Planet Atmosphere

[Shipbuilder]

This has probably already been thought of and discussed previously but it occurred to me that a possible simple way to provide an earth type planet with a blue atmosphere would be to specify a large flasher located centrally to the planet with its frequency set to 0 and colour set to cyan.

Correctly sized would this not provide the outer ‘blue haze’ effect around the planets ?

[Cmdr James]

Isnt that going to look a bit weird on the nighttime side?

[Thargoid]

The other problem is that it's not possible to add a flasher (or currently any sub-entity) to a planet. You'd have to have a separate entity at the centre of the planet with the shader attached to it, and unfortunately that isn't possible either (any entity that is sub-surface on a planet is immediately destroyed, even one of the "ghost" entities that Ramirez came up with and I used in Tracker.

Nice idea though, but the game engine won't allow it.

[Shipbuilder]

Oh well never mind worth suggesting I guess.

[Thargoid]

Submersible is already doing a lot of work on planetary shaders though, including I think atmospheres. The thread about it is currently just below this one on the board (here). Some of the screenshots look amazing from it, although it's still a work in progress. It's a branch build of trunk at the moment, so not part of current 1.76.1 or 1.77 (until it gets closer to completion anyway).

But certainly worth the suggestion - sometimes ideas work and sometimes they don't, but even those that don't can perhaps be adjusted or trunk can be modified to fit...

[Cmdr James]

Im not anywhere I can easily check, but I'm pretty sure we already have atmosphere but it is not visible. I seem to remember frictional heating when close to a planet.

[Commander McLane]

Im not anywhere I can easily check, but I'm pretty sure we already have atmosphere but it is not visible. I seem to remember frictional heating when close to a planet.

Yes, of course we do (and always had). It is, however, not very visible from the distance, except for the clouds.

[Eric Walch]

Current trunk even has a nice twilight when flying in the atmosphere from a light area to a dark area of the planet.