I hope this is coming with the general planet improvements for Q4.
The most easy to present my case example, is Earth.
Earth has a static surface map that includes the clouds!
Sunny Greece is always under a huge cloud and we Greeks are not allowed to ever see it.
Also cloud map being actually part of the surface map removes the realism of clouds actually being OVER the land.
For Greece (as an example) that I already mentioned, it is like there is a huge round white mountain there instead of the proper peninsula.
It's is WAY worse than most 3D renders out there. I mean it's Earth, give it some realism.
When I first got the Sol permit and visited, Earth got like 10 seconds to check out for me. No real interest and realism, so I sailed away to not ruin the immersion.
You could/should actually fractal-generate clouds dynamically and allow for different vectors following known (for thousands of years actually) pathways.
You could/should even project a realistic cloud map of the real (21st century) current day. That would be awesome. Flight simulators do that, at least the last 15 years. Hope ED can catch up.
BUT even a static pre-rendered (with proper alpha) cloud map that randomly slowly simply uniformly move around the globe (a bit higher than the actual surface static map), would still be better than the current implementation, that is possibly ripped from a cheapo public domain source!
Improving this and then using the same process for any atmosphere planet, would be great.
The most easy to present my case example, is Earth.
Earth has a static surface map that includes the clouds!
Sunny Greece is always under a huge cloud and we Greeks are not allowed to ever see it.
Also cloud map being actually part of the surface map removes the realism of clouds actually being OVER the land.
For Greece (as an example) that I already mentioned, it is like there is a huge round white mountain there instead of the proper peninsula.
It's is WAY worse than most 3D renders out there. I mean it's Earth, give it some realism.
When I first got the Sol permit and visited, Earth got like 10 seconds to check out for me. No real interest and realism, so I sailed away to not ruin the immersion.
You could/should actually fractal-generate clouds dynamically and allow for different vectors following known (for thousands of years actually) pathways.
You could/should even project a realistic cloud map of the real (21st century) current day. That would be awesome. Flight simulators do that, at least the last 15 years. Hope ED can catch up.
BUT even a static pre-rendered (with proper alpha) cloud map that randomly slowly simply uniformly move around the globe (a bit higher than the actual surface static map), would still be better than the current implementation, that is possibly ripped from a cheapo public domain source!
Improving this and then using the same process for any atmosphere planet, would be great.