Now it casts shadows
Look closely at the planet. That bright spot on the ocean is the sun, reflecting off the water exactly where it should, and it vanishes the instant a cloud drifts over it. Those clouds sit above the surface and throw soft shadows onto the ground below. The rings lay their own shadow across the globe.
Now the surprising part, the same one as last time: none of this is 3D. There is still no GPU, no model, no texture, not one downloaded file. It is all flat 2D and pure maths, conjured from your word. It has simply learnt to pretend it has depth, and it pretends well enough that your eye stops asking.
Drop onto a planet now and it is actually alive with detail. Clouds drift a touch faster than the ground turning beneath them, and they shade what passes under them. Moons now circle on their own lit paths, slipping in front of the planet and then behind it. Lava worlds, ice worlds, deserts, oceans, green terran worlds, each one scanned and flagged for whether anything could live there. The lore has grown a memory too: it reads the world’s gravity, its heat, its moons, have a different story for each.
Systems are stranger than before. Some stars have a companion, two suns sharing one centre, each with its own corona. Belts of asteroids hide in the gaps between orbits.
Clicking a star now is no longer a cut. The camera dives, flying you down into the star before its system opens around, and flying you back out when you leave.
There is a jump-to-seed box in the corner if you want to leap straight to a particular universe, with your seed, coordinates and zoom always on show!
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