It is probable that Frontier's planets used this schemeGriff wrote:did the Frontier games do an early version of this polygon subdivision for the planets or am i remembering incorrectly? it could have just been early texture mapping going wonky and different levels of detail models popping in suddenly when approaching a planet that make me think it was subdividing the model automatically.
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/progra ... efault.asp
but I havent been able to find any more articles about it.