Yep that's it. And it has already been quite a bit of work getting the continents to have realistic shapes. A plain global landscape fractal with oceans comes up looking pretty bad, and alot of getting the realistic shapes lies in scaling, warping and displacement. One of the earliest problems I had was that I was getting realistic continents but the mountains were extending way out into space, and oftentimes shots from about 20 miles inland with the sun overhead would have thin skies with very visible stars, basically the mean altitude of the landmasses was way too high. So there is alot of fine-tuning involved just to get things to a realistic level. I would also like to make the oceans as deep as they are on earth but it's not a priority. Few people are going to be trying to render underwater scenes -- though I will make Terracell to support them - right now average ocean depth is about 1.5km, whereas on earth it is 3.8km. - and its still pretty early. I may be able to get closer to realism as development continues. For now, the bigger priority is making sure the land altitudes are realistic. I don't want every continent's center to be an Everest, but I am also trying to avoid the Flatworld Tendency. I spent several hours yesterday fighting what I call "Australia Syndrome", that is an over-abundance of minor continents and no major continents. Think I got that worked out now, but still, a large part of it is random, so you never know what you will get. I have to do multiple renders from different seeds to get a feel for how each change has really effected things. Sometimes I get gigantic continents, while other times I get mostly ocean worlds, but most of the time I can get something close to earth's continents, which is the goal. And when I finish the mountian ranges shader, it will naturally modify the continent shapes as well as creating new islands and island chains.
