Quick facts:Planet Tech v4
Delivered in stages starting with Alpha 3.8, Planet Tech v4 builds upon the features of Planet Tech v2 and v3, offering terrain texture blending, objects scattering and biome transitions. The developer tool PlanEd gained a paint tool for efficient workflows when creating planets. Temperature and Humidity maps infer biome selection - a data-driven approach that went on to become the Genesis shared data pool initiative.
Weather supports the actor status system and affects the atmospheric flight model. Snow, wind, dust and sandstorm weather types are generated by a rotating planet-scale texture. This allowed for the implementation of the planet microTech which is primarily a snow-planet. A frozen lake shader contributes to the visuals of microTech along with evergreen tree assets. The city of New Babbage on microTech uses updated design philosophies since v3 as a more open-form-factor and externally traversable location than Lorville before it.
Wind affects the player and StarCloth only in this version of the planet tech. The ability to affect physics-objects came later with v5. Improved atmospherics give better sunrise and sunset visuals by, for instance, emulating the existence of an ozone layer. Unique particles can be spawned on the terrain using various parameters. These can be locked to the terrain and move around on the surface as needed. When particles are affected by gravity or wind, they now flow around the contours of the terrain in a natural way.
Beyond Alpha 3.8, further improvements were made to v4. Windspeed limits were added per-planet to prevent excess wind and un-navigable areas around landing zones, namely at Lorville on Hurston, which later had its skyline reworked to support the upcoming Building interiors. Volumetric clouds were added to the planets of Stanton over time and this same technology was used to implement the gas giant Crusader in Alpha 3.14.
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