[1.12.x] Waterfall - a framework for continuous, mesh-driven engine effects (October 9)

[TanoPrime]

Having a problem with Waterfall, reproducible so far only with the Mammoth engine - during the first part of ascent the plume becomes visible through the craft, and later the plume disappears completely.

See video for details: https://imgur.com/BKxUuSm

Edited June 17, 2022 by TanoPrime

[Random Annoying Guy]

Disabling distortion does nothing

[TeeGee]

Wonderful mod! However I've been having an issue with none of the RCS jets showing a plume at all - only the light source appears. The Vernor engine shows correctly. Does anyone know how to fix this issue? I've tried going to an earlier waterfall and stock config version but nothing seems to work.

[Knight of St John]

On 5/13/2022 at 2:35 AM, Fossilized said:

Hello, I'm having an issue with my plume that's built on waterfall.

During sunset, at an instantaneous time that I assume the game registers as night, the plume disappears. It reappears in the day but instantly vanishes only during the night.

How do I fix this?

On 6/13/2022 at 3:13 PM, TanoPrime said:

Having a problem with Waterfall, reproducible so far only with the Mammoth engine - during the first part of ascent the plume becomes visible through the craft, and later the plume disappears completely.

See video for details: https://imgur.com/BKxUuSm

Both of these are bugs in one of the shaders that waterfall uses.
In the shortly upcoming update, they will be fixed.
 

On 3/20/2022 at 7:22 PM, lemon cup said:

Question for anyone who knows about the setting up Controllers, specifically "Engine Event" controllers:

I would like to link a series of Effects to play when an engine flames out, Basically, the end result I am looking for is that a booster engine continues to look like it is still "spewing" after burnout - but I cannot get the controller to trigger.  Here is how I wrote the Controller:

I placed it in the config and it displays properly in the in-game editor. But oddly, when I go to edit the Controller in game, it shows that it has defaulted to be linked to "Ignition" instead of "Flameout" even though it is specified in the CONTROLLER setting. However, even manually switching it over to "Flameout" and then running the engine to fuel-depletion, it still does not trigger the effects. 

ALSO: smaller issue but still odd:
when specifying the "Duration" of an Engine Event Controller, I have found that (even though the wiki said it is time measured in seconds) the Controller seems to be using some different unit of time. For example, in the above CONTROLLER, you can see I wrote 600. That should indicate 600 seconds, but actually in-game this starts and stops in the span of about 30 seconds. If I were to put a "30" in the Duration block, the animation would only last a second or two. This happens no matter how I scale the curve.

@Knight of St John @Zorg Asking the pros 

EDIT: Pinging @Knight of St John and @Zorg again just to be sure the mystery is real. Feel free to berate me as you see fit.

I believe that these issues will also be dealt with in the coming update, though I was not responsible for the fix.
I guess you can test it when the update arrives.

 

On 7/15/2022 at 6:49 PM, TeeGee said:

Wonderful mod! However I've been having an issue with none of the RCS jets showing a plume at all - only the light source appears. The Vernor engine shows correctly. Does anyone know how to fix this issue? I've tried going to an earlier waterfall and stock config version but nothing seems to work.

same story here. Will be fixed in the update.

Edited July 30, 2022 by Knight of St John

[Knight of St John]

On 6/12/2022 at 6:32 PM, [ Jeremy ] said:

Moving on, I've been trying to get a custom mesh working for an engine I'm working on, but I can't seem to get the full mesh to display in-game. Been trying to use the bundled meshes as an example but it's just not clicking in my head at the moment. See screenshots below for the progress I have at the moment. Any help would be really appreciated!

Using a custom mesh would certainly be possible. you'll have to import it into unity to test them in combo with the shaders waterfall provides.
Though, there is also something to be said for making a mesh generator script in unity itself that generates the vertices and triangles where you want them.

For both these option, I think your best bet is to use the additive dynamic shader, but i'd have to check if the code can work with non-cylindrical meshes.

Furthermore: if you are comfortable working with shaderlab, it's also possible to write a custom shader that uses the existing cyllindrical mesh (used by the additive dynamic shader), and deform the mesh in the vertex shader pass.
Any of these options would be a possible route for you.

 

On 6/12/2022 at 6:32 PM, [ Jeremy ] said:

I also have a question regarding how the face culling works for the deform meshes. Having read the discussion here and the documentation on the GitHub, I gather that most people mainly use the simple cylinder mesh to get good plumes from all angles, especially looking from straight behind, but I wonder if there's a way to enable that kind of behavior on the deform meshes as well, as being able to better control the shape of the plume is something that sounds really appealing.
It might be possible but I haven't found it yet, once again if there's something I missed do tell.

Using the older additive dynamic shaders, it is rather finicky to get them to look decent from extreme angles (like straight behind) but we've found a few ways of dealing with this in our plume designs.
However, these tricks aren't really usefull for the distortion effect, so we're kinda stuck with what we've got there.

Not to long ago, some new volumetric shaders were added that look good from all angles (because they use a ray-march-like algorithm), so I've been using those in my more recent designs.
I've been thinking about maybe doing something similar for the distortion shader, but that's probably a major time investment for me. So, not sure if I'll be doing that.
 

[Nertea]

Waterfall 0.9.0

• Significant stack of performance updates that should increase performane significantly on ships/templates with lots of effects (big thanks to @Al2Me6, @DRVeyl, @JonnyOThan)
• Fixes to Additive Volumetric shader including fix for atmosphere sorting at night sans scatterer

[dok_377]

Can confirm, it almost doubled the framerate with 56 Rapiers in the scene when they're not running. 

not running / full throttle, closed cycle / full throttle, open cycle

[physius]

I'm not sure if it had anything to do with the latest update, but the plume from my SRBs are constantly on even before launch. How can I fix this?

[SpaceFace545]

52 minutes ago, physius said:

I'm not sure if it had anything to do with the latest update, but the plume from my SRBs are constantly on even before launch. How can I fix this?

are you using SRBWE? If so it isn't compatible with the latest waterfall update right now

[BezKartuza]

Please somebody!
I use ReStock+
There engines LV-TX87 "Bobcat", LV-T91 "Cheetah" do not have a waterfall.
Very useful engines. Especially the Cheetah.
Does anyone know how to tie waterfall to these engines from - "Stock Waterfall Effects"?

[ProCrast]

@BezKartuzaDo you have this instaled ? : https://github.com/post-kerbin-mining-corporation/WaterfallRestock/releases/tag/0.2.3

 

Edited August 4, 2022 by ProCrast

[BezKartuza]

1 hour ago, ProCrast said:

Do you have this instaled ? : https://github.com/post-kerbin-mining-corporation/WaterfallRestock/releases/tag/0.2.3

Yes.
All other engines have a modified look and waterfall effect. These two engines look like stock.

[GuessingEveryDay]

2 hours ago, BezKartuza said:

Yes.
All other engines have a modified look and waterfall effect. These two engines look like stock.

What you can do, is download Stock Waterfall Effects, this takes care of the plumes for Cheetah and Bobcat, while also giving you plumes for the jet engines.

[BezKartuza]

36 minutes ago, GuessingEveryDay said:

What you can do, is download Stock Waterfall Effects, this takes care of the plumes for Cheetah and Bobcat, while also giving you plumes for the jet engines.

Thank you.

I thought it was more difficult, because in "WaterfallRestock" there is no waterfall for these two engines.
And therefore "WaterfallRestock" and "Stock Waterfall Effects" would not work well together. (Maybe my logic is broken)
BUT Everything seems to be working as it should.

[NovaRaptorTV]

For Waterfall-Restock, I am still seeing the smoke from the engines as if they are in the stock game still. Is there a way to remove the smoke so it is more like waterfall in RO/RP-1 or Stock Waterfall Effects?

[BezKartuza]

Some engines have waterfall issues. Perhaps this is somehow influenced by "Scatterer".

Spoiler

Ant:

Terrier:

Bobcat:

Spark is same. There's just no screenshot.

Scatterer 0.0835 ; DistantObject-2.1.1.9 ; Environmental_Visual_Enhancements_Redux-1.11.6.1 ; Waterfall_0_9_0 ; WaterfallRestock_0_2_3 ;  StockWaterfallEffects_0_6_3 ; RestockPlus-1.4.3 ; B9PartSwitch_v2.20.0 ; ModuleManager-4.2.2 ; Spectra-1.6.5 ; Camera_Tools_continued-1.22.0 ; TextureReplacer-4.5.3

[Rodger]

14 hours ago, BezKartuza said:

Some engines have waterfall issues. Perhaps this is somehow influenced by "Scatterer".

Scatterer 0.0835 ; DistantObject-2.1.1.9 ; Environmental_Visual_Enhancements_Redux-1.11.6.1 ; Waterfall_0_9_0 ; WaterfallRestock_0_2_3 ;  StockWaterfallEffects_0_6_3 ; RestockPlus-1.4.3 ; B9PartSwitch_v2.20.0 ; ModuleManager-4.2.2 ; Spectra-1.6.5 ; Camera_Tools_continued-1.22.0 ; TextureReplacer-4.5.3

Check Scatterer settings for 'temporal antialising' and turn it off if it's on.

[BezKartuza]

11 hours ago, Rodger said:

Check Scatterer settings for 'temporal antialising' and turn it off if it's on.

Thank you. Helped!

[darthvader15001]

Could you add smoke trails?

[scaiper]

After update to 0.9.0 still having an issue with some engines and RCS thrusters - plumes are visible through other parts. Enabling anti-aliasing as workaround is not helping either.

[GuessingEveryDay]

8 hours ago, darthvader15001 said:

Could you add smoke trails?

It is possible, but would use too many resources, RealPlume is the best for smoke still.

[darthvader15001]

5 hours ago, GuessingEveryDay said:

It is possible, but would use too many resources, RealPlume is the best for smoke still.

But waterfall overrides realpumes

[Rodger]

2 hours ago, darthvader15001 said:

But waterfall overrides realpumes

Not intrinsically, it's up to the plume authors to override other plumes with specific MM patching. You could make a plume that uses both waterfall and RealPlume smoke at once.

[darthvader15001]

How?

[Zelda]

8 hours ago, darthvader15001 said:

How?

Look at SWE (SRB Waterfall Effects) for inspiration, as that's what they do.

Edit: Looking at that thread, they are actually in the process of removing RealPlume to help increase performance, so take that as you will.

Edited August 8, 2022 by Zelda