[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

[Poodmund]

@blackrack, is the Extinction Tint always a turquoise green/blue no matter what textures you export from Proland and what values you specify in the configs under m_betaR = #,#,#?

Currently working on setting up Sarnus and with a turquoise extinction is looks a bit funky.

[blackrack]

17 minutes ago, Poodmund said:

@blackrack, is the Extinction Tint always a turquoise green/blue no matter what textures you export from Proland and what values you specify in the configs under m_betaR = #,#,#?

Currently working on setting up Sarnus and with a turquoise extinction is looks a bit funky.

Extinction tint is the same as the sunset color, which tends to be the opposite of betaR at default atmosphere thickness. You can try giving the extinction tint a negative value, I did something similar once for Duna.

[purpleivan]

I'd like to report an issue that I'm seeing with my current install of the game, which is KSP v1.1 with the latest version of Scatterer 0.0244.zip from Spacedock.

The issue is that in orbit of planets with atmospheres (tested with Kerbin and Duna) part of the skybox appears slightly brighter than the rest. The brighter area, takes the form of what appears to be a large rectangular region, taller than the screen, with the corner of which visible if the camera is swung round towards the poles (assuming an equatorial orbit).

The issue is very subtle and is not clearly visible in this image against the bright background of the forum page, but when viewed full screen, the bright region extends from the left side of the image to almost halfway to the left side of the Hitchiker can in the center.

Some information on this issue:

• This bright area gradually creeps across the skybox, so it's not a break in continuity of the skybox textures
• This artifact only occurred after updating to KSP v1.1 and the 1.1 compatible version of Scatterer
• The artifact seems to be less apparent the higher the orbit and in the case of Kerbin seems to disappear at around 110 - 115km, with the screen always brighter on the same side of the screen as the planet
• My PC is a Windows 7 setup with a GTX 670 graphics card and using DirectX 11
• The issue occurs with Scatterer being the only mod installed

This isn't a really big issue as the artifact is very subtle, but it does break the illusion of the skybox when in lower orbits. Hopefully this isn't a previously reported issue, I did take a look through the postings after the release of KSP 1.1 and didn't see anything similar.

[Poodmund]

1 hour ago, blackrack said:

Extinction tint is the same as the sunset color, which tends to be the opposite of betaR at default atmosphere thickness. You can try giving the extinction tint a negative value, I did something similar once for Duna.

Yep, that worked perfectly. Thanks.

[MrMeeb]

Read back the last couple pages and can't seem to find anything about this - 

I've been having some problems with atmosphere behavior when adjusting FOV (Alt - Mousewheel). As you can see, the atmosphere zooms in with it, causing it to no longer be in alignment with the planet

However, it turns out it wasn't just to do with FOV, as now it seems to happen when looking directly at the planet - here's Laythe at 80km. It does go away with a reload in both cases tho. 

[Rainstorm440]

9 hours ago, Berlin said:

At the moment, no.  He's working on it. 

Ok. I'll just play with the early version. Thank you.

[atomontage]

I can confirm that I'm also getting what @purpleivan has described (probably not?). It looks like a static camera-bound atmospheric shader. It moves with the camera. As far as I encountered this several times, it may happen when I fly from Kerbin to the Mun. I burn to the Mun, then once I get an encounter I go to the map view and start warping. Once I'm close to the SOI change I disable the map view while the warp is throttling - then I get this issue. Reloading the scene helps.

[Wolves_Hero]

Awesome mod, I got pretty nice sun eclipse like real life.

Total eclipse not dark enough like real life always dark when total eclipse.

Edited April 24, 2016 by Wolves_Hero

[Poodmund]

@blackrack I would just like to say thank you so much for your continued work.

Firstly, since the merge of EVE-Overhaul into the main branch it was no longer easily possible to create a thick fuzzy atmospheric glow around celestial bodies. With your addition of the experimentalAtmoScale and skyextinctionGroundFade variables it is now again easy to create a thick atmosphere like effect. I can finally do a Titan like atmosphere effect without spamming cloud layers in EVE. 

Secondly, as I know that you were working on shadow casting onto planetary rings I am going to leave this screenshot here that is completely untouched apart from the shadow being applied in Photoshop. I hope that you agree that it really transforms the image into a believable like image and hope that it will make it into Scatterer some day.

 

[sDaZe]

15 minutes ago, Poodmund said:

 

 

Dude.. Omgg

[blackrack]

11 hours ago, MrMeeb said:

Read back the last couple pages and can't seem to find anything about this - 

I've been having some problems with atmosphere behavior when adjusting FOV (Alt - Mousewheel). As you can see, the atmosphere zooms in with it, causing it to no longer be in alignment with the planet

However, it turns out it wasn't just to do with FOV, as now it seems to happen when looking directly at the planet - here's Laythe at 80km. It does go away with a reload in both cases tho. 

6 hours ago, atomontage said:

I can confirm that I'm also getting what @purpleivan has described (probably not?). It looks like a static camera-bound atmospheric shader. It moves with the camera. As far as I encountered this several times, it may happen when I fly from Kerbin to the Mun. I burn to the Mun, then once I get an encounter I go to the map view and start warping. Once I'm close to the SOI change I disable the map view while the warp is throttling - then I get this issue. Reloading the scene helps.

Please confirm if this goes away or not if you press rebuild ocean in the UI, ocean settings section, just to check if it's related to the other issue.

 

19 minutes ago, Poodmund said:

@blackrack I would just like to say thank you so much for your continued work.

Firstly, since the merge of EVE-Overhaul into the main branch it was no longer easily possible to create a thick fuzzy atmospheric glow around celestial bodies. With your addition of the experimentalAtmoScale and skyextinctionGroundFade variables it is now again easy to create a thick atmosphere like effect. I can finally do a Titan like atmosphere effect without spamming cloud layers in EVE. 

Secondly, as I know that you were working on shadow casting onto planetary rings I am going to leave this screenshot here that is completely untouched apart from the shadow being applied in Photoshop. I hope that you agree that it really transforms the image into a believable like image and hope that it will make it into Scatterer some day.

 

Thanks. For titan-like atmospheres you can also try playing with the extinctionScatterIntensity setting, it gives mixed results but might be cool, another trick (which I might have mentioned before) is you can generate a thicker looking atmo, by multiplying all the betaR components by 2x or 3x in the config tool, I got a good Venus-like look from it once.

Also, in the first image, I'm not sure but it looks like the rings might be drawing between the extinction layer and the atmo color layer, since EVE recently bumped up it's renderqueue by +1 and I bumped up the atmo's renderqueue to match it's totally possible, I'll check it when I can, for reference, here's how the rings looked last time I fixed them for 1.0.5 http://i.imgur.com/r82RziF.png

I expect I'm going to be busy for a while now, but when I get back to working on the mod I'm also planning to have the ring's shadow cast on the planet, which will be even cooler (but might require some orbit/ring tilt for full effect) 

Edited April 24, 2016 by blackrack

[dryer_lint]

Hello! I'm having an issue with scatterer where there are big pixelated circles in the sky. It mostly happens during nighttime, but is also visible in the day.

The sky and ocean look fantastic in the daytime, but these circles are really messing it up, obviously

Any idea as to what's going on?

[atomontage]

Hey @blackrack, I've managed to reproduce the issue. It seems it only happens if I warp from LKO directly from the map screen to boundaries of, um, loading distance (160km+) and beyond. Like when you burn from LKO straight to the Mun and then simply warp after you finished the burn.

The issue is not clearly visible, but sometimes the shader is blue. I guess it matters from which side of the Kerbin I did warp, like if it was dark or light.

Screenshot (watch the left side):
 

This was shot at ~~1,000km above the Kerbin right after leaving the load distance during warp from the map view.

I've rebuilt the ocean as you asked. It helped. Everything was ok after rebuilding.

upd: found another issue:



This happened after quickloading from being close to the Kerbin (like 90km) to the surface of the Mun. Rebuilding the ocean did not help.
Quickloading just in place like hitting f5 then holding f9 right away does not cause the issue. I guess it has something to do with the drawing distance I mentioned in the first issue.

Anyways thanks for the great mod!  Keep rocking.

Edited April 24, 2016 by atomontage
added 2nd issue

[sDaZe]

The eclipse looks weird, doesn't it? 

[rbray89]

4 hours ago, blackrack said:

Please confirm if this goes away or not if you press rebuild ocean in the UI, ocean settings section, just to check if it's related to the other issue.

 

Thanks. For titan-like atmospheres you can also try playing with the extinctionScatterIntensity setting, it gives mixed results but might be cool, another trick (which I might have mentioned before) is you can generate a thicker looking atmo, by multiplying all the betaR components by 2x or 3x in the config tool, I got a good Venus-like look from it once.

Also, in the first image, I'm not sure but it looks like the rings might be drawing between the extinction layer and the atmo color layer, since EVE recently bumped up it's renderqueue by +1 and I bumped up the atmo's renderqueue to match it's totally possible, I'll check it when I can, for reference, here's how the rings looked last time I fixed them for 1.0.5 http://i.imgur.com/r82RziF.png

I expect I'm going to be busy for a while now, but when I get back to working on the mod I'm also planning to have the ring's shadow cast on the planet, which will be even cooler (but might require some orbit/ring tilt for full effect) 

Ended up bumping the render queue for scaled to transparent-1 as there was a weird issue when on Laythe, the clouds on jool would dissapear. Seems as though something was writing to the depth buffer in the transparent queue.

[purpleivan]

5 hours ago, blackrack said:

Please confirm if this goes away or not if you press rebuild ocean in the UI, ocean settings section, just to check if it's related to the other issue.

When I rebuild ocean the artifact disappears for a fraction of a second, then returns, so unfortunately it's not a fix, but I hope the information is useful.

[atomontage]

30 minutes ago, purpleivan said:

When I rebuild ocean the artifact disappears for a fraction of a second, then returns, so unfortunately it's not a fix, but I hope the information is useful.

I guess we have different issues then.

[blackrack]

6 hours ago, sDaZe said:

The eclipse looks weird, doesn't it? 

You're using both the scatterer and EVE eclipses, disable one of them.

9 hours ago, dryer_lint said:

Hello! I'm having an issue with scatterer where there are big pixelated circles in the sky. It mostly happens during nighttime, but is also visible in the day.

The sky and ocean look fantastic in the daytime, but these circles are really messing it up, obviously

Any idea as to what's going on?

This has something to do with anisotropic filtering, try changing options from your driver. In older versions of the mod this used to happen all the time and had a dedicated option for it.

6 hours ago, atomontage said:

Hey @blackrack, I've managed to reproduce the issue. It seems it only happens if I warp from LKO directly from the map screen to boundaries of, um, loading distance (160km+) and beyond. Like when you burn from LKO straight to the Mun and then simply warp after you finished the burn.

The issue is not clearly visible, but sometimes the shader is blue. I guess it matters from which side of the Kerbin I did warp, like if it was dark or light.

Screenshot (watch the left side):

This was shot at ~~1,000km above the Kerbin right after leaving the load distance during warp from the map view.

I've rebuilt the ocean as you asked. It helped. Everything was ok after rebuilding.

upd: found another issue:

This happened after quickloading from being close to the Kerbin (like 90km) to the surface of the Mun. Rebuilding the ocean did not help.
Quickloading just in place like hitting f5 then holding f9 right away does not cause the issue. I guess it has something to do with the drawing distance I mentioned in the first issue.

Anyways thanks for the great mod!  Keep rocking.

Alright I'll check it out.

[Guardsman111]

I hope this hasn't already been reported, but I'm having this issue when about 70'000 at kerbin:

 

Its playable, but very weird and I was wondering if there was a fix or whether I could provide info so you can work on a fix  It appears to be stuck to the camera, so if I move the camera, the clouded bit moves with it.

[Poodmund]

7 minutes ago, Guardsman111 said:

I hope this hasn't already been reported, but I'm having this issue when about 70'000 at kerbin:

*snip*

Its playable, but very weird and I was wondering if there was a fix or whether I could provide info so you can work on a fix  It appears to be stuck to the camera, so if I move the camera, the clouded bit moves with it.

Did you switch to this vessel from another vessel in orbit?

[Bengtsson1]

Looks amazing but its too realistic for my pc.

[Guardsman111]

55 minutes ago, Poodmund said:

Did you switch to this vessel from another vessel in orbit?

No, launched it, used map view to fly from probably 40'000 to a stable orbit of 70'000 - 400'000. this image is taken halfway between that.

[dryer_lint]

3 hours ago, blackrack said:

This has something to do with anisotropic filtering, try changing options from your driver. In older versions of the mod this used to happen all the time and had a dedicated option for it.

Didn't work unfortunately :/

I enabled 4x filtering from the card's graphics options and it's still the same. I have an integrated card but the rest of the computer is pretty decent.

[donkeystealing]

Is it recommended to use manual install or CKAN install?

[MrMeeb]

20 hours ago, blackrack said:

Please confirm if this goes away or not if you press rebuild ocean in the UI, ocean settings section, just to check if it's related to the other issue.

Sorry for the slow reply, but yes, rebuilding the ocean does solve the atmosphere issue