Orbit: Daytime - no stars, nighttime - stars

[maverik83]

Hello!

KSP is a really awesome game regarding everything - especially its real physics engine.

But, I am missing one (maybe easy to implement) detail about physics:

When you launch your rocket during the day, in the real world you don't see any stars in the sky, when you hit space.

This is, because the sun (or Kerbol) is so bright, that you can't see the relative faint starlight - just the moon.

But if launching at night, you can easily see the stars shining (of course after engine cutoff!)

In my opinion this should be implemented during the next update.

I know that there is still a list of todo's, but I think it would support the factor of awesomeness (does this word exist?) because if launching at daytime and going over sunset on orbit

this would make for a real fascinating experience.

I know a couple of ISS vids that show these situations and also heard many astronauts telling about these breathtaking moments.

So isn't KSP got to be even more breathtaking?

Yours, Robert

[Pulstar]

I think that such a feature would be delayed until the new skybox is done. There was talk of the current one, which is a flat bitmap texture, being replaced by a procedural skybox, which for one would look more realistic and way better especially when using zoom. But talk of the new skybox was a few months ago, so I guess more important features took priority. Not likely to change it before if the current one is just a placeholder.

Also your idea would be easier to implement with it I think, you could make stars fade in and out depending on sunlight exposure and specific parts of the sky (would also work for sunrises/sunsets), if your point of view is in the shadow or not. I'm just not sure how taxing on GPUs it would be but then again solar panels detecting exposure and shadow individually aren't so I guess that wouldn't be an issue.