I was a little bit funny over the weekend and had a nice trip to the sun. I always thought the sun would be part of the cubemap, however it is an actual object in the solar system. Weirdly I could fly through it with ease (it took me around 10 minutes to get there). After that I noticed that the lighting is static and detached from the sun.
Question: is this a bug/WIP feature or is it intended for the final game that players can’t fly to the sun to not get this experience of having lighting and sun position “de-synced”? (I read a few months back that the final game will have even 2 suns but that lighting is technically very difficult from 2 sources of light)
I was planning to wright about it as well. During recent Alpha backer weekend I’ve also decided to do a fun test and crash into star . I didn’t expect to see alarms buzzing, my ship melting, etc. But I did not expected to fly through it either.
The other fun test that I’ve made was landing on lava. Yup, totally landable. Great lava boiling sound, btw.
Although those things do not affect game play, they are odd .
The entire planetary system is a rough placeholder, especially the sun which is totally “fake” and is there just to give you light for the playable area
Yup. Also note that the relative sun brightness is a constant and does not depend on distance. So whether you’re millions of Km away or close to it, its intensity remains the same. We’ll address that probably in the next major patch before alpha. Results with HDR might be… interesting.
Most of it is finished however there’s still some work to be done on HDR and we have a problem with the star’s intensity being so high it actually quickly exceeds our currently available precision.
. I didn’t expect to see alarms buzzing, my ship melting, etc. But I did not expected to fly through it either.
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