The position of the celestial bodies is dependent from season and clime. Right now the 2D skybox uses one texture with some overlays applied and a procedurally generated static mesh for stars.
All weather effects, daytime, clime and season are synced between client and server. Weather is randomly applied based on the current climate and the time of day can be read from the hosts computer.
Additional information:
The shadowmapping code is written from scratch and not based on Valves technique in any way. In my current build two shadowmaps at 3072² and 1024² are drawn to allow a shadow with a range of 10k units (the video just shows the former one though), all factors are variable and can be changed to the users liking.
During a second pass of the main view various information (worldspace normals, screenspace normals, depth, sky mask, sharpen mask) are drawn via MRTs to different textures at once to allow post processing effects like SSAO, DOF, edge detection and godrays. All screenspace effects can be individually toggled as well.
The weather effects include particle effects, fog, color correction and sounds, every weather routine can be assigned a weight to allow more variety. Particle effects are partially drawn in worldspace and a seperate view similar to how 3d skyboxes work.
Updates to Source SDK have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:
Source SDK
The Source SDK was updated today to fix tool problems for some games and mods. We are sorry for the disruption to your work that the SDK issues may have caused for the past week. Thanks very much for your patience.
SDK Launcher
The terminology for Engine Version has changed and now maps to the year of release rather than to particular products. Here are the options now present in the list of engine versions along with the games which utilize them:
Source Engine 2006
Half-Life 2
Counter-Strike: Source
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch
Half-Life 2: Episode 1
Source Engine 2007
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Source Engine 2009
Day of Defeat:Source
Portal
Team Fortress 2
Please note that you may need to re-create the game configurations for total conversion mods that were built using 'Source Engine 2007'. Simply run the 'Edit Game Configurations' utility to do this.
Valve games should show up under the appropriate engine version. If they do not correspond to the list given above then you can either manually edit the configurations or run the [I]Reset Game Configurations[/I] utility.
SDK Tools
There are now tools supporting three versions of Source in the SDK distribution. If you are creating content for a game or total conversion based on 'Source Engine 2007' you may need to run some of the command-line tools now located at:
sourcesdk\bin\source2007\bin
The command-line tools needed for 'Source Engine 2006' and 'Source Engine 2009' are still located at:
sourcesdk\bin\ep1\bin
and sourcesdk\bin\orangebox\bin
