[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

[Tekener]

3 hours ago, Errol said:

@TekenerI disagree, what you said only applies to being in deep space. What about those of us that are base building? Or doing submarines? Or flying atmospheric with multiple crafts simultaneously? The point is, it would be a very useful effect, especially for anyone doing youtube. This game has lots to look at and blur out into bokeh besides stars.

Actually you are not correct. Even in the atmosphere things will not get unsharp in the distance. Stars are still sharp spots when looking through the atmosphere (otherwise it would be impossible to watch them from earth). It will get foggy, but contours and shapes will always remain sharp in the atmosphere. Under watre is a different thing, but this is about space flight and not diving   

This is how nature looks like, you will blend over the colors and lose details due to the fog, but objects will always keep their sharp edges/contours. Using binoculars will always show you a clear vision of distant things, not a blury one.

[Poodmund]

And to this effect, Scatterer already does this by using its postProcessAlpha/Depth/Exposure nodes at differing altitudes. We already have this in the game with Scatterer.

[Errol]

1 hour ago, Tekener said:

Actually you are not correct. Even in the atmosphere things will not get unsharp in the distance. Stars are still sharp spots when looking through the atmosphere (otherwise it would be impossible to watch them from earth). It will get foggy, but contours and shapes will always remain sharp in the atmosphere. Under watre is a different thing, but this is about space flight and not diving   

This is how nature looks like, you will blend over the colors and lose details due to the fog, but objects will always keep their sharp edges/contours. Using binoculars will always show you a clear vision of distant things, not a blury one.

I think you missed the point of what I'm saying. Also, you are wrong, since you like that phrase so much.

That atmosphere does blur things like stars in space. Period. This is why we like putting telescopes in space. You get sharper images. This is has nothing to do with depth of field, which is what we were discussing.

My comment about flight in atmosphere said MULTIPLE crafts. If you have one craft close to the camera, that the camera is focused on, and another off in the distance, the other craft off in the distance could be out of focus. 

Being able to do something called a "rack focus" (where a narrow depth of field is either moved closer or further from the camera during the shot) in the game would be really cool for film makers.

[Drew Kerman]

7 hours ago, blackrack said:

However I would like to know what kind of other shaders you guys would like to see in the game, eg other shaders for Kopernicus or stuff like that.

is it possible to see eclipses from the ground? I'm still not sure if that is a restriction of Scatterer because it has no good technical solution or you just meant to get back to it at some point since it was giving you trouble to get working.

Other than that, perhaps some coronal emission effects for the sun?

Oh oh - do comet tails count in this category? I'm still missing the work MrHappyFace started for Kopernicus in that regard

Which reminds me I think you can do footprints/wheel tracks with shaders? Honestly don't know but is another effect that was started then dropped I'd love to see continued.

Thanks for all your work! I very much enjoy putting it to good use as much as possible giving people great images to enjoy from the KSA

 

Edited December 11, 2016 by Drew Kerman

[Tekener]

41 minutes ago, Errol said:

I think you missed the point of what I'm saying. Also, you are wrong, since you like that phrase so much.

That atmosphere does blur things like stars in space. Period. This is why we like putting telescopes in space. You get sharper images. This is has nothing to do with depth of field, which is what we were discussing.

Maybe I misunderstood you, yes, but for me "blury" is not what the atmosphere is doing. It does distort objects like the ones you get when looking at a hot street in the summer casuing the effect of a Fata Morgana. A blurry effect like used in the DoF is not what is happing.

That's actually the only reason why Hubble was put into space: to get away with these distortions. However science advanced and nowadays earth based telescopes can not just reach the same clearness of Hubble's pictures, they do even exceed them by using adaptive optics which corrects the distortions of objects. That's also why no further optical space telescopes for visible light like Hubble will be realized: they are not needed anymore. Hubble was the first and will be the last one of this kind. The next telescope James Webb will be an extremly sensitive infrared telescope where they need to get away from earth's heat and the atmosphere as far as possible, as such wavelengths don't make it through (atmospheric window). And even then these wavelenths are not blured by the atmosphere, they are just absorbed.

Edited December 11, 2016 by Tekener

[Starwaster]

7 hours ago, blackrack said:

Yeah seasons might be a bit more complicated...

However I would like to know what kind of other shaders you guys would like to see in the game, eg other shaders for Kopernicus or stuff like that.

I would like to see a shader that would let me do a proper gas giant being mostly gaseous with a small core. (this would let me do Jupiter properly in Real Solar System. I probably wouldn't do an Earth sized core but I would at least like an atmosphere 20km thick and be unable to see the surface)

[Galileo]

@Drew Kerman You can see eclipses from the ground.  I have quite a few screenshots of it happening.  Ohhh yeah!  I forgot about kopernicus expansions!  @blackrack please please please take a look at that! Footprints and procedural gas giant clouds were soo good with that mod and maybe the work is partially done.  I'm pretty sure the dev has stopped working on it. 

Here's the link

 

Edited December 11, 2016 by Galileo

[Errol]

Good one! I second that motion! (Procedural gas giant clouds)

[Drew Kerman]

2 hours ago, Galileo said:

You can see eclipses from the ground

Blergh, I didn't mean eclipses I meant shadow transits. EVE has Mun going dark but doesn't actually apply any sort of atmospheric effect when it passes through Kerbin's shadow

[Oshika]

14 hours ago, Oshika said:

Hi,

Thank you for your awesome mod, 

however i have some issue and i don't found the solution, with scatterer installed i have a black sky on kerbin and when i open the map view kerbin is totally pink. 

I have the "console" of scatterer but it don't seems to work in game. 

i sought on google with keyword "black sky" or "pink kerbin" but i have not found anything, only one topic about black sky but the problem was different of mine. 

To complete my post : 

Here my modlist and gamedata directory : 

Spoiler

 

And here the in-game bugs that i relate in my previous post (quoted) 

Spoiler

 

 

And i don't know why i have that, i have installed SVE + scatterer manually (all in one for SVE) 

(my output log : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/80927159/output_log.txt )

Edited December 11, 2016 by Oshika

[blackrack]

3 hours ago, Oshika said:

To complete my post : 

Here my modlist and gamedata directory : 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

And here the in-game bugs that i relate in my previous post (quoted) 

  Hide contents

 

 

And i don't know why i have that, i have installed SVE + scatterer manually (all in one for SVE) 

(my output log : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/80927159/output_log.txt )

OpenGL is broken on windows, use directx11

 

11 hours ago, Drew Kerman said:

Blergh, I didn't mean eclipses I meant shadow transits. EVE has Mun going dark but doesn't actually apply any sort of atmospheric effect when it passes through Kerbin's shadow

I'm planning to do this at one point, but there is a whole bunch of stuff I need to get done first for this to work correctly.

 

13 hours ago, Galileo said:

@Drew Kerman You can see eclipses from the ground.  I have quite a few screenshots of it happening.  Ohhh yeah!  I forgot about kopernicus expansions!  @blackrack please please please take a look at that! Footprints and procedural gas giant clouds were soo good with that mod and maybe the work is partially done.  I'm pretty sure the dev has stopped working on it. 

Here's the link

So what needs to be done here? Are these features that were never finished or just never ported to newer versions of the game/kopernicus?

And btw what is this footprint feature? is it what I think it is? Does anyone have screens?

 

19 hours ago, Poodmund said:

Loving the ring shaders but as far as more visual work goes, I would prefer for the Module Manager config compatibility to be properly nailed down before moving forward with additional features.

Currently, if you remove all the Scatterer stock configs and textures and try to introduce a config for a body with the config files located outside of the Scatterer directory, it all falls down as for some reason it tries to default the config location path to the Duna folder in the Scatterer directory... which seems very weird.

To reproduce I install Scatterer on a vanilla build, delete the GameData/scatterer/config directory and then create a planetsList style config and an atmo config (with textures) for any body in GameData/*Test* directory. 

I know it might sound like I'm beating a dead horse here but its a real issue when trying to promote positive compatibility between visual packs without encroaching on Scatterer's main directory; but thats just me and I appreciate that it doesn't add a shiny new feature so its not a popular request.

I will take a look, I thought everything was working well from what you guys said last time.

Edited December 11, 2016 by blackrack

[Oshika]

23 minutes ago, blackrack said:

OpenGL is broken, use directx11

 

I'm planning to do this at one point, but there is a whole bunch of stuff I need to get done first for this to work correctly.

 

So what needs to be done here? Are these features that were never finished or just never ported to newer versions of the game/kopernicus?

 

I will take a look, I thought everything was working well from what you guys said last time.

Thank you very much, i didn't know that i used openGL, because it's a clean install (i have re-installed the game yesterday) i will search how to go on DX11 thanks  

Edit : thank you it works, even if i have a black horizon "bug" 

Spoiler

it runs perfectly, but i think i will wait for a more advanced version of this great mod due to all the know issues (like the revert flight issue) that are breaking the immersion. 
 

 

Edited December 11, 2016 by Oshika

[blackrack]

22 minutes ago, Oshika said:

it runs perfectly, but i think i will wait for a more advanced version of this great mod due to all the know issues (like the revert flight issue) that are breaking the immersion. 

You might have to wait for a really long time.

[Oshika]

27 minutes ago, blackrack said:

You might have to wait for a really long time.

it's not a problem, i'm patient. 

[Galileo]

Those features were finished at one point and nothing has been ported over to the latest KSP.   Here's a pic of the footprints 

And here is a look at the gas animation stuff

 

[blackrack]

52 minutes ago, Galileo said:

Those features were finished at one point and nothing has been ported over to the latest KSP.   Here's a pic of the footprints 

Cool, how was this never adapted for rover tracks?

[Galileo]

18 minutes ago, blackrack said:

Cool, how was this never adapted for rover tracks?

You got me.  I have been trying to implement dust kicking up behind rover wheels for the last week..  How has THAT never been implemented?  I hate feeling like I'm driving over plastic 

[blackrack]

1 minute ago, Galileo said:

You got me.  I have been trying to implement dust kicking up behind rover wheels for the last week..  How has THAT never been implemented?  I hate feeling like I'm driving over plastic 

Hmm, I remember I used to have this from kerbal foundries, maybe like a year ago or more though. How are you implementing it?

[Galileo]

3 minutes ago, blackrack said:

Hmm, I remember I used to have this from kerbal foundries, maybe like a year ago or more though. How are you implementing it?

I'm using collisionFX code changing it so it recognized the wheel colliders and using a new particle effect, but it's not looking how I want.  I haven't messed with in a a week's or so. I kinda just gave up on it and I'm sticking with my bread and butter,  which is textures lol

I want to use collision fx because it has biome colored dust that kicks up which would add to the realism. 

Edited December 11, 2016 by Galileo

[Poodmund]

3 hours ago, Galileo said:

And here is a look at the gas animation stuff 

*snip*

I was never really a fan of that as the noise movement looked very much like standing waves rather than transverse if you get what I mean. It didn't feel as though the distortion was travelling around the body as much as it felt like it was just warbling in place.

[Galileo]

30 minutes ago, Poodmund said:

I was never really a fan of that as the noise movement looked very much like standing waves rather than transverse if you get what I mean. It didn't feel as though the distortion was travelling around the body as much as it felt like it was just warbling in place.

Yeah but that may be as good as it gets with ksp..  I don't think we will ever get to this level

[Poodmund]

In that particular demo by Stephen Cameron, the warped noise effect only gets more extreme as the distortion is run and as said by himself, there is always a sweet spot in the generation as to where the output looks "best". However (and I did send this to blackrack and Waz a while back) take a look at this: 

 

That's the level I don't think we'll ever reach but we can only hope... right?

[Galileo]

14 minutes ago, Poodmund said:

That's the level I don't think we'll ever reach but we can only hope... right?

I wouldn't put it past blackrack to figure something like that out.  I'm convinced he's a magician.

But if the best we can do is what kopernicus expansion has,  I'm OK with that 

Edited December 11, 2016 by Galileo

[Poodmund]

Well if it makes any difference, that particular demo used an Advection Procedure to simulate the fluid flow at the boundary layers between the bands.

... and also of note, seeing as its Unity base, I came across this a while back that was interesting nonetheless: http://vfxmike.blogspot.co.uk/ @blackrack, I presume that blitting like this would impose quite a large memory footprint texture wise and also be CPU heavy? 

Edited December 11, 2016 by Poodmund

[blackrack]

14 hours ago, Poodmund said:

Well if it makes any difference, that particular demo used an Advection Procedure to simulate the fluid flow at the boundary layers between the bands.

... and also of note, seeing as its Unity base, I came across this a while back that was interesting nonetheless: http://vfxmike.blogspot.co.uk/ @blackrack, I presume that blitting like this would impose quite a large memory footprint texture wise and also be CPU heavy? 

No it's fine, I already use blitting in the ocean and the custom depth buffer. It's fine really the blit operation in itself isn't expensive. This blog looks like a good read btw.

14 hours ago, Galileo said:

I wouldn't put it past blackrack to figure something like that out.  I'm convinced he's a magician.

But if the best we can do is what kopernicus expansion has,  I'm OK with that 

I will see what I can do. I feel that a lot of people here highly overestimate my abilities though

 

Edited:

I have a new experimental version I'd like you guys to test. It includes

-Improved EVE integration, new cloud shaders appear to be working well for me now with SVE ( @Galileo please check if you still have issues on your side)

-Ring shadows (new kopernicus ring shader isn't released yet but you should now be able to see ring shadows on the scatterer atmosphere even with the old ring shader)

-Removed ocean and postprocessing effects from Texture Replacer's reflections (they looked messed up)

-Fixed OpenGL on windows

-Fixed ocean reflections and whitecaps

 

Link: https://mega.nz/#!DNhFQRob!r-A6X2ziBsH9Q1H5ldbYtoNaO0p1XoP8gFM9aTtDzfs (also added in the OP)

Edited December 12, 2016 by blackrack