[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

[blackrack]

Hi everyone, I was kind of busy lately, didn't even know 1.8 was out. A co-worker informed today an update is out.

I still plan to update scatterer to the latest version and support/improve it, so be patient.

[R-T-B]

Welcome back.

A shortlist of what to expect:

Your Horizon detection code is all wonky.  Somehow, this makes the world flood.  Your "old" commented code works (sort of, you and I both know it's flawed) but:

Shaders are still screwy.  Sun lensflares in particular replicate like nuts.  Also, there was transluscent water in my report gathering, if one used ocean shaders.

This was in more or less a straight recompile using the older horizon code lines.

I'd make a pull request for you, but really, I think that's about it and I deleted my repos when people thought I was trying to poach your stuff (not at all, its your baby)

Good luck and welcome back.  Your mod is a godsend and seeing you here made my day.

Edited October 21, 2019 by R-T-B

[blackrack]

57 minutes ago, R-T-B said:

Welcome back.

A shortlist of what to expect:

Your Horizon detection code is all wonky.  Somehow, this makes the world flood.  Your "old" commented code works (sort of, you and I both know it's flawed) but:

Shaders are still screwy.  Sun lensflares in particular replicate like nuts.  Also, there was transluscent water in my report gathering, if one used ocean shaders.

This was in more or less a straight recompile using the older horizon code lines.

I'd make a pull request for you, but really, I think that's about it and I deleted my repos when people thought I was trying to poach your stuff (not at all, its your baby)

Good luck and welcome back.  Your mod is a godsend and seeing you here made my day.

Thank you. I appreciate your efforts and would welcome any pull requests, provided the issues are fixed correctly

[R-T-B]

1 hour ago, blackrack said:

fixed correctly

Heh, wouldn't go that far now...  but at least you have a heads up!

[ThijmenDF]

After uninstalling this mod for 1.8, I almost forgot how terrible the vanilla atmosphere and ocean shaders / textures are.

Thank you for making this amazing mod!

 

Btw, thoughts on special effects with solar and lunar eclipses?

[WarriorSabe]

Hey blackrack, since you'll have to rewrite a bit for it to work in 1.8, would it be possible to add full support for multiple stars, star colors and intensity curves? Not necessarily all of those, but those are features I'd like to see at some point.

I don't know anything about the internal functioning of the mod, so I don't really know how hard it would be, but at least with my naivete it seems like it shouldn't be too hard. I'd imagine you could compute the effect for both stars, and simply take the highest or average or something, and for the star color simply subtract out the negative or multiply by the color or something. The intensity curve could also just be a multiplier on the strength of the effect.

Then again, I could be completely wrong about how the code works and none of that would work or be easily implemented. 

[BezKartuza]

I'm just waiting for the version to be released under 1.8.
Because without this, the mod Astronomers Visual Pack cannot work as I understand it. And without him, I just can’t play KSP
Your mod is very important!

[The_Arcitect]

ATATENTION EVRYONE!

Please look at this:

I under stand this looks like a bug.

But this was in 1.8.

So I do not expect this was in the base mod.  was it?

Edited October 24, 2019 by Vanamonde
Don't get carried away with font sizes, please.

[Jacke]

45 minutes ago, The_Arcitect said:

I under stand this looks like a bug.

But this was in 1.8.

So I do not expect this was in the base mod.  was it?

Are you running a pre-KSP 1.8 version of Scatterer in KSP 1.8?  If so, all bets are off and not working is what should be expected.

With the Unity and other changes in the KSP 1.7.3 to 1.8 transition, .dll's for one have to be assumed not to work in the other unless they did all their external accesses via KSP methods that didn't change over the transition.  For something as complex as Scatterer, I'm assuming it's not true.  So you need a KSP 1.8 Scatterer (which we don't have yet) before there's any hope of it working.

[Windh]

3 hours ago, The_Arcitect said:

ATATENTION EVRYONE!

Please look at this:

I under stand this looks like a bug.

But this was in 1.8.

So I do not expect this was in the base mod.  was it?

If you just have a look at the thread here you will soon notice that the current version of Scatterer is not working with 1.8.

[R-T-B]

3 hours ago, Jacke said:

Are you running a pre-KSP 1.8 version of Scatterer in KSP 1.8?  If so, all bets are off and not working is what should be expected.

With the Unity and other changes in the KSP 1.7.3 to 1.8 transition, .dll's for one have to be assumed not to work in the other unless they did all their external accesses via KSP methods that didn't change over the transition.  For something as complex as Scatterer, I'm assuming it's not true.  So you need a KSP 1.8 Scatterer (which we don't have yet) before there's any hope of it working.

Heck, I made a 1.8 recompile of scatterer and it still did that.

Scatterer simply needs work...  which means the modder needs time.  Give it to him.  Let him breathe.

Edited October 24, 2019 by R-T-B

[WarriorSabe]

Seriously, you don't need to write it in massive letters. Blackrack can see it anyways, and those same issues among others have already been reported anyways. On this same page with an official response that it was being worked on no less.

[RW-1]

I just wanted to say thanks to Blackrack for his honest posting to RTB, knowing all he was trying to do was assist the mod and the community as a whole.

I'm patiently awaiting the new release, and that's all any of us can do. If one is so impatient that it must be now, simply remain in 1.7.3 until it's corrected, or use 1.8 without until Blackrack has the time and energy to work on it.

In the end it's a game, not a life (unless you're on staff at Squad or Take Two)

[blackrack]

I made a pre-release for the 1.8 version, I didn't test too much in depth yet, but it seems to be working.

https://github.com/LGhassen/Scatterer/releases/tag/0.0541

Please try it out, I will finish testing and fixing any issues.

On 10/22/2019 at 10:33 AM, WarriorSabe said:

Hey blackrack, since you'll have to rewrite a bit for it to work in 1.8, would it be possible to add full support for multiple stars, star colors and intensity curves? Not necessarily all of those, but those are features I'd like to see at some point.

I plan to include multiple stars, with colors. haven't thought of including intensity curves but a fixed intensity value per affected atmosphere, as I don't intend for the effects to be fully dynamic but manually configured.

On 8/12/2019 at 9:42 PM, pingopete said:

Hey @blackrack, I was reading your planned features and saw new terrain system, I was wondering what you might have planned for that? would it involve allowing for new terrain textures as EVE used to allow? Just wondering as this is one of the reasons I halted work on RVE, and as far as I can tell there's no available option for it currently around in KSP other than altering the global body textures

Well, as a first step I was planning to replace the PQS shaders and try to do some trickery with parallax mapping that would be procedurally generated and make the terrain look more detailed than it is. The new shaders introduced in 1.8 seem to do more or less what I had in mind.

Later on, I would like to explore implementing my own terrain system (ie replace the PQS system with a custom terrain system), but not sure I'll ever have the time to do something so ambitious

On 9/6/2019 at 9:46 PM, General Petrov said:

So I thought I'd clarify on my previous question about an issue I'm having with scatterer. Basically for some reason or another the surface terrain of Duna appears to be partially transparent from a distance. This is most noticeable as you descend through the atmosphere, and when you're on the surface looking at hills several kilometres away. Its not immediately clear from these screenshots, but you can just about see that at first the terrain almost appears as if its a part of the atmosphere, but as you descend it becomes less transparent.

I tried to find out what was causing this, and the only thing I found was that in the game Scatterer options menu, it looks as though Scatterer is loading the config for Urlum instead of Duna judging by the file path. I couldn't figure out how to change this though. I've been looking for a solution for some time now but I can't find anything. Would greatly appreciate if anyone could help me stop my Duna from looking as though its being snapped out of existence as I enter orbit. 

 

This is a limitation in how scatterer handles planets with a tiny radius and a (relatively) high atmo. No fix/workaround for now.

On 9/15/2019 at 11:20 PM, pingopete said:

Been playing around with some new 128k downscaled to 64k earth textures, but having a hard time getting Scatterer to run properly, would be awesome to revamp this. I found if I enable eve integration with clouds and hit map clouds all terrain goes white, so for the time being I've been running without that, but on occasion it would work briefly over certain areas:

Just to clarify the mapping of eve clouds only seems to not work for cube mapped eve cloud texture but work fine for normal single texture cloud maps and detail 

Hmm, could you open an issue on github? I'll look into the cube mapped textures.

On 9/17/2019 at 6:01 AM, WarriorSabe said:

Are the ring shadows/extinction not actually supported/integrated, or am I doing something wrong? I see the setting for it, but I can't get the shadows (on the planet) or sunlight extinction to happen with my planet's rings. I've already checked that it isn't simply the alignment with the sun.

Could you open an issue on github? I will look into fixing it. I ahven't maintained it in a while, it's possible something broke.

On 9/22/2019 at 12:29 AM, Baconoobolo10101 said:

Great mod! works great with EVE. But can you make the waves actually bob you up and down? Bit awkward when the waves are low and my splashed down craft is floating on air between the waves

I tried to do this before, let's say I ran into limitations and the wave bobbing was guaranteed to summon the kraken every time, in addition to tanking performance.

On 10/2/2019 at 4:31 PM, pingopete said:

CrossPost from my mod thread for anyone interested:

I recalled how good scatterer's height wrapping haze effect looked in PQS, sadly I completely forgot ScaledSpace doesn't use the height map to deform the Earth's surface, and Using the Earth Object model is far to low resolution for LEO scatterer, but I found that Scatterer can be tricked into rendering the height wrapping based of the PQS height map by raising the PQS deactivate distance, while keeping the fade in/out range at normal heights.

Problems:

• Scatterer camera far clipping plane issue
• Scatterer rendering ocean edges from PQS
• Scatterer no longer supporting godrays for terrain which would've looked absolutely insane

Album : https://imgur.com/a/5Fb9KU8

Non-Spherical ScaledSpace model in Tracking center

Scatterer rendering haze from PQS heightmap, over 2D (or 3D object deformed) ScaledSpace flat surface textures

I can't begin to imagine how good this would look with the 64k textures if EVE could wrap cube map terrain textures to the surface

The far clip plane will always be an issue. I was thinking about using the height map to affect the scaled Space rendering for a while, open an issue on github, I will look into it, though not sure it would work.

I assume here that the earth scaled space model is a perfect sphere? Otherwise if you can have detail on the scaledSpace object, the scaledSpace shading will match it, provided the option "flatScaledSpaceModel = false" is set for that planet. i might be remembering this wrong, but I thought that the stock scaledSpace system could add detail from the heightmap.

Anyway, here's how shading looks with the option flatScaledSpaceModel  set to true (left) and to false (right).

 

[Delay]

2 minutes ago, blackrack said:

Anyway, here's how shading looks with the option flatScaledSpaceModel  set to true (left) and to false (right).

I guess it would make sense to have flatScaledSpaceModel = true for Duna? Its atmosphere is rather thin and you'd never get that much haze in its trenches!

[Windh]

Just had a quick look, but it looks great so far!

Edited October 24, 2019 by Windh

[Galileo]

I'll be testing it out this evening. Thanks for the quick turnaround!

[stratvox]

1 hour ago, blackrack said:

I made a pre-release for the 1.8 version, I didn't test too much in depth yet, but it seems to be working.

Thank you very much, blackrack!

[Fierce Wolf]

2 hours ago, blackrack said:

but it seems to be working.

Hell yeah it works!!! I love you man!!

[Drew Kerman]

should I add a github issue for this option too so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle?

 

[WarriorSabe]

8 hours ago, blackrack said:

I plan to include multiple stars, with colors. haven't thought of including intensity curves but a fixed intensity value per affected atmosphere, as I don't intend for the effects to be fully dynamic but manually configured.

Cool. A fixed intensity value is fine, too, I just wanted to have proper support instead of having to adjust color values, which isn't quite an accurate way to correct for it.

[blackrack]

5 hours ago, Drew Kerman said:

should I add a github issue for this option too so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle?

 

Check if there isn't already an issue, but yes, you can.

[Drew Kerman]

6 hours ago, blackrack said:

Check if there isn't already an issue, but yes, you can.

yea I checked before asking. I'll add one

[xman1]

Strange.  Getting 5 FPS with just a rover on Minmus with this beta version.  I should be getting 60+.

Anyone else having this problem?

Edit:  This is on an AMD 3700X with a 2070 Super.

Edit:  The area around KSC seemed to operate normally.

Edit:  Adding my CKAN mods.

{
	"kind": "metapackage",
	"abstract": "A list of modules installed on the auto KSP instance",
	"name": "installed-auto",
	"license": "unknown",
	"version": "2019.10.25.08.11.59",
	"identifier": "installed-auto",
	"spec_version": "v1.6",
	"recommends": [
		{
			"name": "StockVisualEnhancements"
		},
		{
			"name": "Scatterer"
		},
		{
			"name": "DistantObject"
		},
		{
			"name": "PlanetShine"
		},
		{
			"name": "SVE-HighResolution"
		},
		{
			"name": "SVE-Sunflare"
		},
		{
			"name": "Scatterer-config"
		},
		{
			"name": "DistantObject-default"
		},
		{
			"name": "PlanetShine-Config-Default"
		},
		{
			"name": "ModuleManager"
		},
		{
			"name": "EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements"
		},
		{
			"name": "ToolbarController"
		},
		{
			"name": "EngineLightRelit"
		},
		{
			"name": "ClickThroughBlocker"
		},
		{
			"name": "SmokeScreen"
		},
		{
			"name": "BasicDeltaV"
		},
		{
			"name": "Chatterer"
		},
		{
			"name": "CollisionFXUpdated"
		},
		{
			"name": "FwiffoRaredenSkybox"
		},
		{
			"name": "TextureReplacer"
		},
		{
			"name": "VesselView-UI-RasterPropMonitor"
		},
		{
			"name": "RasterPropMonitor"
		},
		{
			"name": "VesselView"
		},
		{
			"name": "RealPlume-StockConfigs"
		},
		{
			"name": "RealPlume"
		},
		{
			"name": "RasterPropMonitor-Core"
		},
		{
			"name": "ReentryParticleEffect"
		},
		{
			"name": "DockingPortSoundFX"
		}
	]
}

 

Edited October 25, 2019 by xman1

[xman1]

In testing, this slowdown is not the result of scatterer at all.  In removing each module one by one, I have nailed it down to the fault of planetshine.

Please ignore the above.

Edit:  If anyone wants a fix to the same problem, there is an update to Planetshine here:  https://github.com/prestja/ksp-planetshine/releases/

Edited October 26, 2019 by xman1