Teskooano #devDiary - I've been working on upgrades to the lighting and shadow system in the #gameEngine - stars now accurately cast their light across any solar system, and in multi-star systems it also accurately casts shadows which might be coloured rather than fully dark - two example in this small #video #gameDev #webGL #threeJS #simulation #astronomy #space

Some performance improvements incoming - focusing on a smooth multi-body space engine has been my focus as I took a few days to just clean up code, APIs and - happily running at 120fps (at 96x speed - where the n-body physics is still relatively stable) - the main bottleneck is now in the WebGL rendering itself!

Now when you load our solar system in #teskooano it calculates the actual position based on the epoch (like J2000 or later), TLE telemetry lines for earth-centric satellites, or Legrange points like L2 for JWST to create a live #ephemeris

New #blog - Cataclysms and Creation - https://teskooano.space/plan/00004/

#devDiary - Sometimes you just need some boring information about gravity and light when you're working on a #simulation

Another #video of the new #comet feature in #teskooano - here you can see the lighting, corona and tail going around the sun (you can also see the billboard planets at distance)

New feature: Comets that react to their distance to a star - as they approach they start to form a coma and tail #video #devDiary #gameEngine #simulation #gameDev #threeJS #webGL #teskooano

#teskooano #devDiary - A view here showing 3 rendering viewports on the same simulation data (running on a M3 Mac, 96Gb) on a 60FPS monitor - all engines happily running with only some drops in performance, but generally smooth

Some new #teskooano features and improvements I've been working on such as improved orbit and prediction line, prediction time labels and a new camera transition animation

My co-designer Francesco has written this really cool #DevDiary, where he introduces this new design concept for encounter decks for cooperative #boardgames: Punches, Walls, Thorns – and how the right mix is needed for the perfect experience: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hopefulgames/neon-hope-cyberpunk-meets-solarpunk/posts/4416275

Working a bit more on shadows and light - now planetary rings get shadows from multiple light sources, and from moons! They also now cast on to their parent planet

#teskooano #devDiary

It's been a bit quiet recently - mostly working on performance improvements and visuals.

Here is moon shadows being correctly cast on to planets and ring systems

Working on #WhiteDwarf #stars for #teskooano - caught a nice one here just grazing passed a #redGiant

Sometimes the orbits are just pretty to watch

New star LOD system for the #threejs renderer which switches to a billboard + light at distance, meaning the stars are always brilliant #video #gameDev #simulation #devDiary

New celestial labels for the UI, and our own home #solarSystem with many all the planets (including #pluto) and #moons #video #gameDev #simulation #devDiary

Even virtual #space can be pretty #teskooano #devDiary #screenshot #screenshots #gameDev #simulation