Few more cool "eye candy" feature ideas.

Hi again you all!

I hoarded my ideas for new features that I'd like to see and this is what I came up with this time...

• Global God Rays
  Few games have this system of light shafts implemented and even fewer I know of but some games, instead of showing the light shafts only while you're looking directly at the sun and therefore being directly linked to your position, have them everywhere like in real life and visible from all sides, not just directly "up front".
  That may seem like a small detail, but it makes for a huge difference. It means you get to see light comming through a small hole at the top of a completely dark cave, even if you cant see the hole itself. This can be seen in Minecraft Shader mods and also S.T.A.L.K.E.R games and it looks really great IMO. Coolest thing about this in SoT would be the sun shafts coming from little holes between the clouds. Which isn't possible in the other games because clouds are not an actual 3d thingy... So yea.

• Tree, Grass, Seaweed physics
  I'd also like to see additional vegetation physics. Trees moving in the wind just like in the Witcher 3, Grass (or something similar to reed?) similar to the one in TheHunter, and Seaweed reacting to the player just like in Abzu.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/WelllitTartIsabellinewheatear-size_restricted.gif

• Mass (flocking/swarm) AI for birds and fish
  This is pretty much something only Abzu does so far (at least to my knowledge) and it really looks beautiful. One Valve employee made a similar thing for "bat" swarm in the air and there are similar demo features to be found online.

• Smoke, fire sparks, mass particle physics (physx like)
  As seen in many games before (usually Nvidia Physx) this can look really nice and add another level to the already beautiful graphics of SoT. I did talk about this in my previous posts but still think i should recap it here too. Anyway... smoke that reacts to the wind (Dark Void / Crysis 3), fire sparks (Warframe), wood pieces falling off when ship gets hit or different "magic" effects (Borderlands 2). All that and more would be very appreciated by people like me.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/BreakableKlutzyAustraliancattledog-size_restricted.gif

• Completely pitch black caves
  Not many things can get the heart beating while gaming as not being able to see what's happening around you. Sadly not many games feature "complete" darkness (unless they are horror games). I think SoT could however profit of this feature, especially by making the streams much funnier.

Now one lastt thing I'd like to say is that for all the special physics, god rays and such effects, I'd like to see a on/off button. So all the weaker machines could still run the game properly.
That's it for now, so what do you think? Unnecessary, cool or both? Also I'd really like to hear from someone in business how hardware demanding are these things. Especially global god rays and volumetric smoke effects (As I really like them but see them very rarely in other games). Cya all later!