Creating a Planet for Space Sim

Hey guys, just a quick question. How might you go about creating an enormous rotating planet for a space simulator, without the help of a skybox? It’s not going to be reachable by the player, but I would like it to be enormous and have a glow and illumination. I also may want to have a visible layer of clouds that also rotates around around it. Mainly, I would like to hear any ideas you guys may have and how much having a large model/light source like this may tax the graphics card. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

It’s impossible. No no game engine can support levels that big to construct a whole universe of planets which are 100% interact able. You could do so on very large asteroids, I suppose- that would be awesome.

Also your texture issue is a big problem. If a computer did render your game, (which would be huge and take a long long time), most gpu’s only support 4096x4096 - I say only support- that’s still a pretty huge texture- just it’s an unrealistic resolution when placed on a planet.

Your next step is to rethink your ideas. What the game will incorporate. I have a really basic 3D sim I was building as a project which I could give to you as an example. These are all my assets(apart from the main menu music) so you can use them whereever you wish
I’m on my iPad now, I’ll repost with a link ;D