"Farwarp" in v0.2 renders distant astronomical objects at any zoom level

[charliewhitfield]

Previously, if you zoomed in to a spacecraft, distant objects including orbit lines would vanish. Godot engine has a hard limit on what can be rendered of about 7 orders of magnitude. We dynamically set camera near as you zoom in (so spacecraft can be seen) but far has to be adjusted at the same time to maintain far <= 1e7 * near to prevent a cull error and rendering failure. But this resulted in visual culling of all distant objects.

"Farwarp" fixes this by remapping shader vertexes of distant astronomical objects to be closer to the camera but still visually correct:

Voyager 2 at Saturn flyby:

Voyager 1 on Feb 14, 1990, the day it captured Pale Blue Dot:

(Note also the trajectory line is dead-on the object. This is another v0.2 improvement. But we do need to move that label to get it out of the model.)

See details in this commit.

[andreasfranke1]

Very cool!