rbray89

Right now it looks like the alpha may be all over the place. The extiction shader could be used to set the alpha to a known value. Is it rendered on top of or behind the sky shader? Also:

Oops. Bad queuing. The stock atmosphere was interfering. Looks like this may work. May have to re-purpose the extinction layer to kill the Alpha though.

Hmmm... Oddly, the secondary material isn't showing up in the Scaled space Camera until about ~100Km up. Works in map-view though...

Ah, perfect! That's what I want to hear!

Bingo. At least, that's the theory. I'm probably going to be trying this out soon...

The sky can still be additive, it would just be additive based on the alpha value of whatever is behind it (more or less alpha would affect it in some way) EDIT: Info on blend modes here: http://elringus.me/blend-modes-in-unity/ Basically, Blending can have multiple opps, and the first parameter is what to multiply the source color with (generated by shader) and the second parameter is what to multiply the destination color (frame buffer) with. These to resulting values are added (or other operation based on BlendOp) to produce the final value. You can also specify separate blending for alpha if that is what you want.

Ah, I see... So if we had something that wrote the alpha value as an indicator of how visible through atmosphere it should be, the extinction and sky (and possibly haze) shader should be able to use that to blend. You may even be able to remove the extinction shader and just rely on the sky shader. You also wouldn't have to fiddle with queue order. I assume you do that with the material render queue?

Bingo. We would just adjust the ground view to be "Blend SrcAlpha DstAlpha" Everything should already be writing 1 if it is opaque ( should is the operative factor. I am not certain about things like water.) and we could adjust it for things like clouds (distance) and the luminosity of bodies. - - - Updated - - - Bingo. For the ground view we would use alpha additive "Blend SrcAlpha DstAlpha", and this should let us write in a value for alpha that would let us fade it out. Would work perfectly for celestial bodies, writing 1 with lots of light, 0 for none. Should work for clouds too if I encode a "distance" metric to the clouds... though I guess I could probably just make the clouds fade out... Concerns: 1) Not sure if all shaders write to alpha (they should though) or if the values are as we would expect them to be. 2) Not sure for certain that cameras share a universal frame buffer (but I think this is how it works) The HDR method might work, but I think you'd still have issues with the sky-body interaction.Either the body is above it (don't see blue) or below it(don't see Mun), and neither would exactly produce the results you'd like. Does Mun show through right now in scatterer or is it hidden? I would expect it to be hidden unless the proland stuff includes some mechanism to render moons. EDIT: Realized that bodies are rendered in scaled space and therefor can't show above scatterer render.

That's the beauty of it though... we could do all sorts of funny things with it. I've been messing around with blending (I finally understand how it works now! ) One thought I had, was encoding an "Visibility" metric into the alpha channel of rendered stuff for Scatterer to use (This doesn't seem to affect rendering otherwise). Then scaterer could use the DestAlpha multiplier with blending instead of OneMinusSourceAlpha. BTW, the "OneMinusSourceAlpha" helps ensures lerp-like blending. If you want, you can use "One" there to allow more background through, thought it may overpower things to white.

Exactly. It would cover everything basically, as it goes into the materials list. This is how I'm doing city lights now so I am not forced to replace the terrain shader. It wouldn't require HDR, but I think it would make it look better. I'm excited, this should work really well EVE does some basic stuff around this (View.Normal), but I always wanted to go back and improve it.

Thought of a way to get the moon to show clearly through the sky... My plan is to add another material on-top of the scaled space terrain material that will be a multiplicative shader to enhance the terminator and illuminate the body more. Then we just put the shader on the Transparent-1 queue. Should show up before the clouds, but after the atmosphere

I can take care of 1 & 3, but 2 might be difficult. Do you mean shine as in body glow?

It will be ready within a day of 1.0.5, provided I can get configs setup for a companion default clouds pack. I'm focusing on getting Cloud shadows working properly, then onto a "beta", then a general release. Initially I won't be shipping any of the terrain or atmosphere stuff, as none of it is even close to being ready prime time In the meantime, I figured out a way to render city lights without replacing the terrain shader, and I'm doing that now. The only downside seems to be that I now need to figure out how to get the cloud shadows to render onto the city lights. Bump map should be standard RG normalmap. Keep in mind that it is barely functional right now.

This is temporary... One of the side effects of compiling with different KSP. I can re-release it using the current KSP version if you need.

It isn't just ram... It is using multiple different textures that all tile with each other that is also very tough

We already do some of this... Not necessarily on terrain though. The issue we have however is that we are trying to texture a sphere... That compounds things significantly. I have been working on a new texturing model however that should solve high-level seams.

Exactly my thinking.

This is silly. I think I'm going to have to throw something together because there is *NO* reason why it should be that much work. Worst-case, we render the IVA camera (or clone) to a texture, and use a new shader to render the IVA view to the window.

The coasts have a minor issue, but the whole "black as night" thing is supposed to be that way.

If you did actually read that whole post you will probably have hundreds of questions, I'm happy to answer all of them as long as the attitude is that of contructive criticism, and the aim is to improve the KSP experience for everybody. This is my attitude anyway, nothing I'm saying has to be read as a personal attack or anything like that. cheers Sigma This is already do-able. You can have as many config files in whatever directories you like. The GUI also addresses this (mostly) as well.

WIP EVE should address some of the user-friendliness. The plan is to split the binaries and default "cloud pack" up so that there won't be any more of this confusion.

I guess like all good ideas, someone else had it first

Does ship acceleration affect what happens when you leave your seat? Otherwise, I'd suggest that the ship must not be accelerating while moving about in IVA.

I'd be curious to know what you find. I've wanted to make eclipses and moon phases more realistic for quite some time now. It is why Mun is so bright in my stock configs.

Yeah, I had thought about doing this in the Planet shader I'm working on. We can tweak it so that there is a shader param for "darkness transparency" or some such param that can be accessed by your mod to change what happens when in atmosphere?