rbray89

Is this the most recent build? Are you entering/exiting the tracking station? Are you using a custom config?

Haha, I designed it from the ground up to be usable on my integrated graphics chipset with power saving mode on CPU. Mind you, you get a LOT better performance simply by using a lower res screen as well. U5 Should help a LOT though with multi core architecture built into the framework.

Well, I actually use an advanced particle billboard shader. We have more problems than COD does... In COD, your character can't fly above and over the smokescreen to the other side, or move really quickly around it. In KSP the camera can pan and go very quickly around. This breaks the effect with traditional particles, as they rotate to face the camera, but then break the illusion of 3D. The particle shader I developed is a tri-planar shader that switches out the texture depending on the direction you look at it from. This helps to maintain the feeling of depth.

Well... So the Microsoft clouds are all artist generated. This means that a graphics artist created several cloud meshes that look good, and added them to the game. I also read that they made extensive use of billboards, where they would basically take a snapshot of how a distant cloud looked before they deleted it, and would replace it with a 2D image. Now... In KSP we have a few issues doing that: 1) The camera is not locked closely to the craft. This means you can zoom out 50Km and view the clouds from orbit. Or you could stay within 10Km of the clouds, but move your camera around the craft. This poses some difficulty from a performance standpoint, as we would have to CONSTANTLY generate billboards which is fairly costly to do. 2) You have to be able to fly through them. I think MS flight simulator solved this, at any rate, it is still tricky to do. 3) It still has to look good from orbit. This is arguably the most difficult thing. There are TONS of cloud packages revolved around atmospheric flight, ground travel, etc. This is because from ground, you could use a perlin noise texture on a skybox and be done with it. If you get fancy, you could make it a procedural perlin shader to vary with time. In-atmosphere is very similar... you only see a small bit of atmosphere around you at any given time in an aircraft in atmosphere, so it makes it easier to fudge things. Drop a bunch of cloud meshes around you, some billboards in the distance and you are done with it. What happens when you go above that though... You'd have to figure out a way so that the volumetric clouds you had somehow get mapped to a texture so it can be rendered in-orbit. Or you have to do it the way I do it, and use the 2D texture as a map for where the volumetric clouds appear. If you do it that way, those big fluffy meshes from MS probably won't align to where the cloud map says there should be clouds... So yeah, it can be very tricky Hehe, love it!

The only thing that looks like it could bite me is the shader loading method I use. It isn't supported in U5.2+ it seems.

Right. My primary concern is getting function similar to how it looked previously, then atmo. I basically work on whatever I'm inspired to or have ideas on improving

Nifty! Yeah, there is still some work to be done... I need to align the cloud layers to the particles and add some "randomness" to the particles within the shader. I also plan on adding cloud types like flat, erhm... not flat, storm cells, and perma-cloud for places like Jool. You'll probably noticed that the cloud layer is now just one hexagonal sheet... It now moves the entire sheet, shifting it by the distance between particles. This creates a more or less seamless transition, with particles apearing in the outer edges and disappearing from the opposite side. Much nicer than the "hexagon out of nowhere" loading scheme we had before. In-fact, if the fad distance is close enough, particles will just seem to fade into existence as you get close to them. - - - Updated - - - Yeah, I have to revisit the atmo shader in a bit. Re-tooling everything to use a common library of functions for mapping and lighting. As soon as it is done I'll post a detailed explanation of what all the variables do.

The Apply-Bug should be fixed in mainline https://github.com/rbray89/EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements/tree/532caf83233fdc89a5399692106834a7ef2668e5 - - - Updated - - - I Very much doubt there will be any visual improvements with the upgrade to U5. They have so much work already, and the features that U5 adds aren't very portable to whole-world effects.

not... Yet.

Ah... I see. Yeah, this may be problematic.

That's good to hear. I'll have to experiment a bit... hopefully I'll be able to release WIP EVE before Squad gets to 5.2 - - - Updated - - - Actually, I just read the blog entry... We are fine. Aras was talking about fixed function shaders. We use compiled shaders, so we'll be unaffected.

I was actually thinking about that. It would be neat to see.

I see why not... You would want to pass in a vector to the shader every cycle, though all parts would get the same movement, regardless if attached to the same craft or not, so debris might look odd. You'd also want to do this to Kerbal shaders. Note that I mean to fully replace the shader, not use replacement shaders It would just be REALLY annoying to do this, as the shaders are all closed-source.

You could use compute shaders (or do something to a render/texture, and read from that). Those are the only real way to get stuff out of a shader. Might be easier to use the same computational method used in the shader for a single point (ship origin) to do the moving. Hehe, you might even be able to replace the shaders for the craft pards with one that relocates the vertices when within 'X' distance of the ocean

Terrain in KSP is much more than just graphical. Those shadertoy examples, while cool, are often not terribly practical in games due to things like colliders, and intersection with existing geometry. I started goofing around with the water example, only to give-up when I realized that the surface would always look flat. (it doesn't modify surface geometry, so it can't actually go up/down) In the terrain example, it is cool that it is procedurally generated, but what happens when you go to orbit? How do you map that to a texture that can be rendered on the surface? The KSP terrain system is for the most part very well-done, though I wouldn't mind seeing the proland version implemented to replace it ;P The only issue I see from a moding standpoint is that it can be really difficult to change the PQS system from what I've messed around with.

Neato! Looks great! Regarding the Planetary bodies... I had thought about adding something to the scaled space bodies on a high-queue level (like clouds) that would allow "body-light" to "shine through" the shader... It would also be responsible for a distant-object like function as well. - - - Updated - - - What do the coasts look like? If you made the water translucent, We could use a terrain shader that colors the ocean floor based on depth to make the coasts turquoise and clear.

It enables/disables the config for that file. Because the KSP loaders are disabled, we still cache all textures and load their cache equivalent.

You'd have to use a seperate camera attached to the other two/three, then use a replacement shader to change the shader (just use a simple unlit vertex color shader) then have that camera render to a render texture, and pass that to your shader There aren't any other good ways I can think of unfortunately. This is how projectors and other effects work BTW. EDIT: you'll want to look up "replacement Shaders Unity" and render textures. It has been a long time since I've mucked with them.

There are, but the only I know of the top of my head are Astronomer's or Proot's packs. Right now the cloud shadows in EVE are handled by projectors, but it is less than ideal because projectors . For PQS it works great (crafts, terrain, buildings all are shadowed), but having a bunch of them for each body would be overkill.

Nice! looks great! Texture replacer allows one to change the Scaled Space textures. My terrain/scaled space shader does some additional stuff as well. I plan to add other goodies into it as well, such as eclipse and cloud shadows.

Ah, and I wanted to mention: Any shaders we use with KSP, we should use Unity4 to compile. I have had issues trying to use shaders compiled in Unity5 with KSP. Should of course go away when the port to Unity5 is done

Well, you can't get the detail lines you were hoping for, but it does look fantastic! EDIT: Ah, but as I see, it won't tile over the same surface then... Hmmm... I'll have to think about this one.

You'll probably run into the same problem. The edges will be gone, but you'll likely have some weirdness at the top. Like I said, I'll expose a way to use different textures on the top, right and left sides, while leaving tiling as an option.

I can add this in... I'll just allow the three sides to be different textures.