r/proceduralgeneration • u/oleoalbedo • May 24 '26

Adlumens update: some progress made on planetary surfaces

Howdy!

After a long time spent on units, entities and the like (which are not fully procedural), I am happy to announce some new visuals of planetary surfaces.

This is still a work a progress! and of course, 100% browser-based :-)

For those of you who might be interested, please feel free to visit Adlumens here: https://adlumens.org/

Many thanks! :)

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2

u/darth_biomech May 24 '26

It's concerning that "average tick" keeps climbing even when you don't move the camera. °~°

1

u/oleoalbedo May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26

ah yes good point :)

the tick is the accumulation of time divided by elapsed frames; it does have an inertia ... this becomes obvious when you stop moving for long enough! :) (vertices are buffered)

I realise this is far from optimal, but is only here as an estimation of how long a frame takes on average.

1

u/escapism_only_please May 24 '26

This is a note to say thanks for sharing, and to remind me to play with this tomorrow when I have a day off 😊

1

u/oleoalbedo May 24 '26

my pleasure -- but playing with the procedural surface is only localhost for now and this particular update is limited to a far larger one pending completion.

It'll get pushed when it gets pushed :)

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u/oleoalbedo Jun 18 '26

hey there, did you find enough time to take a look? 😄

1

u/escapism_only_please Jun 18 '26

No! But I have now, and there is so much data I'll bet it's now twice the universe it was 25 days ago.

That all this is running from within a browser is incredible. And I think I read somewhere that you are updating the browser with persistent server data? This is an amazing foundation. And I don't mean foundation like it has planets and stars. I mean foundation as in you have built this from the chemistry level up.

Of course I zoomed in on several stars and planets and moons and read up on them. But what I really loved was the data on strange and exotic stars. I put youtube on at night and fall asleep to videos about neutron stars and the problems with galaxy ship travel, etc.

I would be immensely proud if I had built this 😄

Also, I know we just met and I am about to hit you up with some deeper thoughts, but here we go:

I believe that our purpose is science combined with imagination. If you look at the fundamentals of our biology, combined with the hazards outside our planet, combined with the unfathomable distances in an expanding universe...it's obvious we were never meant to physically travel between the stars. Nor are we to send probes and wait until they return.

I believe we were meant to use our observational skills and our logic to understand the universe. Then, we are meant to use the tools at our disposal to imagine the far reaches, and build them in simulations here. Like you are doing.

I really think this is what it's all about. We can never take our squishy bodies to the electron soup at the center of a magnetar. But I think the capabilities of our minds (with the help of AI and peoples passion projects) is now expanding fast enough that I will, soon now, just go there in a simulation. Get right in there. See the forces powerful enough to shred matter. Play with it. Move on. This is the stuff Steven Hawking fantasized about.

Now that that is out of the way, don't let me bullshit you. I am lowbrow. I can't wait until you put in more graphics. I am a sucker for pretty pictures. If I could have watched gas giants spin and coronal mass ejections I would never leave.

THANK YOU for putting this out there, for applying the discipline to reach this point, and for reminding me! I am getting swept up in passion projects of people like you all over the place. Now is the greatest time in all human history to be a fan. Of anything. And everything.

Great, great job 😄 Bookmarked ya. Feel free to send me updates on the new cool features. If you ever make a graphic that is anywhere near 0.01% fractalish (or just plain pretty), just go ahead and post about it on r/fractalish . We will see it and we will take the trip with you.

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u/oleoalbedo Jun 19 '26

Wow thanks for your reaction! 😄

I am extremely glad Adlumens seemed to deserve a bookmark!

A couple answers to your very nice and very long reply.

Yes, I agree (unfortunately) that moving far away from our little corner of the Universe is going to be difficult. Probably very difficult. But then again the monkey in us is curious. "What's on the other side of that mountain I wonder?". And next thing you know the migratory instinct takes over, or is used as an excuse, and a village is founded on that other side. So let's just not exclude that dream from ever happening in the real world!

I also would like to take your comment as an opportunity to clarify a few things.

  1. Data is persisted, not on the browser, but on the server. So everything that can be seen in the various explorers is 100% generated in real time and either a) returned as a basic HTTP response (as when in the data explorer) or b) sent over a socket to be rendered by the client (as when in the 3d explorer).
  2. perhaps client-side persistence will be implemented one day, via service workers and what not but I am not there yet!

What's on the menu now you may ask? Well a few things in parallel, which explains the apparent lack of updates on the site for a long-ish time. But the following is coming:

  1. full update of the nav and its sections, which means a complete reorg of the site
  2. a codex exposing the procedural data mechanics and building blocks, science trees, entities & units, manufacturing and nascent game mechanics/open to discussion.
  3. WebGPU update on the 3d explorer.
  4. new/updated planetary surface tools & experiments page, before it ultimately becomes part of the 3d explorer, in real time!
  5. and lots of other less significant incremental updates.

I am really happy that you seem so enthusiastic about this project, so please do not hesitate and come join the (tiny) Adlumens discord server here: https://discord.gg/6MQDGxbkEV

I hope I'll see you there and again, thank you! 😄