Explore glow effect for orbits

[ajmas]

The orbit lines at the moment look a little ordinary. We should explore how to improve them, maybe via a bloom effect or by some other means.

While suggesting this, maybe limit the effect to orbit hover and selected orbit scenarios?

[thkruz]

What I did for my implementation is reduce the opacity of each line segment so that it subtly fades away as it wraps back around the earth.

Bloom could look nice, but I think you will need to switch to WebGl 2.0. As I recall, you will need frame buffers so that we can draw the bright parts off canvas, blur them, and then draw them back on canvas. There is no way to do that (efficiently) in WebGl 1.0.

The switch isn't a huge amount of work - just updating the shaders (I think it only took me a few hours to google the differences). The other big benefit that gives you is VAOs. Instead of setting every attribute individually before draw calls, you can setup the VAO with all those commands on initialization and then just make one call to load that VAO.

[ajmas]

I’d suspect the vast majority of phones and desktop in the last 5 years do WebGL 2, so making that the target should be fine?

[thkruz]

I think we should move to WebGL 2 if the goal is modernizing.

This popped up in my github feed and looks relevant. https://github.com/pmndrs/postprocessing

[ajmas]

BTW just confirmed that the Context is showing as WebGL 2 as being enabled already. So we should simply code with that being the case.