[WIP][1.9.x-1.12.x] Scatterer-atmospheric scattering (0.0838 - 14/08/2022) Scattering improvements, in-game atmo generation and multi-sun support

[RegalPlatypus]

Is there a simple way to disable the ocean shaders but keep atmospheric scattering?

[blackrack]

Is there a reason every craft collapses after hitting the water surface at 4 m/s when they can take a 20 m/s ground collision?

 

6 minutes ago, RegalPlatypus said:

Is there a simple way to disable the ocean shaders but keep atmospheric scattering?

Sorry I'm not going to answer this, I respond to this same question literally every page.

[RegalPlatypus]

55 minutes ago, blackrack said:

Sorry I'm not going to answer this, I respond to this same question literally every page.

My apologies.  I searched for a solution on the forums before posting the question.  If this is a frequent enough question, maybe the first post should be edited to include such a frequently asked question.

[Jimbodiah]

Blackrack, maybe add the option in game. The fact that you have to answer it every page should say something. I know it;s WIP, but there are more bugs now actually removing the effects we're looking for just so we can have shiny waves that I see for 10 seconds during launches.

BTW: The space field (stars and stuff) is also gone when scatterer is used, plus lens flare from the sun is removed as well. Maybe use it for Kerbal Naval Program and keep the old version for the Space Program (no seriously, perhaps make a version for boat lovers and one for space lovers, so you can optimize for each?).

Edited December 12, 2015 by Jimbodiah

[blackrack]

33 minutes ago, Jimbodiah said:

Blackrack, maybe add the option in game. The fact that you have to answer it every page should say something. I know it;s WIP, but there are more bugs now actually removing the effects we're looking for just so we can have shiny waves that I see for 10 seconds during launches.

BTW: The space field (stars and stuff) is also gone when scatterer is used, plus lens flare from the sun is removed as well. Maybe use it for Kerbal Naval Program and keep the old version for the Space Program (no seriously, perhaps make a version for boat lovers and one for space lovers, so you can optimize for each?).

The starfield is gone? Never heard of this bug before. Can anyone else confirm this?

I'm already thinking of making a feature selection window that would greet you in the game's main menu and ask you for what you want (especially since I'm also adding the option to generate the waves on the CPU or the GPU and both have pros and cons), so it is on my todo list for next version. But it still baffles me that people don't even make the effort of looking inside a config file to see if there is a conveniently named variable they could change to tweak a new feature, or that they don't bother to read the thread when it has most of the information they need. It's just... kind of disheartening. I realize not everyone has the time to trudge through this, but still, a little effort is required here considering it's a WIP and I'm still experimenting with various features and ideas all the time.

Btw no need for a boat version and a space version, there is no "optimizing for each", it just doesn't work that way, There are some bugs I'm aware of and I will hopefully fix them in due time.

[Jimbodiah]

Stars disappear sometimes, not always, but I've had it a couple of times now. Just a plain black space field. Same as the glitching from orbit, doesn't always happen.

The CPU load is why I mentioned the versions, as it would enable you to maximize effects for playing on the ground (water more important than skies). Also looking towards the future where you will be making land textures   The sea looks awesome though!!!

[ChrisHale]

Sorry if this has already been posted, but I looked through the known issues and the first and last couple of pages.

I'm getting flickering shore lines if I pan the camera up or down. The water can either be drawn inland or out to sea by a noticeable amount. 

Just got my new computer and this mod is amazing. Thanks so much blackrack! I'll see if I can catch it in a sceenshot and add that in a bit.

 

Edited December 13, 2015 by ChrisHale

[fast_de_la_speed]

Scatterer seems to be making planet rings behind everything, what's the reason for this? Is there a fix for it?

With Scatterer

Without Scatterer

[Chris P. Bacon]

Just now, blackrack said:

... But it still baffles me that people don't even make the effort of looking inside a config file to see if there is a conveniently named variable they could change to tweak a new feature, or that they don't bother to read the thread when it has most of the information they need. It's just... kind of disheartening. I realize not everyone has the time to trudge through this, but still, a little effort is required here considering it's a WIP and I'm still experimenting with various features and ideas all the time.

There is a bit of a selection bias here on the forums.   Those of us who are willing to put in the hours of cfg tweaking are probably less likely to come into the thread to complain about (almost always known, and stated) small bugs and glitches.   I've been messing around with your (and pete's RVE) configs and new shaders for days now, trying to get things all setup for my RSS install.  You guys do some great work, but ya have a life as well, and I'm not about to come on here and complain about the dozens of little problems I come across every day, unless I've put in dozens of hours myself on the problem, and am certain it's something truly broken which I can't learn to fix myself.

You've given us an awesome platform to jump off from, and people wouldn't be bothering ya so much if it wasn't such an exciting mod.  For every post here, there are ten people silently enjoying the heck out of the mod, problems or not.  Try not to get too disheartened or overwhelmed, the majority of us know this is an experimental WIP and to keep our mouths shut

[taniwha]

2 hours ago, Chris P. Bacon said:

There is a bit of a selection bias here on the forums.   Those of us who are willing to put in the hours of cfg tweaking are probably less likely to come into the thread to complain about (almost always known, and stated) small bugs and glitches.

 

2 hours ago, Chris P. Bacon said:

Try not to get too disheartened or overwhelmed, the majority of us know this is an experimental WIP and to keep our mouths shut

I have to agree with this, from my experience as a modder: I get something like 1000-2000dl/week for EL, yet only ever a handful of complainers, and even fewer actual bug reports (often, the thread is a ghost town).

[NOBUPP]

Sunlight penetrates the Kerbin at night

I read Known Issues Section.

Roughly I saw, but did not know.

Please tell me the solution.

 

Scatterer Ver.0.0216

OS win7 64bit

[blackrack]

15 hours ago, ChrisHale said:

Sorry if this has already been posted, but I looked through the known issues and the first and last couple of pages.

I'm getting flickering shore lines if I pan the camera up or down. The water can either be drawn inland or out to sea by a noticeable amount. 

Just got my new computer and this mod is amazing. Thanks so much blackrack! I'll see if I can catch it in a sceenshot and add that in a bit.

This means something is messing with the camera projection matrix or the near and far clip planes? Do you have any mods that could do this? Try with just stock.

Also what game version are you running?

 

15 hours ago, fast_de_la_speed said:

Scatterer seems to be making planet rings behind everything, what's the reason for this? Is there a fix for it?

With Scatterer

Without Scatterer

Does this happen with stock? I see that you have a modded planet and I haven't encountered this bug before so probably there are some conditions that trigger this. Does it still happen if you disable extinction (toggle extinction in UI)? Does it go away if you disable postprocessing or set sky alpha to 0?

 

15 hours ago, Chris P. Bacon said:

There is a bit of a selection bias here on the forums.   Those of us who are willing to put in the hours of cfg tweaking are probably less likely to come into the thread to complain about (almost always known, and stated) small bugs and glitches.   I've been messing around with your (and pete's RVE) configs and new shaders for days now, trying to get things all setup for my RSS install.  You guys do some great work, but ya have a life as well, and I'm not about to come on here and complain about the dozens of little problems I come across every day, unless I've put in dozens of hours myself on the problem, and am certain it's something truly broken which I can't learn to fix myself.

You've given us an awesome platform to jump off from, and people wouldn't be bothering ya so much if it wasn't such an exciting mod.  For every post here, there are ten people silently enjoying the heck out of the mod, problems or not.  Try not to get too disheartened or overwhelmed, the majority of us know this is an experimental WIP and to keep our mouths shut

 

12 hours ago, taniwha said:

 

I have to agree with this, from my experience as a modder: I get something like 1000-2000dl/week for EL, yet only ever a handful of complainers, and even fewer actual bug reports (often, the thread is a ghost town).

Alright, fair enough.

 

5 hours ago, NOBUPP said:

Sunlight penetrates the Kerbin at night

I read Known Issues Section.

Roughly I saw, but did not know.

Please tell me the solution.

 

Scatterer Ver.0.0216

OS win7 64bit

No fix for this currently but I personally think it's a very minor and not gamebreaking bug, so just wait until next version or roll back to 0.21

Edited December 13, 2015 by blackrack

[Decoherent]

I'm seeing some weirdness in Eve's oceans. This is looking over the water onto the land. The sea/bed and shore are flickering pretty hard, too. This is with no other mods installed (except KER). Everything works great (and looks beautiful!) on Kerbin...I haven't changed any settings in Scatterer itself.

[blackrack]

4 minutes ago, Decoherent said:

I'm seeing some weirdness in Eve's oceans. This is looking over the water onto the land. The sea/bed and shore are flickering pretty hard, too. This is with no other mods installed (except KER). Everything works great (and looks beautiful!) on Kerbin...I haven't changed any settings in Scatterer itself.

Is the stock water visible in there?

[Motokid600]

Well it's been six months since I've played KSP at all. However I've been following Scatterers development as close as one can. Now that I'm back on the horse I gotta say I wasn't prepared. I knew how gorgeous the game looked from the screen shots. But they just dont do it justice. This is a hell of a thing you have going here Blackrack so I'd just like to say thank you. Thank you for the countless hours you've no doubt poured into this. 

Just make sure you don't burn yourself out. A lot of modders I see often times burn very bright, but not for long. So make sure you take the time to just play the game. Play the game with your awesome work here and put this forum down for however long you need.

Keep the hobby exactly that... A hobby. The moment when what your doing here begins to feel like a job is when the white flag goes up. But again. Absolutely beautiful work. Bravo sir. Cannot wait for the future.

Edited December 13, 2015 by Motokid600

[Decoherent]

1 hour ago, blackrack said:

Is the stock water visible in there?

Yeah, here's a shot with Scatterer removed. The water texture shows up better when zoomed farther out. I remember Eve's water looking nicer, but I've probably just gotten spoiled. Just to be sure, I unzipped a fresh copy of KSP & scatterer and copied over my save, leaving all of the graphics on defaults.

 

[fast_de_la_speed]

3 hours ago, blackrack said:

Does this happen with stock? I see that you have a modded planet and I haven't encountered this bug before so probably there are some conditions that trigger this. Does it still happen if you disable extinction (toggle extinction in UI)? Does it go away if you disable postprocessing or set sky alpha to 0?

I tried on both OGL and DX9, same results. I removed extra planets and just put rings around stock Jool, using Kopernicus 0.6. I tried what you recommended and it didn't change.

[blackrack]

1 hour ago, Decoherent said:

Yeah, here's a shot with Scatterer removed. The water texture shows up better when zoomed farther out. I remember Eve's water looking nicer, but I've probably just gotten spoiled. Just to be sure, I unzipped a fresh copy of KSP & scatterer and copied over my save, leaving all of the graphics on defaults.

With just the fresh copy and scatterer does the problem persist? Does this happen only with the newest version or also with the one before that?

 

1 hour ago, fast_de_la_speed said:

I tried on both OGL and DX9, same results. I removed extra planets and just put rings around stock Jool, using Kopernicus 0.6. I tried what you recommended and it didn't change.

Ah I see now, I misunderstood you the first time, I thought scatterer was adding ring-like artifacts, my bad. To answer your question I sort the planets and atmospheres to control which renders on top of what. This is the first time this issue is brought to my attention and I haven't thought of rings before. If I just include them in the sorting they will start drawing on top of everything instead. I'll have to come up with a better method, I'll see what I can do.

[JT2227]

Any way to have a less sudden transition from Ocean to No ocean once in space? it just goes from ocean, to bare seafloor instantly, and takes 20-50 km to transfer to ocean once again.

[fast_de_la_speed]

24 minutes ago, JT2227 said:

Any way to have a less sudden transition from Ocean to No ocean once in space? it just goes from ocean, to bare seafloor instantly, and takes 20-50 km to transfer to ocean once again.

blackrack says in the OP that it's on the to-do list

[tetryds]

Cpt. Bill navigating on the northern seas.

 

[Decoherent]

 

5 hours ago, blackrack said:

With just the fresh copy and scatterer does the problem persist? Does this happen only with the newest version or also with the one before that?

OK! Here's a bunch of testing, hope it's useful. This is on a fresh unzip (+KER so my ships work), basically default settings, changing it to fullscreen/AA/etc. didn't seem to have any effect.

 

For reference, this is what Eve's water looks like in 0.216, 0.215, and 0.021x with and without Scatterer.
 

 

Spoiler

0.216/0.215/0.021 With Scatterer:

 

 

Spoiler

0.216/0.215 Without Scatterer:

 

 

Also in 0.216, I have this thing going where I can see the sun through Kerbin, and there's kind of a weird ring around the planet:
 

Spoiler

 

0.216

This doesn't look right:

 

In 0.215, Kerbin also has the transparent thing going on, and an even more interesting halo:
 

Spoiler

 

0.215

 

 

So, in short:

0.216: Kerbin has a halo, Eve water looks off

0.215: Kerbin has a different halo, Eve water looks off

0.021: Kerbin is fine, Eve water looks off

 

I hope this is useful in some way. Hopefully this isn't specific to me, due to my really old graphics card (GTX260, oh yeah). I wish I had a SSD, I hope you do. Mind you, I'm perfectly happy with this mod and some small water glitches on Eve, because Eve sucks anyway.

 

[ChrisHale]

12 hours ago, blackrack said:

This means something is messing with the camera projection matrix or the near and far clip planes? Do you have any mods that could do this? Try with just stock.

Also what game version are you running?

EDIT: Got your update. Still borked in this regard. Oh the borking for anyone else is the shoreline raises and lowers flickeringly as I pan the camera up and down. 

It seems to change the shorelines in complicated ways (inland seas form if I'm high up) so I'm not sure how the camera's clipping planes would be the issue. I admit, I don't write shaders, so they're a mystery for me. My knowledge is limited to asset creation.

Ran a couple tests as you requested. With only Scatterer installed, and no other mods, on a stock Kerbal it happens out of the box. If I turn off the ocean shader in the config, so the stock ocean shows, it stops happening. (I'll do that as the work around in the mean time.)

Here's my system information if it helps.

• Intel Core i7-6700K (no overclocking)
• EVGA NVidia Geforce GTX 980 Ti (Driver 359.06) (also no OC)
• 16 GB RAM
• Windows 10 (64 bit)
• Kerbal 1.0.5 (32 bit)

Original Mod List (Just to be complete.)

• AntennaRange
• Asteroid Day
• Collision FX
• Distant Object Enhancement
• Engine Lighting
• EVAManager
• ModuleManager
• Planet Shine
• Real Plume
• Rover Wheel Sounds
• Scatterer
• SmokeScreen
• TextureReplacer
• ToadicusTools
• Water Sounds

I spun this off pretty quick so I unclear at any point just ask.

Edited December 14, 2015 by ChrisHale

[blackrack]

2 hours ago, tetryds said:

Cpt. Bill navigating on the northern seas.

Beautiful.

 

56 minutes ago, Decoherent said:

 

OK! Here's a bunch of testing, hope it's useful. This is on a fresh unzip (+KER so my ships work), basically default settings, changing it to fullscreen/AA/etc. didn't seem to have any effect.

 

For reference, this is what Eve's water looks like in 0.216, 0.215, and 0.021x with and without Scatterer.
 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

0.216/0.215/0.021 With Scatterer:

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

0.216/0.215 Without Scatterer:

 

 

Also in 0.216, I have this thing going where I can see the sun through Kerbin, and there's kind of a weird ring around the planet:
 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

0.216

This doesn't look right:

 

In 0.215, Kerbin also has the transparent thing going on, and an even more interesting halo:
 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

0.215

 

 

So, in short:

0.216: Kerbin has a halo, Eve water looks off

0.215: Kerbin has a different halo, Eve water looks off

0.021: Kerbin is fine, Eve water looks off

 

I hope this is useful in some way. Hopefully this isn't specific to me, due to my really old graphics card (GTX260, oh yeah). I wish I had a SSD, I hope you do. Mind you, I'm perfectly happy with this mod and some small water glitches on Eve, because Eve sucks anyway.

 

I'll have to check this out, I can't think of any reason why this would be happening on a stock install. Btw I think an SSD wouldn't help with KSP, I once tried loading KSP in a ramdisk to load it back after a crash and nothing happens, it's just as slow, searched the forum about it and it turns out it's a bug and something makes the game load really slow and pause a bit after every file load, no matter your disk speed.

 

31 minutes ago, ChrisHale said:

EDIT: Got your update. Still borked in this regard. Oh the borking for anyone else is the shoreline raises and lowers flickeringly as I pan the camera up and down. 

It seems to change the shorelines in complicated ways (inland seas form if I'm high up) so I'm not sure how the camera's clipping planes would be the issue. I admit, I don't write shaders, so they're a mystery for me. My knowledge is limited to asset creation.

Ran a couple tests as you requested. With only Scatterer installed, and no other mods, on a stock Kerbal it happens out of the box. If I turn off the ocean shader in the config, so the stock ocean shows, it stops happening. (I'll do that as the work around in the mean time.)

Here's my system information if it helps.

• Intel Core i7-6700K (no overclocking)
• EVGA NVidia Geforce GTX 980 Ti (Driver 359.06) (also no OC)
• 16 GB RAM
• Windows 10 (64 bit)
• Kerbal 1.0.5 (32 bit)

Original Mod List (Just to be complete.)

• AntennaRange
• Asteroid Day
• Collision FX
• Distant Object Enhancement
• Engine Lighting
• EVAManager
• ModuleManager
• Planet Shine
• Real Plume
• Rover Wheel Sounds
• Scatterer
• SmokeScreen
• TextureReplacer
• ToadicusTools
• Water Sounds

I spun this off pretty quick so I unclear at any point just ask.

This is a bug that mystified me for a while, in fact the water shaders stayed unreleased for a long time until I figured out how to make them stop moving up and down when I pan the camera, the regulars here will remember this. In short I pass the projection matrix of the camera and some other information to the shader every frame, at rendering time that matrix has to match whatever the camera is using or the ocean will display in wrong ways (move up and down, display on top of stuff etc). The mistake I was doing was using one material (which was rendering both on the far and near camera) with the properties of one camera or the other, no matter what I did with the projection matrix, clipping planes etc something always ended up wrong somewhere.

I can't think of any reason why something like this would be happening with stock, except maybe for windows 10, some reports said it was trying to force dx12 and causing issues. All I can recommend is to try forcing Directx9, Directx11 or OpenGL (create a shortcut and add  " -force-d3d11"  or  " -force-opengl")

Edited December 14, 2015 by blackrack

[ChrisHale]

Quote

This is a bug that mystified me for a while, in fact the water shaders stayed unreleased for a long time until I figured out how to make them stop moving up and down when I pan the camera, the regulars here will remember this. In short I pass the projection matrix of the camera and some other information to the shader every frame, at rendering time that matrix has to match whatever the camera is using or the ocean will display in wrong ways (move up and down, display on top of stuff etc). The mistake I was doing was using one material (which was rendering both on the far and near camera) with the properties of one camera or the other, no matter what I did with the projection matrix, clipping planes etc something always ended up wrong somewhere.

I can't think of any reason why something like this would be happening with stock, except maybe for windows 10, some reports said it was trying to force dx12 and causing issues. All I can recommend is to try forcing Directx9, Directx11 or OpenGL (create a shortcut and add  " -force-d3d11"  or  " -force-opengl")

Well I forgot to mention that I'm running a GSync Benq monitor at 144 Hz, that could very well have something to do with it. And the stock ocean looks fine with or without Scatterer installed. Only the shader ocean is acting up. But like I said, I've turned it off in the mean time, so I'm quite happy with atmospheric scattering and maybe it'll get fixed up later by an optimization you or NVidia put out at a later date.