Lets bring some atmosphere to the party.

Another minor update. Instead of investing more significant amounts of time and adding atmospheric scattering I decided to simply add a cloud layer to the planet. The cloud texture came as part of the texture set I am using to render the earth.









Initially I bound the cloud textures (the image data and the transparency map) to texture space 1 and 2 (the earth texture is in space 0) and I attempted to render the clouds directly onto the planet. Since the application that this software will be used in will only view the planet from high orbit, flattening the clouds directly onto the earth texture wouldn't be an issue. The results were unsatisfying. If I looked online I could probably find some correct GLSL for doing alpha blending in a shader, and not by setting the OpenGL state machine with glEnable(GL_BLEND); glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); however I have never tried this before so took quicker approach.

I've created a 2nd sphere for the atmosphere. It is a fraction larger than the earth sphere and the cloud texture is blended onto this. This approach is more costly to render as I am rendering 2 spheres instead of one, and the alpha blending needs to sample the color buffer, however the spheres are relatively low resolution (1681 vertices, 9600 indices which are rendered as a triangle strip to make 3200 polygons per sphere. The sphere is dynamically built at run-time allowing this resolution to be changed).

This method also allows the clouds to easily move independently of the planet, as real clouds do. I don't want to suggest that this wouldn't be possible if I flattened the clouds onto the earth sphere, it probably would by doing some texture coordinate scrolling, but it would result in a more complex shader. Slower to run? Perhaps but defiantly more difficult to understand.

No code worth while to show in this example. The shaders used for the atmosphere layer are pretty much identical to those shown previously.

Next task is to add time of day by creating a light source (the sun) and using texture blending to render the dark side of the earth. I am confident that a standard lighting algorithm will work for this, but instead of using the diffuse lighting value to darken a color (shade that pixel) the diffuse value will be used as a ratio to sample the day and night earth textures.

*Edit*
I've made a short video showing the mobile version of the engine running on a mobile platform, or at least the simulator for that platform.