Simple effects to make the game more realistic

[Agent Orange]

I am talking about stuff like aurora, meteor showers, and other atmospheric events, stuff that should be relatively easy to implement, and should not take up too much resources at all.

So for meteors it would just be a simple moving light source of brightness distributed on a Gaussian or sinusoidal type(as in it will slowly gain brightness, and fade away slowly) OR it could be an image/animation that just varies in transparency or brightness. to keep it simple(mainly to keep the rendering engine from working to hard) the meteors would never "spawn" closer than like say 10 km so that they don't have to be high res or anything. They could then increase in rate during certain times of year to simulate a meteor shower. they would be most common near the equator on the pro-grade side of the planets.

Aurora: They would basically be an animated sheet of colors that moves randomly around the poles of a planet.

Any other ideas?

[VerdammteSeele]

Seems like a good addition to me, but i expect something like this is already planned. The textures for the other planets are sub-par at the moment and there are more moon/planets to come. Still, something like this would be much easier to implement than another planets, or at least I think it would. lol

Perhaps listing them as 'ambient effects' and being able to turn them off on weaker systems would be an idea.

[jwenting]

major red flag: "easy to implement and should not take up much resources" is simply something you can't know.

Vast majority of cases people suggest things with that statement attached they are completely and utterly wrong, and that's me speaking as a professional software developer of commercial and custom systems with some 2 decades of professional experience in the field.

It would be nice eye candy, but certainly you can't claim it would be "easy" or not resource intensive.

It would in fact not be easy at all to do convincingly, and would likely be a major drain on the computing resources of the machine running the resulting program.

They may not overload the physics engine (but then, the moment someone sees a meteor shower and it doesn't affect his spacecraft he'll complain about that, so they'd have to be redone as physical objects that actually can collide with and cause damage to structures in space, which means a massive impact on the physics engine to calculate the trajectories of all the hundreds or thousands of meteorites.

Auroras would need to be calculated and rendered correctly so as to be correctly visible and not shine through things, thus more CPU and GPU resources are consumed.

Etc. etc. etc.

[jwenting]

Seems like a good addition to me, but i expect something like this is already planned. The textures for the other planets are sub-par at the moment and there are more moon/planets to come. Still, something like this would be much easier to implement than another planets, or at least I think it would. lol

it's actually easier to implement another planet than this, almost certainly, as the planets have no real interaction with each other. IOW adding another planet and SOI does not affect anything that happens outside that SOI except the maneouver node system which is run AFAIK independent from the physics engine (so adding another planet has very little impact on game performance as well).

[VerdammteSeele]

I'm a senior undergrad in Computer Science so honestly I'd think it wouldn't be exceedingly difficult to add this into the game. A very basic model that doesn't utilize the physics engine could be included without nearly as much effort as the other tasks they are working on (more planets, inter-stellar, career-mode, etc). Yeah people will complain that it isn't realistic and yeah they will have to apply the current physics model to it eventually, but until then it would be a nice graphical improvement to the game. Especially for those of us who don't like mods. The game gets pretty dull without them after a while. =/

That being said, my concentration is Web Design, not game design, so what do I know. lol

EDIT 1: Planets most certainly are difficult. First you have to design a giant planet to scale. That means plenty of 3DS Max (days to weeks), then you have to texture it. (Photoshop I assume?). Then you need to set its parameters and make sure they're accurate within the current celestial laws of physics. Then it needs moons, so repeat the last steps a few times. Then you need to figure out how the moons orbit the planets based on the laws of physics, Then how the planet will interact with the sun, then make sure its orbit won't disturb any other moons/planets. THEN you have to add it into the already existing game code.

That seems like a lot more work to me then using PhysX to generate some random particles to make a meteor shower in the background. (Pretty sure they're using PhysX already), but like I said I'm a web design guy. My knowledge of code is just that, coding with MIPS and C++, nothing about applying it to a game. Useless knowledge, eh?

Edited August 12, 2013 by VerdammteSeele
adding more stupidity

[jwenting]

planets are a one time design effort, meteors and other things that affect the physics engine are a constant drain on resources.

No, what op wants is not a good idea.

[ZenithRising]

planets are a one time design effort, meteors and other things that affect the physics engine are a constant drain on resources.

No, what op wants is not a good idea.

What OP suggested was a few animations and textures to help improve ambience. I think you must have misunderstood the post. What he suggested is rather easy to implement (assuming your graphics guy has some time) and doesn't involve the the physics engine.