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