Here are the latest developments on the planet update!
I have been busy on improving the following aspect of the tech:
Atmospheric shader
The previous atmosphere was very flat.
The new atmosphere now uses realistic lighting and Rayleight and Mie scattering. It all sounds fancy but it simply means the sky will fade to white close to the horizon, and it will brighten up near the sun. It now has a much more interesting visual personality, with a nice halo around the sun and some color shift on sunset. As you can see on the screenshot the atmosphere color is also now randomized.
Clouds
Clouds are now fully volumetric which adds a lot of character to each planets. They use a realistic lighting and shadowing which gives them that nice dramatic presence. Furthermore each planet now generates its own cloud cover.
I tried to strike the best balance between visual and performance which is really tricky as any volumetric effect will be very expensive. They could benefit from further tweaks as they are too flat and same looking from planet to planet, this will have to wait a bit though as I need to move on to other area!
Biome randomization:
The progress continues on this front with some more terrain random parameters and a new color picking logic.
This planet I found for example features two biomes with different rock colors, which gives a fancy but not too wild rainbow effect.
Planetary Rings and asteroids
I had to get back to the asteroids as the terrain tech had to evolve so much for the planet. They now benefits from the speedup of the GPU terrain generation. Now rings can also be spawned on non-gas planets, and they will also be randomized with different colors, ring pattern and asteroid look.
It looks quite dramatic as you can now see individual asteroids from the ground!
I also did plenty of small and big fixes or improvements necessary before the release, like regarding the player movements and collision with the terrain. Player will now longer get stuck under the terrain and no longer slide on slopes...
Thanks for your patience, hopefully the release is not too far away!
Francois