[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

[GJdude]

I can confirm that the z-fighting flickering interaction with waterfall plumes and any form of TAA is still present, but falling back onto SMAA really does sting since the newer TAA looks very nice.

What levels is SMAA working at currently at the different quality levels? Even at 2 it doesn't feel like enough for 1080p. Is this 2x? 4x? Does SMAA even work like that?

My rig can certainly handle turning it up to 8x or however high it goes. Could those of us still wrestling with this interaction get the option to turn SMAA up higher, if possible?

[blackrack]

22 minutes ago, GJdude said:

I can confirm that the z-fighting flickering interaction with waterfall plumes and any form of TAA is still present, but falling back onto SMAA really does sting since the newer TAA looks very nice.

What levels is SMAA working at currently at the different quality levels? Even at 2 it doesn't feel like enough for 1080p. Is this 2x? 4x? Does SMAA even work like that?

My rig can certainly handle turning it up to 8x or however high it goes. Could those of us still wrestling with this interaction get the option to turn SMAA up higher, if possible?

There is no 2x or 4x in SMAA, there is just different levels but they work differently.

The lower levels typically just look for obvious edges in the depth texture, the middle level does a similar but fast search on the color data, and the highest level does an advanced search on the color data.

When people refer to smaa as T2x that is temporal SMAA, I'm not really familiar with how it works and it isn't in scatterer, but it might have the other temporal issues as the current TAA.

I looked into the TAA-Waterfall interaction for a bit, as I didn't find the issue I decided to move on for now rather than sink more time into it. You can try FXAA through TUFX or try to downsample from a higher resolution (I don't know if nvidia DSR or the AMD equivalent work in KSP tbh).

[Rakete]

53 minutes ago, GJdude said:

I can confirm that the z-fighting flickering interaction with waterfall plumes and any form of TAA is still present, but falling back onto SMAA really does sting since the newer TAA looks very nice.

What levels is SMAA working at currently at the different quality levels? Even at 2 it doesn't feel like enough for 1080p. Is this 2x? 4x? Does SMAA even work like that?

My rig can certainly handle turning it up to 8x or however high it goes. Could those of us still wrestling with this interaction get the option to turn SMAA up higher, if possible?

In fact, this bothers me too. SMAA doesn 't look a smooth as TAA. But TAA causes flickering inside the enginebells of waterfallized plumes. 

I would be very very happy, it there was a fix on that, so that waterfall-users could use TAA.

[GJdude]

33 minutes ago, blackrack said:

I looked into the TAA-Waterfall interaction for a bit, as I didn't find the issue I decided to move on for now rather than sink more time into it. You can try FXAA through TUFX or try to downsample from a higher resolution (I don't know if nvidia DSR or the AMD equivalent work in KSP tbh).

11 minutes ago, Rakete said:

I would be very very happy, it there was a fix on that, so that waterfall-users could use TAA.

Poor TAA really can't catch a break, can it? It's a shame MSAA had to be so disagreeable with the new rendering methods.

For now the only fix appears to be others modifying waterfall configs to distance the meshes from the engine bells a little more, but that could be a quality compromise for anyone not running scatterer and isn't entirely confirmed to work yet. If anyone finds out the cause of this interaction, they'll need a medal.

For now I'll just stick with SMAA before my stubbornness to try and solve this drives me insane, since it's really the only incompatibility problem left after previous updates. What a perplexing issue!

[blackrack]

26 minutes ago, Rakete said:

In fact, this bothers me too. SMAA doesn 't look a smooth as TAA. But TAA causes flickering inside the enginebells of waterfallized plumes. 

I would be very very happy, it there was a fix on that, so that waterfall-users could use TAA.

 

6 minutes ago, GJdude said:

Poor TAA really can't catch a break, can it? It's a shame MSAA had to be so disagreeable with the new rendering methods.

For now the only fix appears to be others modifying waterfall configs to distance the meshes from the engine bells a little more, but that could be a quality compromise for anyone not running scatterer and isn't entirely confirmed to work yet. If anyone finds out the cause of this interaction, they'll need a medal.

For now I'll just stick with SMAA before my stubbornness to try and solve this drives me insane, since it's really the only incompatibility problem left after previous updates. What a perplexing issue!

Have you asked the waterfall devs about it? Maybe ask them to add a small z-offset to these shaders as a quick fix, or maybe check if the shaders are not using the jittered projection matrix but the regular one for some reason.

Edited January 10, 2023 by blackrack

[Rakete]

1 hour ago, blackrack said:

 

Have you asked the waterfall devs about it? Maybe ask them to add a small z-offset to these shaders as a quick fix, or maybe check if the shaders are not using the jittered projection matrix but the regular one for some reason.

I asked them. They said (e.g. the author of the Stock water fall effects configs), some future release could contain an offset, but it never was brought into one of the releases and is still the way it was. It's more than half a year since I asked some of them. Fully understandable, since every modder does it in their free recreational time. Best would be to fix the root issue somehow, but I don't know if this is even possible.

In fact, every mod, that uses waterfall-plumes would have to add an z-offset. I don't think all partmods, that come right out of the box with waterfall plumes, will adapt to this issue. They are just too many. E.g. in my case these mods have one or more parts with waterfall plumes: Stock waterfall effects, SpikeX, KerbalAtomics, NF Launchvehicles, NF Propulsion, NF Spacecraft, SSPXr, Far Future Tech, KARE, BDA+ .... and that are just the ones, that I have. Out there in the wild, there are many many more.  Especially the ones by Nertea (and they are many) won't see any updates anymore, 'cause he retired from KSP1-modding and became part of the KSP2-team. Fully understandable. I guess, most of the part mod creators aren't even aware of this special issue.

As for the projection matrix... I am not qualified enough to answer that question. I am just a simple user. Sorry to say so.

 

Edited January 10, 2023 by Rakete

[Rakete]

4 hours ago, Rakete said:

I asked them. They said (e.g. the author of the Stock water fall effects configs), some future release could contain an offset, but it never was brought into one of the releases and is still the way it was. It's more than half a year since I asked some of them. Fully understandable, since every modder does it in their free recreational time. Best would be to fix the root issue somehow, but I don't know if this is even possible.

In fact, every mod, that uses waterfall-plumes would have to add an z-offset. I don't think all partmods, that come right out of the box with waterfall plumes, will adapt to this issue. They are just too many. E.g. in my case these mods have one or more parts with waterfall plumes: Stock waterfall effects, SpikeX, KerbalAtomics, NF Launchvehicles, NF Propulsion, NF Spacecraft, SSPXr, Far Future Tech, KARE, BDA+ .... and that are just the ones, that I have. Out there in the wild, there are many many more.  Especially the ones by Nertea (and they are many) won't see any updates anymore, 'cause he retired from KSP1-modding and became part of the KSP2-team. Fully understandable. I guess, most of the part mod creators aren't even aware of this special issue.

As for the projection matrix... I am not qualified enough to answer that question. I am just a simple user. Sorry to say so.

 

Is there any chance to fix the root issue in the TAA-algorithm, in a way, that the way smoother TAA becomes available for waterfall users without forcing dozens of modders to reconfigure their waterfall configs ("forcing" is the wrong word, because KSP-modding is just a hobby, I guess, but you get, what I mean... )? Just a polite question, not a complaint. 

Edited January 10, 2023 by Rakete

[KerbalOnKerbin]

Hi! So I've been getting crashes on loading into a space center game and the log spits out this error:
 

Spoiler

[ERR 17:09:10.896] [Scatterer][Error] Couldn't load pluginData System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at ConfigNode.ReadObject (System.Object obj, ConfigNode node) [0x00085] in <4b449f2841f84227adfaad3149c8fdba>:0
  at ConfigNode.LoadObjectFromConfig (System.Object obj, ConfigNode node, System.Int32 pass, System.Boolean removeAfterUse) [0x0001a] in <4b449f2841f84227adfaad3149c8fdba>:0
  at ConfigNode.LoadObjectFromConfig (System.Object obj, ConfigNode node) [0x00000] in <4b449f2841f84227adfaad3149c8fdba>:0
  at scatterer.PluginDataReadWrite.loadPluginData () [0x00015] in <684aa87c0d2345f8a9e4739403f4afff>:0

I can send the modlist if needed.

[HafCoJoe]

29 minutes ago, KerbalOnKerbin said:

Hi! So I've been getting crashes on loading into a space center game and the log spits out this error:
 

  Hide contents

[ERR 17:09:10.896] [Scatterer][Error] Couldn't load pluginData System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at ConfigNode.ReadObject (System.Object obj, ConfigNode node) [0x00085] in <4b449f2841f84227adfaad3149c8fdba>:0
  at ConfigNode.LoadObjectFromConfig (System.Object obj, ConfigNode node, System.Int32 pass, System.Boolean removeAfterUse) [0x0001a] in <4b449f2841f84227adfaad3149c8fdba>:0
  at ConfigNode.LoadObjectFromConfig (System.Object obj, ConfigNode node) [0x00000] in <4b449f2841f84227adfaad3149c8fdba>:0
  at scatterer.PluginDataReadWrite.loadPluginData () [0x00015] in <684aa87c0d2345f8a9e4739403f4afff>:0

I can send the modlist if needed.

Could you try removing all mods except Spectra/EVE and see if it persists?

Edited January 14, 2023 by HafCoJoe

[KerbalOnKerbin]

All I know is that the crash goes away when I remove Scatterer.

I'm unable to uninstall all my mods right now tho

[HafCoJoe]

Just now, KerbalOnKerbin said:

All I know is that the crash goes away when I remove Scatterer.

I'm unable to uninstall all my mods right now tho

Hm gotcha. Alas I can't do much troubleshooting for bugs with Scatterer and Eve, all I can recommend is trying to reinstall Scatterer/EVE/Spectra from new downloads

[KerbalOnKerbin]

I tried deleteing the Scatterer cache since reinstalling the mods didn't work but now it just crashes on main menu load. (for context, it plays the entire main menu music without ever loading, then once the menu music ends it juts crashes)

Edit: I'm going to just try and uninstall all of my visual mod and visual-related mods and install them again, in case it's some random thing causing it to crash.
Edit 2: Reinstalling visual mods didn't work either. I genuinley don't know whats causing this.
Edit 3: Removing my rescale got it to render the first frame of the title screen, but then it crashed. The log shows that for some reason Scatterer can't find a lot of files, even though I have Spectra installed.

Edit4: After updating Kopernicus and adding KSP Community Fixes it boots. First time I uninstalled Spectra and it worked, but when I add spectra it crashes again. Note: no scatterer or eve effects are displayed in the first case.

Edited January 14, 2023 by KerbalOnKerbin

[Arco123]

Coming Soon ™

[in use by another member.]

does anybody else have  a problem with the game locking up when zooming in on any planet other than your homeworld on the map? some people said this would go away after a minute, but my game crashes after a while.  I have an integrated GPU and directx 12. Is this a problem that can't be fixed until I get a new laptop? Or can it be fixed?

[blackrack]

Got some much-needed eclipse improvements in, they now apply to the rest of the atmosphere, the ocean and the new clouds, but also they don't affect the player/ship lights like the EVE eclipses do:

I kept the ambient light near the camera for gameplay reasons but longer distances won't be visible

 

On 1/19/2023 at 4:14 AM, in use by another member. said:

does anybody else have  a problem with the game locking up when zooming in on any planet other than your homeworld on the map? some people said this would go away after a minute, but my game crashes after a while.  I have an integrated GPU and directx 12. Is this a problem that can't be fixed until I get a new laptop? Or can it be fixed?

This is a known issue on integrated graphics, see here for solutions you can try https://github.com/LGhassen/Scatterer/issues/192

Edited January 22, 2023 by blackrack

[dok_377]

Can eclipses also be fixed in EVE or is this only possible in scatterer? 

[blackrack]

5 minutes ago, dok_377 said:

Can eclipses also be fixed in EVE or is this only possible in scatterer? 

The way this works it uses some tools which I have already set up in Scatterer, so only Scatterer  for now and later on will add it to EVE.

[HafCoJoe]

9 hours ago, blackrack said:

Got some much-needed eclipse improvements in, they now apply to the rest of the atmosphere, the ocean and the new clouds, but also they don't affect the player/ship lights like the EVE eclipses do:

I kept the ambient light near the camera for gameplay reasons but longer distances won't be visible

 

This is a known issue on integrated graphics, see here for solutions you can try https://github.com/LGhassen/Scatterer/issues/192

hhhh you're making me want to pick up KSP again more than I'd like to admit

[Zaxxon]

Hi, loving all the visual mod work you do. Thanks! Got the new volumetric cloud version - really nice work!
I've searched around and haven't found the answer to my question: Is there a way to generally tone down the haze / fog from scatterer?  I feel like everything is a bit dull and washed out for things in closer range view.  And even the mountains I would prefer to have less of the distant haze effect.
Thanks!

[blackrack]

47 minutes ago, Zaxxon said:

Hi, loving all the visual mod work you do. Thanks! Got the new volumetric cloud version - really nice work!
I've searched around and haven't found the answer to my question: Is there a way to generally tone down the haze / fog from scatterer?  I feel like everything is a bit dull and washed out for things in closer range view.  And even the mountains I would prefer to have less of the distant haze effect.
Thanks!

Ctrl + alt + f11 in flight, find the thicken buttons for both mie and rayleigh, put a value like 0.75 or 0.5, hit until you're happy then save.

[Kakub]

https://imgur.com/a/d4JAzE6
This is happening only when i have scatterer. It happening with flags on parts and with decals inside cocpits. Can somebody can tell me whats wrong ?

[Etercept]

Hello！My game is 1.12.5 and I installed the mod. Actually it works but the land, the KSC as well as my rocket is dissappeared. 

[Rocket Guy_]

Hi, i just realized that the godrays are missing. how can i fix this? im using scatterer version 0.0838

 

nvm i'm apparently on low settings

Edited February 26, 2023 by Rocket Guy_

[Kriegio]

Whenever I try to zoom into a planet the game crashes with scatterer, without scatter it doesn't crash but white lights flash.

[NaviG]

How can i configure to see the eclipse darkness? I can see eclipse effect, and the shadows in the map but it's not dark ingame. Its strange cause you see the sun covered but the light's still come to the surface and above the clouds.

(Video reference for what i'm missing)

Edit: Just saw your message, amazing feature willing to see!!

Edited March 6, 2023 by NaviG