3DWorld VS msdfgen

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

This very well explained here https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen and with more details in link d pdf.

Basically, signed distance fields allow high resolution renders from low resolution rasters which represent character shape.

No idea how to help you but I will just drop this since it improved the quality for me by 1000 https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

And that's the complicated state of the art version for 3D perspective. Other versions are even simpler.

This is known as a “multi-channel signed distance field”, or “msdf”.

https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

I use this, free and has been very good for me https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

Distance fields are not slow to render. They don't need a powerful gpu. Valve was already using SDF for textures in 2007 and released a paper about it. MSDF (multi channel signed distance fields) is a popular text libraries for game engine devs that uses distance fields. Distance fields are fast to render in 2D and even 3D. The problem is with everything around it. Lighting, shadows, shading will all require specialized tooling and likely a specialized engine for very little benefit (imo).

Signed distance fields only work well for relatively simple characters.

If you have highly detailed characters like Chinese or emojis, you need larger resolution to faithfully represent every detail. One way to get around excessive memory requirements is to store the characters in their default vector forms and only render the required characters on demand, but then you might as well render them at the required pixel resolution and do away with the additional complexity of SDF rendering.

SDFs are still useful though if you have to render text at many different resolutions, for example on signs in computer games, as seen in the original paper https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007...

In the past, SDFs also had problems with sharp corners, which has been solved in https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

MSDFGen looks pretty sweet. https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen