I remember quite some time ago watching an FDEV demo of gas giant storm animations, which got me very excited. Has anyone heard whether this will ever appear in game?
Gas Giant weather systems and animation..
- Thread starter Low_Doctor
- Start date
Yeah...liked this one too!
[video=youtube;BCQXXNCawF4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCQXXNCawF4&feature=youtu.be[/video]
They haven't said anything, but in regard to planets atmosphere is the next logical layer to add after "geology" (terrain/volcansim). My personal guess is that we'll start to see these things sometime next year, but probably not as the headline feature that will start off that Season (which most likely will be interiors off ships and the ability to ineract with these on foot). If gas giants comes at the same time as atmospheric planets (without life) or as a separate thing is anyone's guess.
That's the one, awesome stuff! Yeah, I guess as it is an atmospheric effect it makes sense that it will likely be due when the atmospheres content finally blows in with the wind. Must admit though gas giants just seem a little lifeless at the moment.
I originally thought that they might just base the gas giants on the brown dwarf animation, which in my mind is pretty damn good as is.
I originally thought that they might just base the gas giants on the brown dwarf animation, which in my mind is pretty damn good as is.
Are we certain these animations aren't already happening in game? I mean, they obviously wouldn't run that fast - we wouldn't be able to see the animation happening in game unless we repeatedly did screen captures of the same gas giant over the course of many hours and compared them.
I've done timelapses...haven't seen it. Although, to be fair that was some time ago.
Yeah, I thought that I might just be being impatient, but I'm pretty sure they are static. There were some parallax layers added a while back to give that feeling of depth before 1.0 was released, but nothing since then. I guess the guys have been busy!!
Another time-lapser here confirming that I saw no animation in gas giants. That was a few weeks ago. Unless they move really aaally slow, I think they are just static for now.
In beta as you approached a earthlike planet in SC you could see cloud movement. I don't know if a time lapse would have shown it though. Don't know if it was a bug, but it made it seem more real then, even though the resolution up close wasn't as good. Perhaps they were playing with it and put it on the shelf for the live game until it's ready.
I heard DB say recently that they weren't happy with how the gas giants looked. One of the streams, no I can't remember which. I imagine when they start to work on atmo they'll give it another pass.
Well. The giant red spot in Jupiter takes 9 hours to do one rotation. And in about some 200 years it hasn't done more than 10 trips around Jupiter. I would guess that depending on the planet size and conditions we would need to stare at these planets for a long long time before seeing any apparent change, thus making the current, fixed image, "as realistic" as it can be, in the current context.
Now that they've added Geology, and potentially tectonics by end of year, I think Atmosphere is the next thing to add regarding planets. Specifically Gas giants and "dry" atmospheres, where there are no persistent liquids on surfaces. Adding liquids to the mix would be a third phase of development, and life, both natural, and man-made (cities), a fourth year of development. Floating "Bespin" Cities could reuse modified versions of existing infrastructure, but adding reasons to explore gas giants would be a challenge. You're not going to get very far in a SRV!
You're correct about storm and weather pattern stability for gas giants, they don't change all that much due to no terrain or other differences to break them up. The GRS actually is much slower, about one rotation in six Earth days. Slow relatively because of the size, the winds are over 430 km/h at the edges.
And the storm can last easily 400 or more Earth years before dissipating.
I am really wondering how any of the current ships will be able to withstand the intense gravity and those extreme winds; as the ships are now, I do not see how.
Interesting, I definitely remember someone @Frontier (maybe the big man himself) saying that this was in game, just pretty slow. I always assumed that you could see it in a timelapse but never took the time to do one myself.
I would bet with gas giants that the accessible area will only be up at the top of the atmosphere where pressure would be low. At the cloud tops, Jupiter's gravity is "only" 2.5g. That is easily within the performance envelope for ED ships.
And yet they are still the best looking procedural gas giants I've seen so far.
Someone posted a demo scene thing a month or two ago which showed off some really nice gas giants. They were using proper computational fluid dynamics and we're very close to something like Jupiter. I looked into Ed's gas giants awhile back and i saw that they were actually testing fluid dynamics approaches but i think this was dropped for whatever reason.
I believe the gas giants won't look really good until a proper fluid dynamics approach is implemented. You could also animate it to update one frame every minute or so for some fun timelapses...
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