the renderer looks good again! i added back the light gradient sampling, so the clouds actually turn orange during sunset and go dark at night time like they used to.

btw, I spent like 3 hours reading through https://open.gl/. it’s a great tutorial, and i applied pretty much all of the graphics concepts i learned to this project! i’m using blaze3d instead of opengl this time, but the concepts still apply.

how the algorithm works

based on the time of day, it samples a color from this texture, where the white part of the texture produces the bright fluffy daytime clouds, the dark part produces the dark nighttime clouds, and the remaining orange and light blue produce the amazing cloud colors shown in the image during sunset and sunrise!

i can’t explain the formula too much in detail, cuz i kinda just copied the math from the old code…