3DWorld VS OpenSimplex2

You mean you want to draw the individual stars themselves? It's likely just a texture, probably white so that it can be colored differently for each star. This is how I've done it. Try a Google image search for "flare texture". You can find some of the ones I used here (flare*.jpg): https://github.com/fegennari/3DWorld/tree/master/textures

I remember it being called "wave surfing", where you start at the current pixel and draw a line to the light source, checking the elevation vs. the altitude value of the line (Y or Z) at every step. I have the code in my mesh_shadow_gen class here: https://github.com/fegennari/3DWorld/blob/master/src/visibility.cpp

This all sounds complex, but the system can be made to work well. I've written something similar myself, except with VBOs rather than SSBOs. My code can be found in these two files: https://github.com/fegennari/3DWorld/blob/master/src/buildings.h

C++ code for drawing spiders can be found in my GitHub project, in the spider_draw_t class: https://github.com/fegennari/3DWorld/blob/master/src/building_animal_draw.cpp

Filling the cracks properly generally gives better performance and fewer drawing artifacts compared to skirts. If you use indexed triangles and set them up in neat rows and columns, it's pretty easy to get right. No lookup tables or big switch cases, and it works with any number of LODs. See the crack_ibuf_t code starting around like 1800 here: https://github.com/fegennari/3DWorld/blob/master/src/tiled_mesh.cpp

I wrote a planet name generator that combines multi-character combinations. It may not do as good as a proper Markov Chain, but may produce names that sound better than your simple approach. If you're interested, the code can be found here: https://github.com/fegennari/3DWorld/blob/master/src/Universe_name.cpp

The code for this is in my voxel_manager::add_triangles_for_voxel() on line 497 here: https://github.com/fegennari/3DWorld/blob/master/src/voxels.cpp

Thanks. Yes, I was looking at this. The problem is that the texture atlases are in a different format than the ones I currently use. The MSDF versions don't have all of the ASCII characters and some characters have a different number of pixels. So it's not a drop in replacement for my system, which is using texture atlases like this: https://github.com/fegennari/3DWorld/blob/master/textures/atlas/text_atlas.png

I have some code for this here, but it's part of a large project and not easy to read/understand: https://github.com/fegennari/3DWorld/blob/master/src/free_obj.cpp

Wow you have been playing with noise for a while :) . It amazes me all the different noises that exist now.. Perlin, Simplex, OpenSimplex, OpenSimplex2S, OpenSimplex2F, Worley... If you are curious about OpenSimplex https://github.com/KdotJPG/OpenSimplex2

Probably true, although a neat repo for open simplex is https://github.com/KdotJPG/OpenSimplex2

This may not answer what you're actually looking for - but a few years ago I found a library for coherent noise in Java, which at least meets my needs. I use bits and pieces of the Open Simplex Noise implementation from that library. It's unlicense/CC0, so easily copy-paste-able straight in to one's own project. https://github.com/KdotJPG/OpenSimplex2/

So I was looking for a noise function, and I found this repo from the author of the OpenSimplex algorithm. And in the GLSL implementation, which is the one I'm gonna use, since I want to generate terrain with compute shaders, the function%20%7B) looks like this:

If you want to feel safer from that, you might opt to use one of these instead. Use the ImproveXY endpoint to get a Z that repeats after 500.5626833874055. Go up one directory and into the glsl directory if you need GLSL versions instead .

Fair. I definitely agree Simplex has some characteristics that don't work great in some places. Especially when you threshold near zero of a single octave. Have you tried OpenSimplex2S? It's made to be less "bubbly" than standard simplex. In own repo, In FastNoiseLite, [Shader preview (3D noise)[https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ttdGR8]. Both the 2D function and 2D slices of the 3D function might be worth looking into if you haven't yet.

Here's a link to the original implementation: github.com/KdotJPG/OpenSimplex2/blob/master/glsl/OpenSimplex2.glsl