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Thomas ten Cate has shared several changes to the sky and cloud rendering in Around The World, an early-development exploration game set at sea. A custom ray tracer helped him identify a limitation in his earlier cloud-lighting method, while changes to indirect lighting and atmospheric ray-marching produced softer clouds and altered sunset colors. The developer says some rendering issues remain unresolved.
Developer Thomas ten Cate has revised the cloud and sky rendering in Around The World, an early-development game about exploration at sea, after playtesting exposed problems with how the clouds, sea and sky looked together. In a report published October 12, he describes using a custom ray tracer and changing lighting calculations to make clouds brighter and softer and improve their color at sunset.
Ten Cate says his earlier cloud-lighting lookup table was generated with POV-Ray, but he suspected it did not account for light scattering repeatedly inside a cloud. To test that, he wrote a multithreaded recursive Monte Carlo ray tracer in Rust. He describes the tool as a few hundred lines of code, hard-coded to render a single spherical cloud of uniform density. Its results supported his suspicion that POV-Ray was not simulating multiple scattering in the way he needed.
The developer compared the resulting lookup table with the earlier one. He cautions that the comparison also involved changes to parameters and axis scaling, so it was not a direct like-for-like test. In his renders of thicker clouds, the revised lighting distributes light more evenly: cloud bottoms appear brighter, overall shading is smoother, and the metallic appearance he had observed is gone. He says the difference is less apparent in thin clouds, where light is less likely to scatter repeatedly.
Ten Cate also adjusted how cloud surfaces receive indirect light from Godot’s environment lighting. He changed the surface normals used in the calculation so cloud undersides draw more light associated with the sky. In his examples, this adds a blue tint under a blue daytime sky and changes cloud color at sunset, where he reports a pinker result. A separate change to the order of operations in the atmospheric ray march reduced an unwanted yellow cast near the horizon when the sun was overhead.
How the Sky Changes in Play
These changes address the way the game’s sea, clouds and sky read as one scene, rather than adding a new feature or announcing a release. For a game built around travel and exploration at sea, the appearance of the horizon and changing light can affect how convincing its environments feel. The report shows the developer iterating on those visuals through playtesting and technical experiments.
The report also illustrates the practical trade-offs behind the current look. A custom simulation helped identify a limitation in the earlier method, while the Godot lighting adjustment uses a change to normals to approximate indirect light reaching cloud undersides. That is a development technique described by the author, not evidence that the game reproduces every aspect of real-world cloud or atmospheric physics.
For readers following the project, the update provides a specific snapshot of its rendering work, but it does not establish a launch date, platform list or final visual standard. Around The World remains in early development, and the described images and results are part of an ongoing technical report.
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From Cloud Tests to Sky Lighting
The October 12 post is part of ten Cate’s ongoing development series for Around The World. He describes it as a game of exploration and discovery at sea and says it is currently in early development. The preceding post focused on making the clouds look passable; subsequent playtesting left him dissatisfied with the combined appearance of cloud, sky and sea.
The new report follows that work through three connected adjustments: a different lookup table for cloud light scattering, a change to how indirect environment light affects clouds, and a revised ordering of calculations in the atmospheric ray march. Ten Cate presents the findings as experiments on a specific rendering setup, not as a general performance or visual-quality benchmark.
“The ‘metallic’ look that I mentioned in the last post is now gone; cloud bottoms are brighter, and lighting is smoother overall.”
— Thomas ten Cate, developer of Around The World
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Rendering Questions Still Open
Ten Cate says the results of the two lookup tables are not an apples-to-apples comparison, because he changed parameters and axis scaling as well as the scattering method. He does not provide numerical measurements for the visual differences or a performance comparison for the custom ray tracer.
The atmospheric adjustment also remains a workaround rather than a fully explained resolution. The developer says the difference should theoretically diminish as the number of ray-marching integration steps increases, but it did not in his tests; he suspects another issue remains. His account does not specify when that issue will be investigated further, whether the current rendering changes are final, or how they perform in the game as a whole.
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Further Work on Atmosphere
Ten Cate does not announce a release date or set out a schedule for the next development update. The immediate status is that the revised cloud lighting and atmospheric calculation have improved the rendered examples to his satisfaction, while at least one underlying ray-marching question remains open. The game is still in early development, and further changes may follow as he continues testing the sky and sea together.
Readers can expect the project’s development series to provide the next confirmed details if the rendering work changes or the developer publishes new tests. The October report does not say whether the custom ray tracer will be used in the game itself; it is described as a tool for checking how light behaves in the cloud-rendering setup.
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Key Questions
What changed in Around The World’s sky rendering?
Developer Thomas ten Cate updated cloud light scattering, changed how cloud undersides receive indirect environment light, and reordered operations in the atmospheric ray march. He reports brighter cloud bottoms, softer lighting and different cloud colors under blue skies and at sunset.
Why did the developer write a custom ray tracer?
Ten Cate wanted to test whether his earlier POV-Ray-generated lookup table accounted for multiple scattering inside clouds. He says a small, hard-coded Monte Carlo ray tracer confirmed his suspicion that the earlier setup did not simulate multiple scattering as needed.
Is Around The World released?
No release is announced in the report. Ten Cate describes Around The World as currently in early development.
Are all the rendering problems fixed?
No. Ten Cate says the atmospheric ray-marching result still behaves unexpectedly when he increases the number of integration steps, and he suspects another issue remains. He does not give a date for resolving it.
Source: hn
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