A few thoughts on this month's video:
1. Thank you! Making one of these always takes some effort -- it's appreciated.
2. Asteroids: looking good! THAT is what an asteroid field ought to look like.
There is something bugging me about the albedo on these things -- they're all uniformly bright, maybe? -- but I can't put my (flat) finger on it yet. Work-in-progress, of course.
Also, toward the end of the video there was at least one occasion where asteroids "popped" into view. That's pretty common in 3D graphical games, and not even close to a problem for me personally, but it does seem to bother some people.
3. Planets: looking bigger.
I'm not sure if the apparent lack of surface detail resolution was real or due to video compression, but I was a little surprised that landscapes seemed quite fuzzy at the ship's nearest approach.
One thing about the planet apparently being inside an asteroid field did bother me. I've said before (and still feel) that realism is not a good goal for a game; what you want is plausibility for the reality of the invented world, which may or may not conform to the physics of our real world.
An asteroid field close to a planet is certainly visually interesting, and might have some gameplay value if that case is relatively rare. Having said that, part of the definition of what a "planet" is is that it "
clears its neighborhood" (its orbit) of comparably-sized objects. In the video, those asteroids near the planet look pretty darn big! So, other than a few exceptional cases, maybe the density function for generating asteroid fields could be tweaked to reduce the field to zero within, say, 5-10 times the diameter of each planet? Other opinions on this suggestion are welcome.
4. The music really was very nice. I would not at all mind hearing that and similar tracks while doing my thing in LT.
That said, I'd really be impressed if the music reflected something of the environment in which the player's perspective is currently located. For example, when you're talking to an NPC representative of a militaristic civilization or flying through their space, the music might be brassier, in march time, and minor key. Maybe the music has more emphatic percussion when you're flying through an asteroid field than through empty space.
More furious music when engaged in combat than when floating serenely through the void would be nice as well.
I don't know if this kind of "reactive" music is one of the goals for LT. It's just something I thought of while enjoying the video.
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Overall, there's obviously been lots of progress since the last video. If this new one doesn't help keep people interested, they're just not paying attention.