I mean... walking is kinda cool and all but it's also underwhelming after 5 minutes of the same old muddy geometry every planet. Why not spice it up with some procedural dust storms based on planet characteristics?
The weathers could be determined by a simple random seed generated at server start. This will make weather consistent across all users.
And to simplify things for a nice beta version, you could just generate a panning noise map (using the random seed) biased by the star-facing vector that determines the storm's position for each planet updated every half-second (to save performance). The "Wind" direction would be determined by the noise panning vector. The only time anyone would notice that it's not perfect is when they stand at the very edge where the value clamps are. You could further improve it later with the help of a meteorologist to figure out how a storm would really form... if you really want to.
The intensity of each planet's weather could easily be biased lower or higher depending on the thickness of the atmosphere, the speed of its axis rotation, and its distance from the parent star (or eccentricity of its orbit) storms on binary planets could be a dangerous sight to behold, with the most intense storms forming at a terminator ring facing the nearest orbital body (Creating an "eye of the storm" effect).
Will there be clouds to represent where the weather is? You could just feed a cloud shader into one of the invisible spheres that encompass each planet and plug in the weather noise texture to determine their locations.
Obviously since the only data required from the server for the desktop clients to run this system is the generated seeds and the planet characteristics (which we're receiving anyway), there should be no server performance hit.
I'm sure you guys know what you're doing and are perfectly capable of making a better system than what I just described, but even this would make a lot of people happy without making anyone else particularly upset.
The weathers could be determined by a simple random seed generated at server start. This will make weather consistent across all users.
And to simplify things for a nice beta version, you could just generate a panning noise map (using the random seed) biased by the star-facing vector that determines the storm's position for each planet updated every half-second (to save performance). The "Wind" direction would be determined by the noise panning vector. The only time anyone would notice that it's not perfect is when they stand at the very edge where the value clamps are. You could further improve it later with the help of a meteorologist to figure out how a storm would really form... if you really want to.
The intensity of each planet's weather could easily be biased lower or higher depending on the thickness of the atmosphere, the speed of its axis rotation, and its distance from the parent star (or eccentricity of its orbit) storms on binary planets could be a dangerous sight to behold, with the most intense storms forming at a terminator ring facing the nearest orbital body (Creating an "eye of the storm" effect).
Will there be clouds to represent where the weather is? You could just feed a cloud shader into one of the invisible spheres that encompass each planet and plug in the weather noise texture to determine their locations.
Obviously since the only data required from the server for the desktop clients to run this system is the generated seeds and the planet characteristics (which we're receiving anyway), there should be no server performance hit.
I'm sure you guys know what you're doing and are perfectly capable of making a better system than what I just described, but even this would make a lot of people happy without making anyone else particularly upset.
