A developer wrote his own ray tracer to prove POV-Ray skips multiple scattering in clouds
Rendering pretty sky in Around The World game
Thomas ten Cate kept tweaking the sky in his seafaring exploration game Around The World and found the clouds looked metallic. Suspecting POV-Ray never simulated multiple scattering, he wrote a few hundred lines of multithreaded Monte Carlo ray tracing in Rust to confirm it, then replaced his lookup table. Bending surface normals toward the sky gave clouds a blue tint and pink sunsets, and reordering the ray march fixed a yellow horizon.
In the end, curiosity got the better of me and I did write my own multithreaded recursive Monte Carlo ray tracer in a few hundred lines of Rust.
- wyrdcurt
Oh wow, thanks for this. I'm working on a game with some similarities to this (at least in the sense of "includes ocean travel"). Just this week I was working on a sky shader in Godot, and have yet to implement clouds. That whole series of articles looks relevant to my interests... ocean/wave rendering is also on my to-do list.
Game itself sounds interesting and I look forward to playing.
> "On Earth, exploration often meant gruesome exploitation and violence, whose effects can be felt even today... However, this game is not about any of that; it shows how things could have gone, if people had behaved more kindly towards each other."
I love this concept. The world I'm building is almost the inverse of this, taking the reckless real-world exploitation of Earth to its logical conclusions and challenging the player to find a better way of life in the ruins. But despite the different approaches, I think we're both trying to imagine how this world could be better, instead of giving in to bleak, helpless doomerism. We need more fiction like this.
- kylecazar
I'd love to play the game when it's ready. I don't play much of anything but was searching for open-world sailing/exploration games very recently on Steam.
Sounds like exactly what I was looking for... Strange coincidence.
- hbrav
I love this as a concept for a game.