I finally have some more time to work on this! Its still alive!

I had to change the erosion quite a bit. Before it was rather fake and could not be translated to actual heightmap changes. That works now, but as a result it has become a little less manageable. It often just cuts deep crevasses into the ground which looks a little sucky. I'll have to think about this a little more. I'll probably also need a way to make steep edges just crumble down to smooth things out again.

and then I started to work on lighting a little. Ignore the textures, its just what I found instantly lying around:


had to write a custom shadow caster, which took some googling to figure out, but then the shadows worked basically right out of the box, which is nice. At the moment its just diffuse with some ambient. No detail normals, no specular or any special treatment for water / wetness at all really. All still to come.
I have several things on my list which I could work on next.
Could be Lava, so more substance can be added. The flow could easily work the same way as the water with some parameter changes. The tricky part is to decide when to turn "lava" into "ground". I was thinking about simulating temperature in some way, we'll see how that goes.
Another thing is vegetation. I was thinking of distributing a lot of billboards using a compute shader and switching textures and scaling up and down depending on different factors like angle of the ground, angle of the camera, wetness of the ground, etc.
Doing shadows that way probably won't work out of the box. I'll have to recompute the mesh specially for the shadow caster I'd guess.
Anyway, I'm glad I finally got some time to go back to this.
Ah, any I also came up with a name I quite like:
"Weltenformer"I'd be curious how that sound to an english / american ear.