Nicely put rutecht, I’m interested to see how Imerso is porting this into Unity3D. Will it be just in the 3rd person as in his example or will it include a transition into first person and the ability to land. Or will this be the job of the Purchaser to achieve. In the example I tried to hover just above the terrain and the result was terrible shuddering, probably caused by the collision setup in whatever Engine he is using. Certainly this will be the challenge for the Purchaser, having the transition from extraterrestrial travel to terrestrial travel. Then what sort of detail can we put into the terrestrial worlds? Can they be convincing and within the framerate limitations of Unity3D and with the ability to take off and enter back into the extraterrestrial? Answers I will need to know before getting too excited about this addon.
The wobbling when you stop at a planet’s ground has been solved already but the new C++ demo is still unreleased, I put it at hold. The Unity3D version if/when released will include that improvement already, so it’ll be possible to land and walk around without any perceptible floating-point instability at all.
On the new (unreleased) C++ techdemo there is far better flying physics as well. I will probably make a Camera extension to complement the Unity3D version, but it’ll not be required (any other cameras will be accepted).
Also, please consider that the techdemo is 100kb only, it does not include any photorealistic textures nor hi-poly models. The Etherea1 tech is much more capable than what has been actually shown.
And so will be the Etherea1 for Unity3D.
The main difference is that in the case of the Unity3D version, it’ll not be a defined game, but a tool directed to another game developers, so it’ll provide the freedom to configure, place and do anything with the planet(s).
Until now, the conversion is coming along nicely, and I’m quite satisfied with the results. I will come back with more details in some days.
EDIT: in the case of the C++ techdemo, the entire engine is written by myself. And of course, you can enter and leave any planets as you please, everything is handled automagically by the underlying engine.
imerso,
Wonderful, anyone who can code their own complete Engine has my confidence. The Techdemo alone is a shot of inspiration, a little rough around the edges but the general concept looks solid. I particularly like the atmosphere effect when entering into the orbit of a Planet.
This plug-in will completely change my work.
I will have to work super hard to redo everything but this wow well this plug-in will give not only me but all of our Unity users a new way of creativity. Really keep up the work and now that your plug-in will be must have soon by me and many MANY other people. Just please don’t set ridiculous price for it haha. Sometimes its better to give something for smaller amount of money to get more from it :).
And i have question about the planets that are made using this plug-in.
Can i make holes in the planets ? Like make a cave ? or underground places ?
I’m using Unity in a planetarium/digital dome. Looking forward to this.
Nice one. Now we have our own Outerra. 
JP
Thanks, I am thinking about fixing it at $99.
The first version won’t be supporting this feature directly. Naturally I will be counting on incentive in form of registrations to continue improving the extension after the first release.
[ ]s
imerso
You could make a freaking sweet remake of Damocles (Probably my fave ever game) with this, and for that reason, colour me interested, you guys talk like this stuff hasnt been done before, it has, just 15+ years ago (Frontier, or earlier, Damocles) and not much since!
If you will really sell this for 99 $ than you can count on me, and i will always be happy to test anything if you will want, i would like this plug-in to have as much possibilities to new and old developers not only game but documentional as possible.
LazyGunn of course its not a new thing but we are talking like that because its something new for Unity and thats what is important and thats why we are so interested in this.
Wasn’t complaining! Was enthused mainly, i’d love to show people how cool games like Damocles were and it seems like a boys dream could come true
I am not aware of any actually released games featuring visitable and full sized planets, not even Spore as their planets are very small. As far as I know there are no released games featuring something like that as of today, only videos of upcoming games.
So, unless I’m absurdly mistaken, we’re talking about next-gen technology here.
I’m not sure they count as ‘released’, they are very old, but here’s Frontier, made in 1994 i think? I ‘completed’ it (reached Elite anyways) on the commodore amiga, one of the most ambitious games ever made and all under 500kb. In this video you can do everything shown, in-game, including flying surface to space, between planets, between solar systems with different star types, gravities, even social and economic systems. Everythings to scale and uses newtonian physics
Even earlier than that was Mercenary 2 - Damocles, that allowed travel from planet to planet but the planet surface was im sure not truse scale. was a hell of an achievement for the time though (1990)
You could take a look at d3d ffe, which is a very pretty reworking of the sequel to frontier
http://www.spacesimcentral.com/downloads/ft2.php?dir=/FFED3D
@LazyGunn: yes, thank you for remembering those games, I love them. And Elite is still possibly the best game ever, if we consider the hardware limitations of that time.
edit: But still, I think you understand what next-gen meaning I was referring to.
Elite was the first game I ever played 
Was on the BBC Micro. i’m still endlessly thankful that I got addicted to games via such an illustrious start, it probably is, taken hardware limitations at the time, the best game ever made. Frontier much like it was incredibly ambitious but lacked focus, its sequel was a buggy mess sadly, but yeah, I hope you played Damocles! Because your planet code is absolutely perfect for a remake
Hah old memories of perfect games are coming back. Who knows maybe with this plug-in one of us will achieve creation of such good game.
Time will tell.
But one thing is sure, you’re work imerso will save us A LOT of time
Hah yes, i was just reminiscing is all
You can have a look at Voxelform for a way to do that right now, but if a solution more adapted to planets is on the way, then this could get very, very interesting…
My only issue with large-scale games is the floating point error bugs, but if you somehow managed to sort that out -including- for multiplayer… then awesome 
I can understand why, for Spore, they took the design decision to focus on concise phases and scale ranges (they certainly had the technology to do otherwise!); it is a common paradigm in traditional game design that the players have a short attention span and need to be ‘rewarded’ by interesting stuff quickly and consistently to keep their interest, as if they were some kind of automaton requiring pre-planned stimuli.
But the problem with that approach is that, when they took all the “boring” parts off and kept only planets, they also removed the very fun of the journey to discover, reach and earn unusual stuff. Everything was made of somewhat interesting landmarks therefore decreasing their value and making -them- repetitive and boring since they were so easily found and reached. So instead of “Oh my god! Among the asteroid fields and lone stars, I found a planet!”, it became “Okay here are a hundred thousand planets, all slight variations of one another… Next!”.
Food for thought.
Well you can use you’re imagination for sure this plug-in will be able to do many different type of planets moons stars not only in sizes but colors and such. Rest you can add by your self black holes, horizont of events, aliens, pirates everything depends on your imagination and how much work you will put in the game. Also as you can tell you can land on every planet so take random planets and change them add building make caverns and such :).
But you are right the came cannot be focus on only one thing or it will be boring in very short time.
With such a vast platform for scenarios I think that ‘storyline’ will become an important part of the jigsaw. In the past, players have been short changed with basic FPS warring storylines that are basically irrelevant to the Game Play. I suggest that it will be necessary to have an Epic Story to go with such an Epic environment. One that is entwined sufficiently to keep the Player guessing and wondering. Otherwise, it will be just a bigger bore.
Count me in, I could use that no problem.