Quote: "maybe you could just implement that part to Your shader?"
Well it's not as simple as copy and pasting a few lines :p, I'll have a look at implementing it eventually.
Quote: "That looks sweet. Now include the HUUUUUUGE textures! lol"
You can get them yourself, these are the ones I used for the pics:
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/creators/donedwards/RealisticEarth-v4-4kDDS.zip
http://celestiamotherlode.net/creators/tjong/earthlights.zip
Or you can get other planet's ones from
http://celestiamotherlode.net
Quote: "(As far as my knowledge goes displacement-mapping would deform the sphere according to the texture, correct me, if I'm wrong! And what I have read it is only available on DX-10-cards (or was it on DX-10.1?).)"
You can do texture lookup calls in the vertex shader using VS3.0, but I dunno if DBPro supports this as I've never tried. However it's better you do this on the CPU, you see mountains on a planet are incredibly tiny(on Earth at least) compared to its radius, so from a distance like in that pic I showed you likely wouldn't be able to notice any displacement features, only shadows caused by them at beast. It's only when you get really close to the surface would you actually see the mountains and things rising above the background, but in the example the sphere I use for the terrain is far too low low res to show these terrains. Because of this, you need to use some type of dynamic LOD system that subdivides parts of the planet as you get closer, such like the demo I entered into the recursion compo, adding displacement to that would be very simple as you only have to write your own texture sampling code. However I wrote that code using GDK as it's the kind of code that really requires OOP to be manageable, I wrote similar code in DBPro before but it was no way near as efficient.
