We are still waiting to see your BlitzPlanet in real time ;-)
How are you doing specular masks in blitz3d anyhow?
Last week was surprisingly busy, so I had little time for making this. Good news is that Shifty got me thinking about ways to get the citylights off from the lit side and I think I got it now. General discussion "elite" thread also had a link to awesome (pixel shader) planet stuff in gamedev and I got few additional ideas... and want to re-make my surface texture, plus try to get DOT3 stuff there too. And I have starfiled texture + first version of nebula now.
So... it's not finished, but it just keeps getting better! Like I said, I don't want to release crap looking version of the demo... also code needs some re-factoring and commenting to be really useful for others too.
[edit]
Oh, and the specular mask... Blitz3D doesn't have that of course so it was time to get creative, you'll see it then. Blitz3D has a simple "shininess" value, but it's enough for my planet when it's masked. My technique even would allow simple gloss mapping, but I really need only on/off for my planet.
Specular & glossiness explained:
Specular Lighting
A dull, rough object will have a dull, rough colour - ambient or diffuse lighting is sufficient to accurately model how the object will appear. Shiny or smooth objects though will produce specular highlights and therefore require a different lighting model. Specular lighting is more realistic than diffuse lighting but it is much slower as it requires details of the direction of the light source (or sources), plus the viewpoint of the camera.
Gloss Mapping
A gloss texture map contains information about the reflectivity of an objects surface - some parts might be shiny, others may be dull. The process of gloss mapping involves several texture stages: firstly, a specular texture map is generated and then multiplied with the gloss map (correctly adjusting the overall highlights). This result is then added to the base texture map that has been adjusted for the diffuse lighting in the scene. Gloss Mapping produces more realistic highlights than specular mapping or environment mapping as additional information about the object is used to modulate the final effect.
[above taken from futuremark's website: http://www.futuremark.com/community/hardwarevocabulary/ ]