Possible projects for people to try

[FluffyFreak]

Some things that I'd love to see from a rendering / gameplay position are:

• clouds/volumetric atmospheres
• rings with physical ice/rocks/etc so they can be mined/interacted with
• better ring rendering overall
• Gas giant atmosphere rendering
• VR headset integration, I did some experiments with this many years ago with the Occulus DK1 which were fun but hacky
• surface details like plants, forests, rocks, maybe animals like No Man's Sky
• water rendering for planets, our sucks totally right now
• and of course I need to finish the planet texturing branch that I finally got rebased to latest
• You could improve the galaxy rendering that's already ingame
• Rendering the galaxy again, but as a 3D point cloud so it's all pretty
• Better background rendering by rendering a simplified version of the galaxy to the background a bit like SpaceScape that changes based on your position within the galaxy
• Rendering a UI to textures that can be displayed in the ships cockpits <-- I've been promising @bszlrd that one for YEARS and I'm very sorry!
• Shadows, shadow mapping, screen space shadows
• New terrain map generation like https://vraid.github.io/earthgen/
• Terrain collision detection is currently done by directly calling the terrain->GetHeight code, instead could/should be done from colliding with the terrain mesh / heightmap directly. Altitude above terrain could be done with raycast projects into heightmap. Collision done against geometry.

[FluffyFreak]

• Show orbits in the HUD, use speedlines etc as source code inspiration

i think we'd likely want to show only the orbits inside the current frame by default, for clarity
So if you are in a planets frame the system-wide orbits are either not visible, or faded
Distance based fading could also be good for spatial clarity

[FluffyFreak]

Also assisting on existing PRs that people might need testing, help with completing etc

[sturnclaw]

I have a WIP branch that implements (a version of) point cloud rendering for the galaxy map. We really need an HDR pipeline (and changes to sector generation structure) for it to be effective, but it was the primary reason for refactoring the renderer to allow explicitly specifying vertex format bindings. I'd be happy to publish the branch if someone else wants to continue the work there, but at current it's unlikely to see the light of day due to needing major changes in other parts of the code to be more than a performance-draining hack.