Fog in space?

Unity Engine
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1

Hey guys,

I have run into a problem on my game. My game is a space dogfight game and the camera is usually at 10000 render distance. This is pretty much the max you can get on Android and everything was looking fine. That is until my partner made a map that is extremely big, the camera isn’t even close to being able to see the whole map in one shot. Seeing this I tried to simply put in fog, that however only tints objects with a corresponding fog color. It does not make the skybox “foggy” though. Which is fine because then it wouldn’t feel like space.

The other way I could possibly solve this is to replace the farther away models/textures with lower res ones until I actually get close enough to get a good look at them. I’m not sure if this approach would actually work though.

If you could please tell me if this way would actually work or another way to approach the issue that would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

2

If you are using the Pro version of Unity, you could do some LODing

Fog will not render over a skybox or empty space - you would have to build actual geometry around your map (like a giant sphere) but like you said, it won’t look like space.

Could you try some kind of transparency fade effect when objects are too far away and then hide the object when it is at 0% opacity? If you just have a starfield background it might look alright.

3

I think I will have a go at the opacity approach. If I get something down I will share the code here.

First I must sleep…