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There are mods for Seamless Grav Jumps and for Seamless Planet Takeoffs. But when you arrive at a planet in Starfield you still have to choose a landing spot, and then watch a loading screen and an animation. It’s another thing that contributes to the feeling your spaceship is more like a house that can teleport.
When you’re in space, Starfield’s planets are basically just textures you can fly right through if you put in the hours to try it, as Alanah Pearce discovered back when the RPG’s boundaries were still being explored. It seemed like one gap modders would never be able to paper over, but Frederik Wessberg has apparently managed it.
The video of his work-in-progress mod shows a planetary approach, complete with heating effects on the ship during atmospheric entry, a moment of white as he hits a layer of clouds, and then the ship just lands. It seems like the clouds are there to mask a moment of loading, but Wessberg says “the cloud cover is in fact not a fancy loading screen.”
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He goes on to explain, “The clouds are not covering loading – they’re helping make the seam as minimal as possible right at the point when we do the final cell switch, in terms of lighting and exposure, and terrain color. For airless moons and planets, I just do the switch with no veil, which is fine in that context as the lighting and exposure won’t change as much between the two cells (although there I do some extra exposure matching). The underlying loading mechanism is entirely done in the background, while the game is still interactive. We just wait until the assets are finished loading in, and then we do the swap.”
To make that work, the floating textures had to be replaced with actual models of the planets and moons. “I had to completely reimplement Starfield’s planet rendering in space in 3D,” Wessberg says, “in a way that looks detailed and sharp at every altitude.
“Thankfully, Starfield is actually amazingly physically accurate, and in many ways a true space simulator – it just doesn’t ever reveal this to the player, but I could leverage it in my design here. So, the planet rendering is based upon Starfield’s biome data and exact surface maps, including climate data, atmospheric composition data, and takes into account things like orbital phase, distance to the sun, distance to the moon(s) orbiting the planet and how they contribute moonlight, and so on. The philosophy is: Starfield’s data is the ‘truth’, but we then modulate it by real physics.”
The finished version of the mod, which will be freely available on Nexus Mods, will let players fly manually in low orbit, or turn on the autopilot and walk around the ship as you descend from orbit, and land anywhere you like—even on water. There’s a post on Wessberg’s Patreon with the details.
