i would like to know what would be the best looking way to 'fake' (without shaders) a planetary halo (light scattering), actually i use a hemisphere with blending (simple irrlicht sphere bind to a planet with backface culling disabled and frontface enabled) and apply a gradient texture that fit the edge, then make it always facing the camera and then use a billboard to give it a fake volumetric style, it give good result but i am wondering if there is a best way to do it, especially to improve the effect on the surface of the planet near edges and on the shadow edge like in this image:
I am just not fond of making 'everything' in shaders, i want an alternative (also for my computer spec) and i found it is also way more fun to code stuff without shaders, using restrictions imposed to approach shader result with better range of cards compatibility and maybe even more speed and room left to put others ressources hungry shaders.
Um :/ that doesn't sound very efficient, especially since shaders would probably LOOK BETTER, and they are executed at a lower level in the graphics pipeline so they would also be FASTER.
EDIT: I understand what it is you're saying that you want to use "alternatives" to shaders, just let me tell you something: The whole reason why I moved to irrlicht is because my previous program was very rigid and forced me to accomplish affects in the ways you are describing, SOOOooooooooooooo SSSSSsloooooooowwwwwww.
Yeah but i plan to port my app to a wide range of platform, sometimes, they don't even have huge ressources for shaders so cumulated with others it will slow down, i just want alternative to shaders, especially for this effect because i know games that didn't supported shaders in the past had pretty correct result for this at almost no cost.
