COMING SOON as a PC mod: Seamless Landings without loading screens and 3D Planets
Video teaser can be seen here: https://youtu.be/L-E7tspL6-c
Hey everyone,
I've worked on this thing for roughly half a year at this point, and finally it's starting to look and feel ready enough for me to show it to you!
I'm bringing Seamless Landings on planets and moons without any loading screens to Starfield.
You can do it entirely autopiloted (as seen in the video above), and leave your cockpit seat and walk freely around your ship or enjoy the views while the ship flies from orbit to ground.
Or, you can fly manually too. Fly around in low orbit and enjoy the views, or indeed fly uninterrupted to land on the ground.
You can even land on water! If you ever wondered how it would look if you were allowed to select a spot in the ocean in vanilla Starfield, here's your chance to see that for yourself.
And during your trip to the surface, you'll be flying through real 3D layers of volumetric clouds, driven by climate data and weather systems, thunderstorms and lightning, auroras around the poles, airglow above the night-side horizon, physically-based atmospheric scattering based on the actual atmospheric composition the game data provides, city lights glowing from POIs on the surface, terrain and cloud shadows cast on a global scale, real biomes, oceans, and snowcaps, built from the game's own data and surface maps, re-entryeheat shield effects that fumes against the hull of your ship correctly and leaves a layer of ash, detailed new live cockpit monitoring, and rich new ship HUD elements.
It's still a work in progress, and it's PC-only, made for SFSE. But hopefully you can see from the video just how far along this is.
And now for some background:
After seeing the Seamless Grav Jumps and Seamless Planet Takeoffs mods, and especially after we got cruise mode officially in the game, not being able to also land on planets without loading screens really stood out to me.
I thought it would be a fun small project, but I quickly realized how wrong I was. Because, planet rendering in Space in vanilla starfield is very limited: A planet is represented by a texture, maybe a moving cloud layer, and maybe an atmosphere. Flying closer to it than the game allows will mean flying into a flat texture, and eventually also losing the atmospheric rendering.
So, to build actual seamless landings, I had to completely reimplement Starfield's planet rendering in space in 3D, in a way that looks detailed and sharp at every altitude.
Thankfully, Starfield is actually amazingly physically accurate, and in many ways a true space simulator - it just doesn't ever reveal this to the player, but I could leverage it in my design here. So, the planet rendering is based upon Starfield's biome data and exact surface maps, including climate data, atmospheric composition data, and takes into account things like orbital phase, distance to the sun, distance to the moon(s) orbiting the planet and how they contribute moonlight, and so on. The philosophy is: Starfield's data is the "truth", but we then modulate it by real physics.
I could go on and on about what I've learned from diving in here, and I promise I will - later. For now, I hope you like this teaser.
Oh, and you can support me by listening to my music!
https://youtube.com/frederikwessberg