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.
