I’m looking for either an out of the box plug and play planet generator that I can not only fly around but walk on as well or a good tutorial or something along those lines to help teach myself how to do it. I’m not really concerned with great detail or anything just something useable. I’d preferably like to learn how to do it myself, or atleast get something that has the source code so I can play around with it but I’ll take what I can get. Hope someone out there has som ideas! Thanks in advance! 
sounds like you are trying to do something similar to spore?
I vaguely remember something like this in the Showcase forum. Check there.
You could also try this’
It may be what you are looking for, if not, give us a little more detail about what you are searching for.
something like spore would be good, yes. I would want a little larger scale and different effects such as lava and ice and what not. I also want to know how to do this without taking up every ounce of the computer. This Whirld wiki seems pretty interesting. looks like its in early stages though but maybe a good place to start. anybody got anything else?
p.s. javascript is preferable.
World Generation is a complicated process - nothing procedurally generated comes close to the artistry of doing it all by hand, but obviously that’s beyond a lot of people’s scope for time… and sometimes it IS nice to see an entirely randomly generated world.
As with all random generation, it starts with your algorithm. And personally, I’d outline exactly the level of detail you’re trying to nail down here. For the sake of sanity, I’ll assume you’re doing a single planet mapped (at least mentally) onto a sphere. Now personally, if I was to attempt something this monolithic, I’d seperate each polygon on this mental sphere into a zone, and for every edge define where the connections are to the other zone (matching them all up) so that when the user leaves one zone, they arrive on the one next to it.
Then it’s just a matter of randomly generating each zone to match the climate, which is dependant on where it’s located Y-coordinate wise on our virtual sphere… Generating each zone is an algorithm in itself, but at least a lot of stuff about procedural world generation for 2d areas is covered by wikis like the Roguebasin. I’d also really want to give myself nightmares and use a Geodistic Sphere, so each zone was made out of similarily sized triangles…
Fundamentally, no matter how you approach it, you need to iron out the thing you’re going for first - if being able to circumnavigate the entire world isn’t much of an issue then my solution doesn’t matter. If you only need to give a Civ 2-4 outline of the world, you only need to generate each map as you would a general Roguelike. You could even just randomly generate a texture and use that as the heightmap for an entire sphere if you only need a Mario Galaxy level of “world” generation…
Hi gang,
I posted this
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/73312-Procedural-planets?highlight=procedural+planet
a while ago,
Theres even more images here
And if you follow the links to my blog, theres a load of tech detail on how i did it.
However, its a pretty complex procedure, and there are alternative approaches (such as recursive fault offsetting of an exisitng sphere model, which is probably alot simpler). It depends really on how much youo are going to actually use the planets as a focus point, if you are intending to modify them at run time or not etc. You could probably get some decent results just displacing the vertices on a standard sphere with the values from a polar texturemap etc.
anyway hope this helps
but is there a way to take what you did tom and make both the sphere version and a flat version? I have had troubles also getting the heightmaps onto the sphere like that. do I make each height map seperatly and then connect them into a cube and then turn that into a sphere?