I was meaning atmospheric effects as in rain and clouds and their coloration. I didn't seem to make that clear. I've landed on plenty of atmospheric worlds, yet be interesting if there was some actual clouds, some fog, a bit of rain. Other engines seem to handle it, and even a basic implementation would be welcome.
I expect the tricky thing here isn't the display at any one moment, but knitting together the underlying data so that it's consistent in both time and space across an entire planet for whatever players happen to be on or looking at the planet ... while remaining simple enough in principle to be simulated in the spare cycles of a domestic PC that's already spending most of its power on running the game itself.
If I land next to you and you're seeing bright sunshine and I see heavy rain, that's going to be a problem (especially if we're on opposite sides of a CZ). Similarly if we land on separate parts of the planet and meet up later.
If I see a big swirl of clouds from orbit, and come down in the middle of them and it's sunny on the ground with not a cloud in the sky, that's going to get criticised.
If I look out of my ship and see that it's raining, and then log back in a couple of days later and it's still raining, and know that in ten years time at this spot it will still be raining because that's what the weather is, that's going to get criticised too.
The No Mans Sky simplification of planet-wide weather states, so it's either sunny (or clear night) across the whole planet, or raining across the whole planet, and just changes which on a predictable cycle, is okay for that game but probably wouldn't work for Elite Dangerous.
This probably isn't impossible - things like planetary rings have a huge amount of simplification going on to make the positions of asteroids completely consistent between multiple players in the same instance without requiring thousands of parameters to be synchronised across the network every second, and you need to know a bit of astrophysics to notice the breaks from reality - but getting an efficient and good-looking dynamic weather system which you need to be a meteorologist to see where it's not real is likely a
much harder problem than showing a few cloud or fog effects (which things like Notable Stellar Phenomena or the Thargoid Maelstroms show that the engine is perfectly capable of displaying in other settings)
In this case, factions of players could face each other, provoking players to compete in the fulfillment of missions and in conflicts with each other. For example, two factions could start a war and players would have to take part in these wars on both sides in order to win.
In theory, yes. In practice the tricky bit is getting player groups to have interesting fights - the bubble is very large, so conflicts over the same bit of space are unlikely. Player groups have generally in the existing Powerplay or Political BGS been extremely reluctant to start any fight they can't be certain of winning - so there would be wars, but they'd mostly be one-sided walkovers where a large group repeatedly flattens a small group until they give up and quit, then takes their territory ... and the large groups just quietly respect each others' borders because there's always an easier target.
When there are evenly-matched sides fighting for position it can be very interesting to participate in or even just watch unfold - but I can think of maybe three such cases in the entire game to date (I've probably missed a few more, but it's certainly not the normal case). The original Powerplay had somewhat the right idea to encourage evenly-matched sides by having so few possible sides that players would coalesce around just 11 (and in practice with the various permanent alliances, just 6) ... but ended up with extremely stable borders anyway for other reasons.
