Waz

Sure, that would be possible, but it would further increase the cost of the shader. The PQS system has nothing to do with clouds. Clouds are generated on a flat sphere (which happens to be implemented via a PQS, but it's not really procedural, just CPU-side tessellation). But the main cloud map does determine clouds visible at ground level. It has to, since the transition from ground to space is entirely continuous as you fly. Basically, what happens is: All (2D) cloud layers are always visible, and determined by their main texture At close range (eg. 100km or so), the detail texture for a given layer is multiplied by the main texture (or "ANDed", if you prefer) At very close range (default 10km from a layer) volumetric clouds are turned on, and then fade in - still multiplied by the main texture though (so the fade-in distance should be less than the visibility distance to avoid popping) Sorry it's not documented better. Always happy for contributions.

All you've done is make the detail smaller, so it shows up more obviously from the ground. From space, it will be too small to be visible. These settings have nothing to do with performance - EVE doesn't "turn down the detail" using this setting. Producing content for KSP is a great way to get a feel for how massive the world is... even a world like Kerbin that is one tenth the size of Earth. Clouds need about 1 pixel per 1 meter to show detail as you see them in real life. To do that across the entire planet requires 1.5 TRILLION pixels. EVE allows you to cheat by having two levels of resolution - one for the presence-or-not of clouds at about 1-kilometer resolution, then another texture (the detail texture) that is just repeatedly tiled over the whole planet but only visible where the first texture says "clouds go here". Edit: and to complete the story, UVnoise provides a level of resolution between these two, displacing the pixels in the main texture so that the pixels aren't too visible, thus allowing the detail texture to be more easily create visual distinction since it doesn't need to be big enough to hide the pixelization. UVnoise has a secondary feature in that it can be animated, giving unrealistic but cool effects on planets like Jool. Getting great results with such a system requires artistic skill I don't have, but @Galileo and other who produce EVE configs do and have done an amazing job faking those 1.5 trillion pixels.

Did you mean to post that in the KK forum? EVE isn't currently in pre-release.

It could be a number of things but it's extremely unlikely to have been the transparent FX thing. Most likely it's related to the change that makes the clouds work on the main menu (the actual change was to initialize the mod correctly upon scene change, the main menu was just a bonus).

Note that this exception is in *CelestialShadows* - i.e. the eclipse shadows which look a bit sucky, not the cloud shadows. I don't yet see why it's happening though.

The objects need to be in the TransparentFX layer in order to avoid being shadowed upon (in the current release), so most likely this is something Lack's Stock Extension needs to fix.

I find SVE looks very good. Perhaps there's a problem with your install - post a picture and say what you think is bad about it and how it could be made better.

I get that English isn't your first language, so maybe it's a translation error, but now you really just seem to be being rude, and adding a smilie doesn't change that.

Have you read the first post in this thread? See SVE.

That's normal. The idea of Volumetric clouds is that they are visible when you pass through them (passing through 2D clouds would be passing through a flat surface, which looks poor).

Shadows are significantly more expensive than the clouds themselves. They're implemented by completely redrawing all the geometry (the ground, the VAB, your rocket, etc.) with a second semi-transparent black pass, whereas (2D) clouds are just drawn on a sphere. Volumetric clouds are more expensive than both, though I've never determined why; certainly they involve a lot of overdraw. Also note that setting ShadowFactor to 0 saves nothing - it is all still drawn, just entirely transparently. Unchecking the shadow material is the correct way.

You can add more cloud layers (Alt-zero), or you can install a configuration such as SVE (see first post) which adds all sorts of neat clouds.

Can you narrow it down further by incrementally removing clouds layers in the EVE menu (Alt-zero)? EVE shouldn't be using much CPU at all.

Certainly when looking at the horizon the number of polygons to be rendered for the 2D clouds is highest, but I've never heard of it being particularly expensive. What graphics card are you using? Did you mean to use both "CPU" and "GPU" above?

Can you report this with this good level of detail in an Issue on my EVE GitHub, ideally tested with just EVE and that mod installed? There are a few glitches like this, but they have always been hard to reproduce in the past, so I've never managed to track them down.

That just looks like you've got low-resolution terrain textures, with something like the default config. i.e. it looks more like the *terrain* is pixelized, not the cities, which have more detail than the surrounding terrain.

If they're using SVE, I just noticed that the textures in StockVisualEnhancements\EVE\CityLights\Textures have no mipmaps. This would cause pixelization. Edit: a quick test by replacing the DDS files with PNG files (so that KSP loads them and generates mipmaps), confirms - yes, they twinkle more without mipmaps.

The UVnoise thing really only works well for continuous gradients. Do you mean pixelized when up close or far away? For far away, some anisotropic filtering might help. For close up, I think the only solution ... is real city geometry.

Yeah, there's simply no way for a Projector (which is how the shadows are implemented) to paint on just the opaque parts of this geometry. But surely these would look better with *no* shadows? This would be best achieved by them being on the TransparentFX layer, but if that's not possible, some other layer could be excluded too. Note that with modern GPUs, using transparency like this is not necessarily faster than having proper geometry - vertex shader is cheaper than fragment shader.

EVE-1.2.2-1 is uploaded. https://github.com/WazWaz/EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements/releases Let me know if it works or not; I'll bug the CKAN guys when we're all happy.

The change, which I'm uploading now, is to not cast shadows on objects in the TransparentFX layer, a layer that is explicitly for these effects. I'd like to know why flag decals as pictured above are not shadowed, as they should be on the Parts layer, which receives shadows.

I'll try to exclude them algorithmically rather than by name (eg. any transparent shader).

These artifacts can be fixed in the code - it's a matter of excluding these materials from the shadowing effect. If you report it as an Issue in the tracker, I should get to it before the next release. https://github.com/WazWaz/EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements/issues I'm basically waiting until there are enough fixes or features in what I've got to warrant a new release. It's only been very minor stuff like this so far.

You could instead use the in-game and more realistic process of scanning the planet with the new radar stuff in 1.2.2. Venera and Mariner didn't get to "turn off the cloud layer" :-)

First check if Scatterer doesn't already implement this - @blackrack has done some neat stuff improving the coloring of clouds. If not, I suspect you'll need to modify the CloudVolumeParticleShader. I currently does this: color.rgb *= ScatterColorLight(IN.lightDirT, IN.viewDirT, normT, tex, _MinScatter, _Opacity, 1).rgb; I suspect instead you will need to Lerp between the color.rgb and the modified version, similar to how SphereCloud.shader does it: OUT.color = lerp(scolor, color, _MinLight); I'm certainly no expert it EVE or shader programming, and the EVE shaders are quite fancy. The cloud particle system is rather complex - I don't really understand *why* it's so complex. If I did, I'd try to simplify it because it's currently a very expensive effect, for why it produces. Sorry I can't be more help. How did you install it, CKAN, or manually trying to copy files around?