Planets are invisible for a while after you get close to them

[asmageddon]

It seem to take some time to load the chunks, before which the planets are completely invisible.
My suggested workaround(before you get chunk loading to be efficient enough) is to use pitch-black chunks for where the planet is going to be (using simply a distance and height checks to see where the planet will be)
Another thing is that size of the long-distance planet pseudo-model and the normal one seem to be somewhat mismatched. Atmosphere also looks different.
Yet another suggestion is to make the texture for long-distance model based on actual planet surface, at least after it's been generated.

 

[schema]

Yeah, those were actually all good points I have considered and already though about / discussed.
One of the reasons for initial planet loading sometimes taking longer, is actually more a problem in the request method, which I think I will be able to speed up.

The problem with all of your approaches is, that you actually don't know what a planet looks like, before you have actually been there, and it actually has been generated. I can't foretell the shape or look of a planet beforehand. Even if the planet already generated and is saved on disk, finding out about it's general shape would require to load it (which is the same as loading it in general). This also goes for the texture: Even if I would update the current texture as a planet generates, it would be necessary for the server to distribute it to all clients.

Maybe I'll find something like that in the future (server distributing a very low fidelity set of information about already generated planets (which creates at generation time)), but for the effect it would add to the game, it will not be very high on my priority list, since it's only a little improvement in graphics, that would result from it. More important to me at the moment are the stability and gameplay of the game. But I definitely will do something to improve the planet graphics (from far and loading from near)

I'm thinking about blending in (with physics) the pseudo model until the planet is at least loaded some percent.
I also will be able to speed up planet generation about 3 times of it current speed I think, so that will help a lot. A planet that you have already visited should load a lot faster (since there is no generating involved)

 

[asmageddon]

Thanks for your reply.
I think that generating a new texture for already generated planets could be a nice touch since it'd make (bigger) structures visible from far away.
As for my black-block workaround, I think it could be done if, before loading planet chunks, the server sent the client "there's a planet near you at (x, y, z) with radius of r and height of h", which client would use to generate substitute chunks. This isn't that good of a solution, but at least it'd give the player of general idea of where the planet starts and where it ends.
As for distributing the texture I don't think it's much of a problem - first off it doesn't need to be high resolution and second off, it's generally only relevant to people who are above(for overworld) or below(for the bottom) and within certain distance. You also don't need to resend it every change.
Btw, have you thought of making different planets and asteroids separate entities like ships? I think that it would be pretty awesome, especially if you could build a reactor on a planet, attach 10k thrusters and fly it through space. And speaking of large vessels, shield size doesn't scale fast enough with amount of shield blocks IMO.