Took a break from menu work over the past week in order to do something long-overdue: set up the game world. I created the various planets you can visit, a few dwarf planets, even a handful of test asteroids. I’m very proud to say that the single terrain system can be used to create huge super-Earths as well as tiny bumpy asteroids only several kilometers across. Here you can see the ship over an asteroid with a dwarf planet in the distance (lighting is turned off for these shots, so they don’t look their best)

You can also see in the second picture, I also created the actual star the planets orbit around. The visual look of it was a complete accident: I was working with the atmosphere shader, trying to come up with some unique effects, and this kind of happened so I ran with it. Ended up looking pretty good!

One of the things I’ve been working on is getting the atmosphere to look good. As you can see here, I’ve got it filtering the sunlight so the star appears to be a different color depending on the atmosphere color, similar to the way our Sun appears yellow in our blue atmosphere. There’s still a lot of work to go here- the colors don’t look quite right, and of course the atmosphere itself needs to be affected by the light- that sunset shot is begging for more red and orange!

Remember- there are no restrictions in Rodina! You see something, you can go to it, including the Star! It might be a little hot, though.

Hope this is a nice little taste of what I’ve been working on. After my current Interface Milestone, my next task is to make the planets look pretty. You can see right now that the planets are still very uniform and featureless. I’ll be giving them landscapes soon, as well as doing further work on the atmosphere and lighting to get those great sunsets and nighttime views.