this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
474 points (98.2% liked)

Science Memes

20075 readers
1713 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (6 children)

Because the computer-generated images that symbolize said other planets are generally done with some shitty-shit stupid noise algorithm to generate the surface rather than anything decent (well, at least it's not uniform noise), whilst the ones for planet Earth just use existing map data for the Earth surface.

As it so happens I've been working on a game that has planets, so here's an example generated with better algorithms:

example made up planet

PS: also note that for game purposes, the athmosphere is unrealistically thick as a proportion of planetary radius, purelly because it looks better. A lot of choices in game making are mainly artistic freedom which at first people with a Science or Engineering background tend to shy away from "because it's not how things are".

[–] NecroParagon@midwest.social 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Good luck with the game! Sounds like it'll be interesting

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 weeks ago

Thanks!

It definitelly looks nice, though the game play is IMHO what makes it fun or not.

load more comments (4 replies)