I wanted a space like Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous a huge, actually explorable space. Not a handful of flat dimensions you teleport between with a rocket, but real planets sitting in real orbits that you fly out to, approach, and land on, with the world changing under you the whole way. The other half of it the part that got me started is that space mods and shaderpacks don't get along. You install a shaderpack and the pretty sky mod either vanishes, renders through walls, or turns into flat grey squares. That annoyed me enough to build around it: Auralith's VFX shaders opt out of shaderpack replacement rather than fighting it, so everything stays intact with Iris running.
Most space mods are content mods: dimensions, ores, rockets, machines, oxygen. Galacticraft, Ad Astra and friends do that well, and the space between the dimensions is mostly a loading screen because that isn't the point.
For Auralith the space between is the point:
- Planets are places, not destinations they orbit on real elliptical paths with axial tilt and spin, defined per-planet in JSON. What you see in the sky is where the planet actually is right now.
- Seamless transitions fly up and the dimension swap happens underneath you. No loading screen, no cutscene: the planet you were standing on fades into the sky behind you, already tilted and spinning correctly.
- Volumetric clouds raymarched through a baked 3D noise volume, with self-shadowing, powder effect and Mie scattering. Not a rotating texture on a slightly larger sphere/cube.
- Physical atmospheres Rayleigh + Mie scattering with ozone absorption and multi-scattering, so sunsets happen because of the maths, not a gradient.
- Shadows that mean something rings shadow the planet, the planet shadows the rings, and clouds shadow the surface below them.
- Shaderpack compatible the whole point. It looks like this with Iris on.
Status: WIP. Right now it's mostly rendering, Galacticraft-style gameplay (oxygen, machines, progression) is planned, but the rendering is the miserable part so it went first. Things will break, JSON formats will change, and some of the above is prettier in the screenshots than in your actual game. :3
Volumetric rendering is expensive. This isn't:
