City lights on the dark side of planets

[Disembodied]

This looks pretty snazzy … is there the possibility to adjust the amount of city light depending on technology and population levels? Could there even be a way of adding some weird/great volcanoes?

[gsagostinho]

Since people are brainstorming here: perhaps the colour of the lights could also be procedurally selected, as one can easily assume that alien street lamps might have different colours due to different chemical components being used.

[Smivs]

Many of the alien races may be nocturnal, so do not need or have street lighting. Others may have different visual ranges, so a species that sees in the utra-violet say (like an Insectoid race) might have street lighting invisible to the human eye.
Visible street lighting may be quite a rare thing.

[Astrobe]

One could also argue that advanced civilizations are not dumb enough to waste energy to light the clouds (or show where to aim with an orbital X-ray laser nicknamed "The Greatest Filter"). Some Oolite races are insectoids, so subterranean life could be another argument but... Eye candy!

On a more serious note, Commander_X's work is very promising but the twinkling in the game is too heavy IMHO - twinkling probably caused by a moiré effect, a technical problem rather than a design choice. I'll try to encode information in the generated textures for use by the shader, in order to see if it can help (but I'm more on the stage where I hack around to see what happens - that's how I learned Basic a long, long time ago). Commander_X has done a pure-shader implementation. It looks quite challenging to control the shape of the patterns, the size of the lights, and other parameters I don't even know about.

[Commander_X]

Yup, the twinkling is mainly a direct artifact caused by the size of some of the light spots (pixel sized), monitor's own pixel size, planet's rotation (the fact that these small pixels are moving is not helping), and the clouds layer rotation to top all of them.
The safest way to turn down this is by enlarging the light spots. This helps visibly, but due to combining two noises (the larger main city shapes and the smaller light shapes), there will always result very small spots (on the cities outer borders) that will still expose the issue.
Another way to bring down the effect is to tone down the colour I used for the lights -- the whole thing will fade away, and the effect will be less annoying.
Oh, and of course, this will still be observed on the F7 screen due to scaling down.

[Diziet Sma]

<wipes drool from corner of mouth>