[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]

blackrack: It's a bad idea IMO: from far away PQS will look either look much, much worse than the prerendered scaledspace texture+NRM, or it will lead to way too much processing overhead. And that's for Kerbin-sized stuff, let alone anything larger. :\

There's good reason PQS gets faded out and disabled as low as it does.

Yeah I know, but I haven't run into any performance issues yet and I really don't like the low-quality look of the scaled space objects. Anyway, it causes a few issues playing with the camera's far and near planes and there's a limit to how far youc an take it so it's just a temporary solution right now.

Edited April 26, 2015 by blackrack

[blackrack]

I've made an experimental version to test out a few things and features I'm not sure about yet like the keeping PQS active thing and the auto settings adjustment based on altitude.

Anyway, here's the changelong:

-Effects no longer lag behind as you move the camera.

-Auto depth adjustment based on height (WIP/experimental).

-Kerbin no longer covered by blue sphere after altitude of 160 Km.

-New view from orbit faded out progressively as you approach scaled space (extremely WIP/experimental, has some artifacts)

-Few adjustments to the base settings, more subtle effect.

-UI now defaults to hidden, can be enabled with Alt-f11 or Alt-f10.

-The mod no longer disables anisotropic filtering and forcing aniso through drivers no longer causes artifacts

-Other minor fixes

This is a very experimental version, so expect bugs, null references and probably broken compatibility with RSS, this is just for testing a few things and getting feedback from you guys.

I should be able to drop in tomorrow with another experimental version that supports multiple planets at the same time, and perhaps give kerbin a higher atmosphere since it's so low right now that mountains pierce it.

https://kerbalstuff.com/mod/700/Scatterer

Have fun and let me know what you think.

Edited April 26, 2015 by blackrack

[djnattyd]

So did it work?

I'll let you know, real life unfortunately got in the way of me testing it out.

[blackrack]

I may have something good cooking up.

I'll let you know, real life unfortunately got in the way of me testing it out.

Hate it when that happens...

[Thomas988]

I may have something good cooking up.

http://i.imgur.com/tvU2Opw.jpg

EXCUSE ME

uncaps

[m4ti140]

...... wow...

This is the one thing I miss since the original demo... water shaders... you're adding them back.. you're turning KSP nextgen.... thanks...

[E.Nygma]

This is freaking awesome, eagerly awaiting a stable release!

[Proot]

My first ride:

- All looks a bit better (even more!) and runs much, much more smoothly (without "addition" effect). Looks much more natural.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

- Sadly, after the night of my first orbit the look was like this (200.000m altitude):

http://imgur.com/AIY6Vp6,YEb2sua,YtNP6fQ

Anyways, my graphic cards seems to not have the best shader support, so maybe I'm not the best person for this tests.

Obviated this last issue, this version seems a breakthrough.

Things that (imho) can be improved:

- The sun glare replacement fading is maybe too abrupt for my taste. Maybe should be more dilated in time while the ascent goes on? I don't know... it's just a personal appreciation.

- For me, the atmo still seems a bit dense in the distance.

- I still miss the effect on map view, but I know that you need to finish with this issues before to even think on it. Anyways, will be possible a "switch" in, in the future, to allow the effect in the map view?

Thanks fo this, blackrack. Is fun and glorious. We cannot demand more.

EDIT: I've just seen that ocean... and well...

Edited April 26, 2015 by Proot

[blackrack]

My first ride:

- All looks a bit better (even more!) and runs much, much more smoothly (without "addition" effect). Looks much more natural.

http://imgur.com/a/DSBYJ

- Sadly, after the night of my first orbit the look was like this (200.000m altitude):

http://imgur.com/AIY6Vp6,YEb2sua,YtNP6fQ

Anyways, my graphic cards seems to not have the best shader support, so maybe I'm not the best person for this tests.

Obviated this last issue, this version seems a breakthrough.

Things that (imho) can be improved:

- The sun glare replacement fading is maybe too abrupt for my taste. Maybe should be more dilated in time while the ascent goes on? I don't know... it's just a personal appreciation.

- For me, the atmo still seems a bit dense in the distance.

- I still miss the effect on map view, but I know that you need to finish with this issues before to even think on it. Anyways, will be possible a "switch" in, in the future, to allow the effect in the map view?

Thanks fo this, blackrack. Is fun and glorious. We cannot demand more.

EDIT: I've just seen that ocean... and well...

Those clouds sure look good from orbit, I haven't tried them myself, but do they get colored over by the postprocessing? And in this case, do they look completely horrible from the ground?

I haven't run into that exact issue but 200km altitude is when I did the camera planes switching so things still get wonky around there but I have something in mind for later.

I will fix the sunglare in due time, I haven't really put any work into it except for that abrupt switch.

I plan to make new scaledSpace objects for the planets with new/retouched textures and their own scattering shader which works only from orbit. I could fade to this once out of PQS view and it wouldn't look completely different like the current scaledspace objects. This is still just an idea but I estimate it should look like the image on the right

Once that's done that should be the effect you see in map view, and it will also support EVE clouds since it won't be postprocessing-based.

[Starwaster]

How are you determining when to switch? Are you grabbing the actual fade altitude from ScaledSpaceFader? (there's one for each CelestialBody)

[blackrack]

How are you determining when to switch? Are you grabbing the actual fade altitude from ScaledSpaceFader? (there's one for each CelestialBody)

I modified the PQS deactivatedistance to an arbitrary value with that snippet you sent me yesterday. I'm not grabbing the actual value from a ScaledSpaceFader or anything yet and that's why I said this would probably break compatibility with RSS for this version. But it's more of a "testing version".

[Proot]

Those clouds sure look good from orbit, I haven't tried them myself, but do they get colored over by the postprocessing? And in this case, do they look completely horrible from the ground?

I haven't run into that exact issue but 200km altitude is when I did the camera planes switching so things still get wonky around there but I have something in mind for later.

I will fix the sunglare in due time, I haven't really put any work into it except for that abrupt switch.

I plan to make new scaledSpace objects for the planets with new/retouched textures and their own scattering shader which works only from orbit. I could fade to this once out of PQS view and it wouldn't look completely different like the current scaledspace objects. This is still just an idea but I estimate it should look like the image on the right

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/elementLinks/16_atmospheric_01a.jpg

Once that's done that should be the effect you see in map view, and it will also support EVE clouds since it won't be postprocessing-based.

Those are clouds from wip-EVE. Sadly the scattering fully cover the clouds. You can only see them at a few meters of distance, and the post processing overlays the horizon over the clouds (which spoils the travel among clouds, lol) .

The only reaso why you can se a few clouds there is because I use more than one layer of clouds, and that ones are at 5000-6000 meters of altitude aprox...

The day that you can make this fully compatible with the achievements of Rbray89... well then, literally, this game will have become absolutely epic.

Edited April 26, 2015 by Proot

[John FX]

Some more graphical glitches. Seemed fine initially but glitched with altitude. Looked nice until that point though.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Depending on view angle I either get perfect, grey bar at top, or sky turns white. Most noticable in LKO.

Also at further distance all ground/cloud detail is lost. Orbiting Minmus for example.

Edited April 26, 2015 by John FX

[blackrack]

Some more graphical glitches. Seemed fine initially but glitched with altitude. Looked nice until that point though.

http://imgur.com/a/iyuF1

Depending on view angle I either get perfect, grey bar at top, or sky turns white. Most noticable in LKO.

Also at further distance all ground/cloud detail is lost. Orbiting Minmus for example.

This looks pretty bad indeed. This may have been a really bad idea after all...

Do you mind testing without any other mods? Just to be sure.

[John FX]

This looks pretty bad indeed. This may have been a really bad idea after all...

Do you mind testing without any other mods? Just to be sure.

Will do, I've updated the album with some more images. I managed to get the invisible kerbin as well.

[blackrack]

After hours of fiddling I finally got the sun's reflection working like it should with the water.

(compare it with the previous image http://i.imgur.com/tvU2Opw.jpg)

Feels good man, looks like I'll be dropping this in KSP soon.

Edited:

Will do, I've updated the album with some more images. I managed to get the invisible kerbin as well.

I couldn't find any new images in the album.

[The-Bean]

That water looks amazing. I was going to ask the other day if anything could be done about the vanilla water but I didn't want to be a bother.

What other sorts of graphics effects are possible, in theory? Godrays would be awesome.

[Gaalidas]

Holy expletives... that's amazing.

[blackrack]

That water looks amazing. I was going to ask the other day if anything could be done about the vanilla water but I didn't want to be a bother.

What other sorts of graphics effects are possible, in theory? Godrays would be awesome.

Godrays are actually possible too with the postprocessing shader I'm using, I just couldn't get them working. But I will try again another day.

They should look like this http://www-evasion.imag.fr/people/Eric.Bruneton/images/atmo.png (second image)

[John FX]

I couldn't find any new images in the album.

You may need to refresh your page. There should be 15 images, the ones after the floating craft are the newer ones, they are all in time order.

Here is a fresh stock install

Edited April 26, 2015 by John FX

[blackrack]

You may need to refresh your page. There should be 15 images, the ones after the floating craft are the newer ones, they are all in time order.

Here is a fresh stock install

http://i.imgur.com/DCzufbA.png

Is this that bug where the blue sphere follows your ship around no matter where the planet actually is?

[Mothership1202]

Well I know the first mod I'm downloading as soon as I finish building my PC in a few weeks. This is absolutely beautiful

[John FX]

Is this that bug where the blue sphere follows your ship around no matter where the planet actually is?

Yes, that's the one. I have not reproduced the white wall or floating launch supports yet though.

[HerrGeneral]

Honestly I feel like the fog/haze is still too thick- it may just be because I'm used to vanilla KSP's "no haze at all" and I'm able to see so much farther, but with the haze it feels like I'm flying through a cloud bank- and from orbit it looks like the entire planet is covered by an ocean where the mountains stick out like islands. What does it look like if you turn it down?

[John FX]

Honestly I feel like the fog/haze is still too thick- it may just be because I'm used to vanilla KSP's "no haze at all" and I'm able to see so much farther, but with the haze it feels like I'm flying through a cloud bank- and from orbit it looks like the entire planet is covered by an ocean where the mountains stick out like islands. What does it look like if you turn it down?

My preference would be for it to keep the look it has now from ground level (I really like the layers of pastel mountains) but almost no effect from orbit. I agree that the air looks like water from orbit, the effect seems too strong but as you say, maybe I am used to the stock air which is invisible.