Duke's nebula update. Still a lot of work, integration into engine, correct blending with stars...









Something looks like spiral galaxy (or protoplanetary disk?):

Recently I have working on a proper HDR with autoexposure, and adding a new shiny bloom effect. In process, improved quality of MSAA, and many other things. Now, finally, SE is able to display very large difference of brightmess, and true relative brightness of objects.

Earth and Moon. Relative brightness must be adjusted for all Solar system bodies. More precisely, scripts will have a physical-based parameters for textures calibration. Something like MinPixelBright and MaxPixelBright in some physical units like luxes.



Saturn and Titan. No stars visible!



Pluto and Charon. Stars are visible (although their brightness is still not calibrated, so this may be wrong).



Saturn and Mimas with shiny glow.





Earth's night side. Atmosphere is glowing not in red color, as expected... I have to tweak the atmospheric scattering code. There is a tail of the comet Encke visible in top left (comets brightness is not calibrated yet).



ISS over night side of the Earth. Starry sky, city lights, aurora, clouds and ISS are illuminated with a moonshine. I can use real photos from ISS to calibrate such scene.



When ISS enters sunlight, it looks almost like explosion, until virtual "eye" adapts to a high brightness.



Ship's light in the "night". Looks too shiny? Radiator's glow is too bright and too hot, it must be separated in its own texture, controlled by the graphics engine.



Engine exhaust looks extremely bright, because its brightness is calibrated for the the next picture.



In the "day", engine exhaust is barely visible. This is why its brighness was so extreme. Radiators glow and lights are completely invisible.



Molten planets looks interesting in the Solar system browser.



Glowing lava now looks really "glowing" (that is a planet in the sky, but it is so bright compared to the night moon's surface, so it is being overexposed).



"Interstellar-style" black hole looks much better with a new bloom.



With HDR, it is now easy to explore extremely bright object such as stars and accretion disks. Autoexposure speed is a bit too slow in this case (and adaptation back to starry sky), I have to derive a better formula.

Continue developing post-effect shaders. First, simple color enhancement. Will be configurable.

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Next, effect called pseudo lens flare.

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Flares inherits the shape of the light source.

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Any light source now can generate flares, even brightly illuminated object.

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Effect is fully integrated into the engine: added preset config files similar to those for old lens flares, added drop-down box to the graphics settings menu, sliders to adjust effect brightness. It is not possible to assign a custom texture to the lens ghosts, because they are actually a blurred frame image, sampled several times. So modding ability of this effect is minimal. You can change the dirty lens texture, "star rays" texture, radial colouring texture, and number and intensity of ghosts.