P0-MS4: Part 267: New Atmosphere/Clouds System

by PhoenixGames on Nov.05, 2017, under Astral Realms, P-0, Software and Games, Spiritus Astrum

I have modified my project to use a dynamic, gameobject based, skybox system. This was the easy part.

The hard part was solving an issue that I ran into involving view distances. When adding the new skybox, I noticed that it was rendering in front of my planets, when the stars should render behind them. This was due to the “Space Exploration Engine” that I integrated at the beginning of this project, it has a complex two camera setup: One to render objects at close range, and one to render them at long range.

I couldn’t seem to solve this problem until I decided to add another camera, so I now have three cameras: One for the skybox/starbox, one for distant planets, and one for the foreground objects. This seems to work well, and the performance impact seems minimal.

The next goal was to modify the volumetric clouds resource to work properly with this system. The clouds themselves work well, but there are still issues with the implementation. The clouds will need to page in and out as the player moves through the sky, and they will also need to appear at a relatively constant distance from the surface of the planet, regardless of the direction that the player approaches the planet from.

This will require extensive changes to the resource in the future, but for now I have disabled individual cloud movement, and I am just moving the “cloudbox” itself as the player moves. This is very noticeable, as the clouds all move together, but I don’t have time to implement a complex paging solution now.

The clouds seem to look better from the planets surface, because the player isn’t moving as fast.