Thomas Wiggins

It’s been a while since the last update, and unfortunately it’s likely to be a little while till the next one due to upcoming university coursework. I’ll still try to spend a couple of hours every few nights on this though if I can.

Anyway onto the update. Firstly I’ve fiddled about with the atmospheric settings to add a bit of a more “blinding” effect from looking at the sun, though I feel it might be overdone for when you’re not looking at the camera. Maybe something to add would be a modifier that increases based on how central the sun is to the screen.

Secondly I’ve added some planetary objects to the previously empty sky. There is now a sun which orbits the sky during the day and stars which become visible at night. Pictures below!

From inside the dome - Click to enlarge images

From outside the dome – Click to enlarge images

I have also been working on other parts of the engine. I added a modified version of my camera from “Blocks” with the physics interactions stripped out. I have also been learning how to use vertex/fragment shaders, I planned on converting the sky calculations to the graphics card but I may save that for another time now. In the more immediate future I plan on using shaders to add dynamic shadowing to the terrain, possibly using the shadow-mapping technique.

I’ve almost finished implementing the base for the sky, using the SkyDome technique. Instead of a skymap or a colour table I decided to use a simulation of how light actually scatters in our own atmosphere for a (hopefully) more realistic approach. This means that I also have a day/night cycle, albeit currently it takes a total of one minute to complete the cycle as opposed to 24 hours! Screenshots below.

Wireframe of the SkyDome

The sunrise (NB: the actual sun itself isn’t drawn yet)

I also had a few rather interesting glitches while implementing this. When I tried to first display it I put every colour value of the SkyDome’s vertices to red (um.. because it’s the standard sky colour…? Don’t ask me why!). However I made my colours were stored as RGBA and I was accidentally making the colour pointer read the values as RGB, this resulted in alternating between full red/green/blue colours due to incorrect offsets.

Glitch – Rainbow sky?

Not very realistic but interesting as far as glitches go!

My next steps with this sky will be to make it a bit more realistic, there are no planetary objects currently (sun, stars etc) so that would probably be a good next step. Clouds might be added too.