What, you mean sitting in clear space with nothing on the scanner just admiring the planet isn't part of the game?
Heh, it most certainly is, and something I do plenty of already (even to the point of not using the torus and taking a long, slow cruise in-system).
With planets like these to slowly approach, I'll be cruising in on minimal thrust, and loitering in the aegis will be awesome.
I would advise stilts for the quagmires, and camels for the snowy hills
And any survivors, their debts I will certainly pay. There's always a way!
Specially #150. It uses a light-map of the earth that I have as desktop picture for some time. Its good to see in the current planet picture #150, that the lights are on at the dark side and fade away on the planet side that catches sunlight.
On that light map, I am always surprised that the river Nile in Egypt is so visible. More than any other river on the map.
Yeah, the Nile really does look like someone's hand slipped when they were painting out the texture!
It would be really fantastic to have these really beautiful planet effects in the game - something really cool about them looking so wonderful and pretty but be off-limits to the player (without the planetfall.oxp)
Amazing work submersible!
Quick screenshot from my working copy with what I believe is the world's least optimized atmosphere shader.
Ooh, that's nice. Gotta love the green aurora at the pole, too.
Actually the green was an unintended artifact of simulated light attenuation. Aurora might be possible to simulate with a volumetric technique I have been thinking about for clouds. I have also sworn to myself to stop fiddling about with shaders until I can tidy up my patch and convince a real dev to land it on trunk.
Short short version of a cloud shader would be supplied a texture which uses r,g,b to describe the cloud density at different layers, and the alpha channel to describe the depth of that strata. This would allow for all sorts of goodness - lumpy clouds with a parallax effect and more convincing than a flat layer. Add some colour to that and you've got something like an aurora shader instead.
Actually the green was an unintended artifact of simulated light attenuation. Aurora might be possible to simulate with a volumetric technique I have been thinking about for clouds. I have also sworn to myself to stop fiddling about with shaders until I can tidy up my patch and convince a real dev to land it on trunk.
Congratulations on your promotion submersible. I see you have your own branch in the source tree for shaded planets. Is it something we can check out to see your work on planets, or is it too early?
"A brilliant game of blasting and trading... Truly a mega-game... The game of a lifetime." (Gold Medal Award, Zzap!64 May 1985).
Congratulations on your promotion submersible. I see you have your own branch in the source tree for shaded planets. Is it something we can check out to see your work on planets, or is it too early?
Thanks - I'm trying to comment my changes to make some of it all slightly more meaningful. As yet the branch is just a copy of trunk. I probably would have got further with this however we're struggling with a sick trumble here in RL.
I will post in this thread when the first round of commits land on the shady-planets branch.
Congratulations on your promotion submersible. I see you have your own branch in the source tree for shaded planets. Is it something we can check out to see your work on planets, or is it too early?
Thanks - I'm trying to comment my changes to make some of it all slightly more meaningful. As yet the branch is just a copy of trunk. I probably would have got further with this however we're struggling with a sick trumble here in RL.
I will post in this thread when the first round of commits land on the shady-planets branch.
<Waits patiently>
Get well soon to the Trumble
"A brilliant game of blasting and trading... Truly a mega-game... The game of a lifetime." (Gold Medal Award, Zzap!64 May 1985).