I am very disappointed to not see rings casting shadows in the preview of the chapter four release. These have been missing from the game from its inception and make this look so much more like a simplistic toy instead of a simulated galaxy. This to me seemed such an obvious and simple way to greatly enhance the realism of the way the game looks so not seeing this in the coming big visual update was a real let down to me. Here are some arguments why we need this:
Casting shadows should be easy to accomplish since it could just be a reprojection of the rings on the surface texture of a planet. Technically I guess you could limit the possible performance impact by only casting shadows on the host planet, excluding possible moons and other structures orbiting the ring system if necessary. And, technically, on a planet very close to its host star the shadows should be blurry since the light is not coming from a point source but you've been ignoring that for terrain shadows, a perfectly fine optimization, and that should be fine for ring shadows too. The game would still look 100x more spectacular with those shadows.
I never commented on this issue before since you previously rightfully concentrated development on gameplay features and performance. But now that you put so much effort in enhancing visual quality this issue feels like a huge oversight.
- please convince me of how undramatic, boring and insignificant the shadows are in a picture like this https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/179/colorful-colossuses-and-changing-hues/ or this https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/189/tis-the-season/ or this https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/133/many-colors-many-moons/. Ya can't, can ya?
- rings are almost always offset by a few or many degrees from the ecliptic so there will practically always be fantastic shadows
- pictures taken from earth are often taken with the sun on the opposite end, meaning that the shadows of the rinsg will be hidden by the rings themselves in many earth-based pictures. That may lower our expectation of the rings casting shadows and how good that looks so please look at the may photos taken by Cassini to get a good idea of how fantastic it is. In game in orbit around a ringed planet the shadows will almost never be obscured by the rings themselves.
- planets cast shadows on rings, so please finish the job and do the reverse also. In many ringed systems the rings are vastly more spectacular than the planet at the center. They should affect how the planet looks.
- often when landing on a moon orbiting a ringed gas giant the rings disappear because we look head on to them, it is pretty rare for this not to be the case in practice. That's totally realistic since rings are very thin. Having rings cast shadows will be the only spectacular indication of how awesome the system is.
- when watching the host star get almost completely blocked from view by a ring as seen from a rover it is very jarring that the surroundings are still brightly lit
Casting shadows should be easy to accomplish since it could just be a reprojection of the rings on the surface texture of a planet. Technically I guess you could limit the possible performance impact by only casting shadows on the host planet, excluding possible moons and other structures orbiting the ring system if necessary. And, technically, on a planet very close to its host star the shadows should be blurry since the light is not coming from a point source but you've been ignoring that for terrain shadows, a perfectly fine optimization, and that should be fine for ring shadows too. The game would still look 100x more spectacular with those shadows.
I never commented on this issue before since you previously rightfully concentrated development on gameplay features and performance. But now that you put so much effort in enhancing visual quality this issue feels like a huge oversight.
Last edited:
