I've been popping questions on the "Game Designs & Concepts" forum (like this, this, this and this) for a while about this game I'm working on. Unfortunately, Cosmos is still in its baby alpha stages and therefore I won't be linking any playable demos. I'm trying to get this working into at least a decent stage before the local Game Fair in three weeks. I'm posting here on "The Depot" forums to show an update on its status as well as mention it will eventually be on the depot.

Since I've had such friendly and wise advice from the community, I've made a little html document stating who will be credited in the game for their help. I will probably ask more questions before the end, so it is likely to expand. If you feel you are entitled to some of the cake, or you want your name to be displayed differently, or if you don't want to be included with this project, please let me know. Here's the link to the Cosmos Credits.

So now for the update. The program currently generates a random world, has night and day and the new addition to v0.6 includes temperatures based on the distance from star of which heats the planet (based on an equation I found for an average temperature of a planet from the distance of its sun). Temperature brings in the factor of ice and evaporation. Currently, a primitive form of ice exists and evaporation is this next thing I'm working on. Here's a picture of what it looks like from me putting down water in several places:

http://comp.uark.edu/~spsilve/terrain12.JPG

The pink-ish purple areas are water over rock (where currently, rock is just red). Basically, those areas are shallower than the dark blue areas. The gray with kind of a red tint areas are rocks with frozen water on them. The light blue is shallow water over ice.

The thing I'm working on now is pressures, density and winds. After that will be clouds followed by flora (when the game will be really colorful). Erosion does happen, but currently it is too realistic and it'd take way too long for any one to notice. And of course, I'm still tweaking these colors over and over from general feedback.

BTW, are you the sole creator of The Mana World? That's a pretty awesome game! Wish I had time to play it...

But he is the team leader, right? Still quite an accomplishment.

That's quite a large team! I'm also impressed! Just coordinating a project of that size which aren't even able to have IRL meetings is quite amazing. In my experience people join such projects and work for 2 weeks, then they drop out or simply stop working all together. And as you manage to produce it can't be entierly true in your case.