Starry starry night

[ericvrp]

How can we go about adding a night full of (flickery?) stars that is completely visible at night and slightly visible during sunrise/sunset?

[JonahPlusPlus]

That's something I want to look into eventually, it's just not a priority right now. My idea for how it could look:

• Procedural Backend
  • Stars are just simple shapes (slightly blurred) that are arranged according to a seed value and colored based off provided color value
  • Pros
    • Simple
    • Performant
  • Cons
    • Not realistic
    • Very little artistic control
• Artistic Backend
  • Star textures and their distribution range are provided via a Vec<StarInstance> and are arranged via a seed value
  • Pros
    • Allows for more realistic star textures and other objects (like planets, galaxies and different colored stars)
  • Cons
    • Less performant
    • More artistic work

If I go down this route (adding the artistic backend), I might want to consider adding support for custom sky textures to go along with it (would lack support for daylight cycles, but offers more artistic control).

[passivedragon]

How about a simpler type of solution?

Being able to "add" a skybox or the likes on top would allow for complete freedom, while also making all of these things possible (save for having the light interact with atmosphere, but there could be an optional post processing done to the texture to achieve the same effect. It would mean atmosphere simulation as such may be done twice, but I don't see that as something bad).

I'd love to have a simple way of rendering textures "on top", we'd get a way to add a costum texture for a sun/moon additionally for free that way.

From reading the linked issue, it seems this should be possible already, however I can't find any documentation on the procedual feature, or rather how to use the crate without it enabled.