I must admit I've gotten a little side-tracked this week checking out the Elite: Dangerous beta
Type-6 bought & 2mil credits, so probably just going to dip in and out now until the next beta build hits. Probably could do with earning some more credits and then settling into messing about with a Cobra, but don't really fancy the trading grind for the moment.... so... with an empty bank holiday ahead, it's back to fixing stuff!
have made few tweaks to the oxygen atmosphere shader and it's looking even better now, hugging the planet much closer. Within the atmosphere this means bluer skies and better sunsets!
Need to figure out what 'glow' colours to add to the gas giants/brown-dwarfs atmospheres now that I've created a new shader pass for these, the geometry it uses for their atmosphere is an inflated mesh of the parent planet. I realised I didn't actually need to recalculate anything and could just expand & reuse the mesh to match their deformation & ensure the atmosphere has the same 'rugby ball' shape.
Rings are now being split up as described last post, so the further side is drawn behind the gas giant and their new glow. Not quite finished this evening, but the idea appears to work as I'd hoped... just gotta dot the i's & cross the t's to finish it up. Once it's finished I'll try putting the orbital rings through the same routine to see if perhaps they'll then draw behind their parent planet when they should do.
And after playing E: D & seeing its streaks when travelling about at speed, I thought tonight that I'd take a quick look again at the issue of the missing space dust when far away from stations/planets. Success! Finally seem to have figured out what the issue was -their radii needed to be scaled up at higher speed- have apparently worked out the scale calculation and the dust seems to be appearing consistently once again
Next to do is to extend the external 'cloud' layer so that nanite2000 can shroud a planet with 'fog'. Everything goes through the same cloud shader pass at the moment and this makes a filled texture too opaque on the light side of the planet... well, bright white and not at all see-through
I probably need to add another shader pass & extra settings in the textures file to choose which pass will apply to the cloud layer. Going to add a lower external cloud layer too, this could be used to add a cloud shadow texture.
Getting there... just a few last minute detours!