A living background: rotating planets, comets, opaque depth layers.
- Planets rotate: A shader draws every world live as a sphere from its unrolled surface map (
scripts/planeten.pynow writes it out too) and turns the surface very slowly around its tilted axis, one rotation every four to seven minutes. Lighting, the shadow line, the atmospheric rim and the gas giant’s ring stay put.- On the gas giant, the bands move at different speeds depending on latitude.
- The ocean world’s clouds drift faster than the land.
- The lava world’s glowing veins breathe.
- Without WebGL, the painted image stays.
- Comets: Roughly every 15 to 35 seconds, one sweeps through the background, with a bright head, a cyan ion tail and a windswept dust tail, at a depth of its own. If it gets close to the main planet, the planet’s gravity pulls it in and bends its path. Every third one heads straight for the planet, and if it hits, the surface flashes and keeps glowing afterwards.
- No more transparency: Planets, backdrops and background rocks are opaque. Nearer ones hide farther ones; depth now comes from darkness and colour instead of see-through layers.
- Clearer parallax: The layers are now cleanly sorted by depth: distant stars, nebulae, planets, comets, backdrops and rocks. The dust has its own layer at the front. Until now it sat in the same draw object as the distant stars and would have been hidden by the opaque planets.