Adding Radar for Sandstorm Detection

Project Sandcrawler takes place on a harsh desert planet. Naturally, there are sandstorms. Lots of sandstorms. The original name of the project was actually Sandstorm.

Since sandstorms significantly impact the player and the sandcrawler, I want the player to have a way to anticipate the arrival of sandstorms. They can’t avoid the sandstorm because it’s massive, but they can recall crew back to the ship, pull in fragile equipment, and generally hunker down.

In the video above, you can see the sandstorm front collide with the ship and watch outside as conditions get worse. This took a solid 5 hours today to get the storm generation working, pairing it with the existing outdoor particles and lighting, and creating the entire radar system. But I think it looks good! Well……you know. Good enough for now.

Next steps:

1. Obviously storm fronts aren’t that solid of a line, and in fact in game the first 20% of the storm is a linear ramp-up in intensity. I need to make a shader or something that fades out the opacity of the first and last 20% of the storm.
2. It moves, but the storm is otherwise very static. I want the amplitudes to bob around a bit, and the noise texture shouldn’t be moving 100% in step with the storm itself. Basically, the noise looks kinda blah.
3. The fade gradient around the edge of the radar itself is a bit intense; I just meant for the outmost quarter-inch or so to have fade, not a giant chunk of the radar.
4. The storm particles are obviously lulz and require a lot of polish.