Hello,

I'd like to ask developers, who use Esenthel, how did they managed to do stars on their sky. I tried some solutions, but none seems fine to me:

• Particles put in a sphere
  Quite effective way, stars have a nice glow, we can align even single stars (eg. falling star effect) and so on. The minus is that I cannot use it with any of the clouds and astro objects (planets). Particles are always drawn before them, which doesn't make sense. Clouds and planets are covered by stars.
• Stars instead of cloud layer
  This is very nice looking and GPU effective solution, using star texture as one of the clouds layer. We can make nice blending between day and night also. The first minus is the same, as in previous point - planets are covered by stars. Second - it's hard to use volumetric clouds and layered stars at the same time (they seems to be drawn at the same height, scaling 'height' parameter of clouds doesn't work)
• Skybox
  It's the simplest way, probably usable with planets and clouds, BUT: it needs skybox-type sky, not an atmospheric sky, which IMHO is much much better then skybox.
  

Did anyone tried something better? I'd like to make an set of: atmospheric sky, clouds, planets and stars - not intersecting one another.

And my addition question: how to make an animated (moved) texture on billboard?
Cheers,

Kulesz

I'll try to add special layer for stars to render before drawing planets/sun.

Quote:And my addition question: how to make an animated (moved) texture on billboard?

you can create multiple images, and then draw them sequentially