3DWorld VS single_file_libs

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

Yep: https://github.com/nothings/single_file_libs

Also sometimes I use only header (.h) with all functions included wrapped by #ifndef and #endif. When I use these? for code that I always reuse to simplify things and some data stucture handling (to implement dynamic arrays). A good example list of these (not mine) are https://github.com/nothings/single_file_libs

Also, there are many libraries that are much bigger (little list I found) but are implemented in a single header file.

If others have a similiar problem, I found a great github page that has lots of single header libraries, including data structures.

> Like, why don't we just let projects be "done"? Things don't need to be maintained and updated for eternity.

This is generally why I opt for "single-file" libraries that do one simple task well. The smaller the library, the more likely it is "done". For example, do I want some insanely complex image library that handles every file format under the sun, or do I just want some basic one that allows me to output a simple JPEG?

I often find myself referring to "single_file_libs" repository: https://github.com/nothings/single_file_libs

Looking at the open issues, it doesn't appear to be actively maintained but it's still an incredibly good resource for "completed" projects.

Steamworks is the easy option, but if you're programming-savvy you could also use a networking library (some lists for C and C++: 1 2 3) to accomplish the same thing.

Have a look at these. https://github.com/nothings/single_file_libs#geometry-file