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  • this is gem.

    I particularly enjoyed the post about cloud, and I also watched Ten Skies lately... Strange coincidence.

  • This is excellent work!
  • I love this as a concept for a game.
  • I'd love to play the game when it's ready. I don't play much of anything but was searching for open-world sailing/exploration games very recently on Steam.

    Sounds like exactly what I was looking for... Strange coincidence.

  • The light is also reflected from the Earth back into the sky, e.g. over bodies of water.
    by shrx
  • About cloud rendering: In 2008 a college friend wrote his thesis on real-time realistic rendering of clouds: https://maverick.inria.fr/Publications/2008/BN08b/

    You can see screenshots of that work in his thesis defense slides https://theses.hal.science/tel-00319974/file/defense.pdf

    That's where I learned about the transference phase function (slide 24), which includes two spikes on the return angle that correspond to the relatively unknown Glory rainbow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(optical_phenomenon)

    I don't know if this method is what is used in video games today.

    Incidentally, you may recognize his advisor Fabrice Neyret as someone very active in the Shadertoy community https://www.shadertoy.com/user/FabriceNeyret2

  • An interesting read, given nowadays no one seem to care anymore how things are actually done in detail.

    Doing a pretty sky in my game? Just delegate the entire process to AI.

    If it doesn’t look good just keep prompting your way to a pretty sky. Learn nothing while you do it, and when you need to do a simulated 3D sky again, have zero reusable knowledge, after all you can just point your codex at your successful previous attempt.

  • Oh wow, thanks for this. I'm working on a game with some similarities to this (at least in the sense of "includes ocean travel"). Just this week I was working on a sky shader in Godot, and have yet to implement clouds. That whole series of articles looks relevant to my interests... ocean/wave rendering is also on my to-do list.

    Game itself sounds interesting and I look forward to playing.

    > "On Earth, exploration often meant gruesome exploitation and violence, whose effects can be felt even today... However, this game is not about any of that; it shows how things could have gone, if people had behaved more kindly towards each other."

    I love this concept. The world I'm building is almost the inverse of this, taking the reckless real-world exploitation of Earth to its logical conclusions and challenging the player to find a better way of life in the ruins. But despite the different approaches, I think we're both trying to imagine how this world could be better, instead of giving in to bleak, helpless doomerism. We need more fiction like this.

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