Recognized by Council Un-derp planet atmosphere

[Valiant70]

Currently, the colored portion of a planet's atmosphere is rendered as a hemisphere with the local star in the middle of it. This results in a partially black/starry sky except at perfect high noon on certain planets/plates that point directly at the sun... and even then you see a black horizon if you're not in a valley.

First of all, there should be no abrupt edge. It looks horrible. It needs to fade gradually. Second, unless the sun is very low, there should be sky color clear across.

It will probably work better to keep track of the angle the sun is hitting the plate the player is standing on and use that to decide what the sky looks like. The simplest solution would be to render a full sphere of atmosphere and reduce its opacity and brightness when the sun approaches the horizon, fading to black a little bit after the sun has dropped below the horizon. To make it prettier, keep the sun side slightly lighter as the colored atmosphere fades. Sunset colors would be nice but are less of a priority. We can wait until later for pretty sunrises, sunsets, clouds, and weather.

Planet atmosphere has been really disappointing for a really long time. Now that we can finally see it through windows from indoors, it'd be nice if it looked right.

 

[Ithirahad]

You can report "part of the sky on planets is black during the day except at noon" as a bug, because that's what it is. Not that the code is behaving unexpectedly, but I think we can be fairly certain that this is not intended behaviour.

 

[SkylordLuke]

I miss the old atmosphere,when you could see your ship / station from the surface during the day ..and that slight blue or red tint of atmosphere.. it looked soooooo awesome and mighty,and the sense of scale was immense.. now its just.. underwhelming in a way,it blocks anything AND everything beyond the atmosphere. and the color is always bland

 

[Valiant70]

If I recall, the problem with the old atmosphere was that it was too "thin" and stars always showed through unless you were standing at the perfect height. Maybe Schema should revert to the old shader (if possible) and just tweak it a little to make it "thicker."

Well, for now. Later we need epic atmospheres.

 

[kiddan]

We definitely need both better atmospheres and transitions. Maybe a fiery transition under certain circumstances? It would make crash-landing look pretty darn sweet!