Well they have seamless planetary to space transition. I think that’s the big part. A lot of games have the ground part, a lot of others have the space. But not both.
I think something to do in the broader sense isn’t required. Maybe just spawning from a planetary base. But there should be battles in the atmosphere for sure.
Well with enough funds maybe … I too hope for clouds and vegetation.
Just personal opinion here, but it seems from a reasonable scoping perspective I would like to see (provided it’s fun for gameplay) some spawn point bases, ground structure objectives to blow up. (antenna relays / warehouses / small spaceports / fuel deposit storage).
This. This is something I completely agree with.
For myself, flying in the atmosphere and dogfighting there will be half the game. I’m personally looking forward to the challenges of learning when to take the fight into space and when to take it to atmo assuming flight mechanics inside the atmo aren’t awful. I’m not saying they are, but we’ve talked a lot about space flight physics but almost nothing about how ships will handle inside an atmosphere.
Ships that have no aerodynamic control surfaces (space ships), and use thrusters to hover (and fly in an atmo) will not all of the sudden fly like airplanes. Not to mention that airfoils are designed & optimized for specific atmospheric properties of a planet(s). To top it all off, I am not allowing any wing/fins of our ship designs 
Flavien did mention a while ago (on the old forums), that ship flight characteristics will be impacted by the atmospheric properties of a given planet, but they will still fly like spaceships.
Incorporating planets into I:B gameplay is of course something are working on. If funding is available, there could possibly be atmospheric craft for planetary defense purposes, etc.
Have you considered having having specialized craft for space, atmo, and a jack of trades ship that’s not the best at either but is okay as a sort of hybrid that has some wingy bits for atmo stability.
I am only slightly disappointed about a lack of wingy bits. As a primarily minnie pilot on eve wingy bits have become a staple(just like duct tape) of my spaceships. Having said that, I will be happy with any spaceships at all.
If they handle like spaceships in the atmo, what sort of combat will evoke? The way I imagine it, it would actually be like the flight mechanics of many space shooters that are basically airplanes in space(but really in a planet). Is this similar to what’s in mind?
Edit: At the least, will ships purposed to fight in atmo have a lifting body of sorts or look somewhat aerodynamic? Or is aerodynamics mostly ignored due to “advanced materials and technobabble stuffs?”
We discussed it a little here: Balancing flight mechanics
The thing is that most spacecraft will have extremely powerful thrusters and be able to hover and change position in every direction in space … so why shouldn’t they be able to in atmospheres.
I want it to differ in the atmosphere too. But I don’t need wings for that. No matter how powerful your thrusters are there’s still the square air resistance law and, as you said, lifting body mechanics. Both things that could be interesting.
New screenshot! The star field looks really nice:)
Oh man, I wish I knew what we were looking at here. What’s causing the reddening near the horizon? It doesn’t appear to be light from the sun reddened due to passing through the planet’s atmosphere falling on the ring. Maybe it’s light reflected off the ring reddened by the planet’s atmosphere as it makes its way to the camera? What’s that hazy band that runs parallel to the rings? The galaxy? An outer diffuse ring? My money’s on the galaxy, but it’s so hard to tell what’s going on from a single still image.
The pic was posted on flavien’s twitter page. He mentioned that the Milky way was a work in progress, so I’m guessing that’s the parallel band. As the ring is only red towards the horizon, I believe your assumption of it becoming red as it traverses the atmosphere to the camera would be the most logical (sunrise/sunset distortions…)
I think it’s the color of the atmosphere at dusk bleeding onto the rings. You can see it in the planetary rings video if you look at the boundary between night and day on the planet. The terrain has a reddish hue at the boundary to show off a nice red sunset. I think the intended effect is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6a69dMLb_k&list=UUNEHBrhTUN4P_ZxIy29DNQw#t=324, but clearly it is also visible from space.
It’s the background light getting scattered through the atmosphere. It’s actually called “extinction” and is basically the same thing that causes day light to get yellowed by the time it reaches the ground, or the sun reddening at dawn.
Nope, although I’d like to experiment with a bounce of lighting due to the ring getting lit thanks to IBL ( image based lighting ). But our IBL is very experimental atm. Since that pic was taken from the night side of the planet, it is currently entirely black; but with IBL, some light would get reflected from the ring and the terrain would be indirectly lit. I hope we’ll have time to do it for the KS 
Yeah it’s the Milky Way, but as I explained on twitter it’s just a basic effect; it lacks the dust and additional effects it had a couple years ago when I had originally implemented it.
At some point I want to do a timelapse of this. It’s actually looking pretty cool seeing it change at various times of the day
When the community reads your side of the story it gives us that nostalgia we’ve come to know over the years. I get a feeling of excitement each time I click on a post of yours. You guys really are a cool group of people.
So, is that just a filter you’re using to simulate extinction, or are you actually calculating optical depths using extinction coefficients? I know you’ve spent a ton of time working on Rayleigh scattering for your atmospheres over the years, so I know you must have been calculating optical depths or mean-free-paths using some reasonably realistic scattering cross-sections for that, so is the reddening just an extension of that in-engine?
Ring-shine would be super awesome cool. How far beyond that do you think you could go? Would planet-shine (e.g. Earth-shine) be realistically possible?
We are doing the actual calculations for extinction, in-scattering, etc.
It’s definitely possible however there are a number of challenges for us to overcome. One of the big ones is that atmosphere is expensive and any sort of indirect illumination calculation involves approximated ray-tracing of some sort and that involves multiple executions of our atmosphere code. Another issue is shadows which are a never-ending source of frustration.
I probably shouldn’t be as excited about that as I am. I mean, the atmospheres have always looked great, but I’ve never considered the possibility that we would see the effects of reddening from space due to the planetary atmospheres.
Does this mean that total lunar eclipses will result in the red moon effect? Because I had been assuming no, but now I can’t help but assume that they will (which would, in all honesty, excite me more than any kind of ship or weapon you could ever put in game).
Yes we can do proper lunar eclipses. They’re particularly interesting when we use atmosphere’s that aren’t blue and you get to see what crazy colors their sunsets look like. For an extra level of variation that obviously also depends on the color of the nearest star(s).
I can almost hear Kichae’s squee from here! 
If they start talking about specific opacities and wavelength dependent cross sections, you’ll be able to hear me squee from Mars (mind you, I can’t see that happening, as it’s computationally expensive with no benefit to the game other than introducing spectral absorption lines, but a guy can dream).
Yeah, I can’t see myself getting to Mars before they make a decision one way or another about this, either.
Still, computational costs can be optimized, the real question is whether or not it’d be faster, in terms of man-hours, to use this. If there’s a set of equations, and probably a python lib, that gives as accurate looking a result as it is possible for science to measure, then using it might be faster than building an approximation from the ground up (with all the iterations it’ll require to look good enough).
Probably not, though. I mean, unless the materials system happens to contain the data that those aforementioned equations need there could be quite a bit of data entry involved.
I’m fairly certain older libraries of cross-section data are readily available, so if they wanted to do the calculations themselves, they could. Again, though, I don’t think it really adds anything. Especially since you can fake the lines using readily available line lists (which are computed using the above mentioned cross-section data) and simply superimposing the lines on the atmosphere’s spectral energy distribution. Atmospheric composition data is already required for the engine to do the proper scattering calculations, and composition data is all that’s needed to calculate line weights.
@INovaeKeith, @INovaeFlavien, out of curiosity are you using the same atmosphere code for stellar atmospheres, too? The global atmospheric physics is a little different in atmospheres due to the high percentage of excited and/or ionized atoms (depending on the star’s temperature), but scattering is basically the same. In fact, due to the exceptionally high concentrations of hydrogen and helium, scattering in stellar atmospheres is, generally, simpler than it is in planetary atmospheres (in fact, the majority of the scattering is due to Thompson scattering off of free electrons, and simple stellar atmosphere models neglect scattering off of everything but those electrons). Where it would get really interesting, though, is in very cool stars which tend to have a lot of neutral atoms, molecules, and even dust in their atmospheres, leading to increased reddening.