
Cool project, I hadn’t seen that… One of the challenges in porting something like that is that they seem to be rendering using double precision… jME’s use of a single float approach makes it a bit more difficult (not impossible) to do something like this…
That said, you can do a direct port of their math and mesh stuff and probably have a working (albeit less accurate) version running. The tricky part is how you get accuracy closer to ground level when working with more and more decimal places.