Shaders

[valentin123]

i will really like to the team add shaders to the game,it will be a good graphical improvement and add things like:

-Lens flare(for stars,lava and everything that shows light)
-Better color and saturation
-Better textures
-Better ambient and ambient occlusion

[wubbzy301]

These ideas will add "Very High", except for Len flares.

[Xriqxa]

-Lens flare(for stars,lava and everything that shows light)

I don't think that you would see lensflares come out of lava, probably only stars.

-Better color and saturation

What's wrong with the saturation now? You mean have your own editable vision/color thing?

-Better textures

Unless you want your processor to die, I don't think the textures need any improvement.

-Better ambient and ambient occlusion

Occlusion means when cold air forces hot air upward. Do you mean "accretion"?

These ideas will add "Very High", except for Len flares.

Why except lensflares?

[wubbzy301]

These ideas will add "Very High", except for Len flares.

Why except lensflares?

It would add a checkbox named "Len flares", that you can enable or disable.

[Plutonium]

Occlusion means when cold air forces hot air upward. Do you mean "accretion"?

In computer graphics, ambient occlusion is a rendering technique used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting (quote from Wikipedia).

[Xriqxa]

Oh...

When SPH is implemented it should be able to handle that

[Plutonium]

SPH has nothing to do with that.

[Xriqxa]

If SPH simulates each small area of a planet then the lighting should look more specific. Or am I not understanding something here?

[Plutonium]

To put it very simple:
SPH is a way of simulating things. The results of that simulation can be presented in number of different ways and dimensions.
Ambient occlusion is a rendering technique, it doesn't care if you are rendering an Easter bunny or SPH simulated planet.

[Xriqxa]

So basically better lighting?

[Plutonium]

Yes

[pac0master]

Here's an example of AO

http://i.imgur.com/IugX91V.png

[Georg]

Lens flares are on our list of things to add.

(Dynamic) ambient occlusion is a nice technique, but it only makes sense in scenes with high geometric complexity (read: lots of surfaces intersecting at acute angles, such as indoor environments, foliage, buildings etc). While we can simulate a lot of interacting objects, a typical scene in Universe Sandbox² rarely meets those conditions, thus the benefits of AO would most often go unnoticed and incur a performance hit too large to justify the minor visual improvements.

For complex objects (like space stations, hint, hint) ambient occlusion will be baked into the object textures, which is not as fancy as a dynamic calculation but looks just as nice for our purposes.

Keep the suggestions coming,
George