pegwars : political economic and galactic warfare

New Nebulae Recently I began replacing the old particle-based nebula standin with proper volumetric nebula shaders.  The nebulae need to be many and varied, and so I want to procedurally generate them like the rest of the universe.    After being introduced to some awesome volumetric nebula examples on ShaderToy, I thought I'd too have a play around with ray-tracing a noise field to create procedural nebulae.   The end result looks something like this : Ray Tracing a Noise Field The general algorithm for rendering a volumetric noise field: - for each pixel on the screen, cast a ray from far to near (or near to far based on your needs) - at each step, accumulate density by looking up procedural noise functions - in this case, a fractal brownian motion function. - return the accumulated density, to be manipulated for the final pixel colour. This is a very basic implementation of volumetric ray-tracing, and runs very slow for the output quality.  Optimising the shader to

I hope you all had a great 2018!  I've been hard at work on Pegwars whenever I get the time, which is not as often as I would like, and have made some great improvements that I'll detail over the coming weeks.   One such feature I have working now and would like to present a teaser of is Planetary Installations. Planetary Installations Imagine purchasing and equipping your frigate with some heavy planetary bombs, and seeking out an enemy planet. Hypering in, you orbit the planet with eyes out cockpit window for any valuable targets - depots, airports, perhaps even the enemy HQ.  Evading the orbital defences you plunge into the atmosphere over your target, only to discover ground-based defences surrounding it are now opening up on you.  You dodge and weave fearlessly through the laser artillery fire until expertly maneuvering into place to drop your bombs on the perfect trajectory to ultimately destroy the enemy installation, causing immediate political and economic damage t