Devlog #2 - Planets Are No Longer Fake (Prev devlog was a billboard test lmao)

Got the first 3D planets rendering in-game today.

My original plan was to render planets as simple quads facing the camera, but I realized that would become a nightmare once I wanted proper depth, spinning textures, or atmospheric effects. Instead, I wrote a UV sphere mesh generator using Minecraft’s Tesselator and now planets are rendered as actual 3D geometry.

The nice part is that planets naturally intersect with the world and correctly handle depth occlusion without any special tricks. The tradeoff is a higher polygon count, but that’s easy to control through sphere subdivisions and should be plenty fast for distant celestial bodies.

The screenshot is still using placeholder colors and a debug UI, but seeing a real planet hanging in the sky for the first time was a pretty cool milestone.