[1.9-1.12.x] EVE-Redux: Performance-enhanced EVE + maintenance (v1.11.7.1 - 09/09/2022)

[thepres1s_Stuff]

2 hours ago, blackrack said:

Apart from seeing snow particles (which this can't do) snowfall just looks like thick fog, and it can do that.

We can only dream if the KSC and any craft could get wet or have snow on them.

Edit: we can only dream about rain and snow particles

Edited October 17, 2022 by thepres1s_Stuff
deleted first sentence because of things

[Ilya_G]

47 minutes ago, thepres1s_Stuff said:

We can only dream if the KSC and any craft could get wet or have snow on them.

It is possible to implement this, but it is unlikely in this mod

Idea: You can add the mechanics of changing the coefficient of adhesion to the surface (technically, this already exists) and the coefficient of resistance to movement (if you drive into snow or into a deep puddle, then the resistance to movement will increase)

But, as I said, it is unlikely that this will be implemented in this mod (at the moment, everyone is waiting for the release of a new version of the mod with volumetric clouds, which the author still cannot finish)

On 5/16/2022 at 9:14 AM, SpaceCube2000 said:

What is the feasibility of adding lightning effects to the clouds? Like this: 

 

It is easy to implement simple weather effects (particles of snow, rain, thunderstorm effects (as in the picture)), as you and the creator of the mod himself said. But not in the first version

It's interesting to see a bunch of Kerbal Weather Project and this mod

 

[InfoTheGamer]

Honestly, the volumetrics are presentable and realistic as they stand in the teaser images, and you've outdone yourself again @blackrack. When it comes time to it, how will the pipeline work for updating to KSRSS/RSS; if the devs are already communicating with you forget I asked this question. Again, congrats on your inspiring work and I hope you have a good day

[pvt.Pile]

Jees, would you PLEASE make a beta release so we all could test|debug|whatnot those ultra-cool clouds for ya already?!?!?!?

Edited October 17, 2022 by pvt.Pile
typo

[Ilya_G]

1 hour ago, pvt.Pile said:

Jees, would you PLEASE make a beta release so we all could test|debug|whatnot those ultra-cool clouds for ya already?!?!?!?

If you want to address a message to someone, it is best to mention this person through " @ ". This makes it more likely that a person will see your message.

For example @pvt.Pile

[blackrack]

Some quick mist/fog to test the godrays more in depth. I've implemented godrays separately 4 times at this point, but yeah I always loved them:

3 hours ago, pvt.Pile said:

Jees, would you PLEASE make a beta release so we all could test|debug|whatnot those ultra-cool clouds for ya already?!?!?!?

Patience

3 hours ago, InfoTheGamer said:

Honestly, the volumetrics are presentable and realistic as they stand in the teaser images, and you've outdone yourself again @blackrack. When it comes time to it, how will the pipeline work for updating to KSRSS/RSS; if the devs are already communicating with you forget I asked this question. Again, congrats on your inspiring work and I hope you have a good day

There will be some work to do for mod devs but I will have documentation. I think RSS may run slower due to the need for higher resolution textures, and also needing to raymarch longer distances to the horizon, although there is adaptive raymarching but remains to be seen how well it will work for RSS scale.

[WarriorSabe]

8 hours ago, blackrack said:

Apart from seeing snow particles (which this can't do) snowfall just looks like thick fog, and it can do that.

Yeah, I was mostly just thinking the fog might not work as well for snow, wasn't sure. But, on the topic of particles: how hard would it be to add a key to optionally render some kind of particle effect just nearby when within the given volumetrics, minecraft-style?

[blackrack]

Just now, WarriorSabe said:

Yeah, I was mostly just thinking the fog might not work as well for snow, wasn't sure. But, on the topic of particles: how hard would it be to add a key to optionally render some kind of particle effect just nearby when within the given volumetrics, minecraft-style?

Not hard at all, maybe after the first release though. Could also have the particles being "lightable" by sun and/or craft lights for added immersion.

[SpaceCube2000]

34 minutes ago, blackrack said:

Some quick mist/fog to test the godrays more in depth. I've implemented godrays separately 4 times at this point, but yeah I always loved them:

Patience

There will be some work to do for mod devs but I will have documentation. I think RSS may run slower due to the need for higher resolution textures, and also needing to raymarch longer distances to the horizon, although there is adaptive raymarching but remains to be seen how well it will work for RSS scale.

Overall, how much do you expect the volumetric clouds to impact performance? I am expecting a pretty precipitous decline in frame rates.

[blackrack]

2 minutes ago, SpaceCube2000 said:

Overall, how much do you expect the volumetric clouds to impact performance? I am expecting a pretty precipitous decline in frame rates.

In those screenshots I'm getting 120 fps at 1440p on an 2080 super and i5 12400f (from low altitude / near ocean level with 2 cloud layers and a fog layer). In the other screenshots when flying between the two cloud layers I was getting 70-80 fps. Overall the second cloud layer is a drag on performance and may not be in the final release.

In earlier rounds of testing with 1 volumetric layer + Parallax 2 + Scatterer I was getting 80 fps. The quality can be lowered further to get better performance and additional layers can be dropped. When I started developing this my performance goal was to get good performance at 1080p on a gtx 1060 with at least 1 layer.

Overall the performance hit isn't as bad as you think but you'll still need a decent mid-range GPU.

[WarriorSabe]

48 minutes ago, blackrack said:

Some quick mist/fog to test the godrays more in depth. I've implemented godrays separately 4 times at this point, but yeah I always loved them:

Patience

There will be some work to do for mod devs but I will have documentation. I think RSS may run slower due to the need for higher resolution textures, and also needing to raymarch longer distances to the horizon, although there is adaptive raymarching but remains to be seen how well it will work for RSS scale.

Oh wow I just realized I missed this as I was typing my last comment, that looks absolutely amazing

4 minutes ago, blackrack said:

In those screenshots I'm getting 120 fps at 1440p on an 2080 super and i5 12400f (from low altitude / near ocean level with 2 cloud layers and a fog layer). In the other screenshots when flying between the two cloud layers I was getting 70-80 fps. Overall the second cloud layer is a drag on performance and may not be in the final release.

In earlier rounds of testing with 1 volumetric layer + Parallax 2 + Scatterer I was getting 80 fps. The quality can be lowered further to get better performance and additional layers can be dropped. When I started developing this my performance goal was to get good performance at 1080p on a gtx 1060 with at least 1 layer.

Overall the performance hit isn't as bad as you think but you'll still need a decent mid-range GPU.

Oh and what do you get with the old EVE on the same hardware? For easier extrapolation to how it might be on other systems

[blackrack]

8 minutes ago, WarriorSabe said:

Oh wow I just realized I missed this as I was typing my last comment, that looks absolutely amazing

Oh and what do you get with the old EVE on the same hardware? For easier extrapolation to how it might be on other systems

I haven't tested that in a while but somewhere around 200-300 fps iirc

Edited October 17, 2022 by blackrack

[WarriorSabe]

9 minutes ago, blackrack said:

I haven't tested that in a while but somewhere around 200-300 fps iirc

So 2-4x heavier, assuming EVE was the bottleneck before. That's, maybe workable for me on this, guess we'll have to see. It'll probably at least not crash if I keep the rest light, which is enough for development. Can't wait to try this out!

[pingopete]

1 hour ago, blackrack said:

Some quick mist/fog to test the godrays more in depth. I've implemented godrays separately 4 times at this point, but yeah I always loved them:

Patience

There will be some work to do for mod devs but I will have documentation. I think RSS may run slower due to the need for higher resolution textures, and also needing to raymarch longer distances to the horizon, although there is adaptive raymarching but remains to be seen how well it will work for RSS scale.

Not gonna lie, as soon as this goes public I was gonna try loading it into RSS, I guess RSS is at my core and I can't help striving to pull visual mods into Earth. I had was wondering about the performance too, as typically doing this results in an equivalent performance hit, but having seen you images it looks like a ton of clouds already being rendered to beyond the horizon with great performance!

Quick question: I may have seen a screen shot way back but wasn't sure if it was PQS or SS, just wondering if this method for volumetric rendering can pass over into ScaledSpace too while remaining 3d?

Again, needless to say, amazing work dude

[Socowez]

2 hours ago, blackrack said:

Some quick mist/fog to test the godrays more in depth. I've implemented godrays separately 4 times at this point, but yeah I always loved them:

Patience

There will be some work to do for mod devs but I will have documentation. I think RSS may run slower due to the need for higher resolution textures, and also needing to raymarch longer distances to the horizon, although there is adaptive raymarching but remains to be seen how well it will work for RSS scale.

Do the clouds look good at night? I was thinking you might still be working out a few kinks sinse you've only posted day screenshots. Or it could just be that they're much easier to see in the day 

[blackrack]

8 hours ago, pingopete said:

Not gonna lie, as soon as this goes public I was gonna try loading it into RSS, I guess RSS is at my core and I can't help striving to pull visual mods into Earth. I had was wondering about the performance too, as typically doing this results in an equivalent performance hit, but having seen you images it looks like a ton of clouds already being rendered to beyond the horizon with great performance!

Quick question: I may have seen a screen shot way back but wasn't sure if it was PQS or SS, just wondering if this method for volumetric rendering can pass over into ScaledSpace too while remaining 3d?

Again, needless to say, amazing work dude

Thanks. Right now the view from orbit is still the weakest part, and while it has improved from the last time I showed screenshots I still don't have enough variety in noise/shapes/shading yet to make it look good. In addition the temporal upscaling starts to deteriorate in quality from orbit showing increased artifacts and blurring.

So it can do 3d in scaledSpace and the transition altitudes to 2d are going to be configurable but for now I'm going to go with a relatively early transition due to the above issues.

7 hours ago, Socowez said:

Do the clouds look good at night? I was thinking you might still be working out a few kinks sinse you've only posted day screenshots. Or it could just be that they're much easier to see in the day 

At the moment clouds at night are still pitch black. They don't look good with a uniform "ambient" light and need a directional light. My goal is to have them be lit by the mun or a second body at some point for a convincing night look.

[WarriorSabe]

13 hours ago, blackrack said:

At the moment clouds at night are still pitch black. They don't look good with a uniform "ambient" light and need a directional light. My goal is to have them be lit by the mun or a second body at some point for a convincing night look.

Would multiple secondary lights be a thing, like with Scatterer? I imagine that would get expensive quite fast, but I was thinking about worlds with multiple large moons (or multiple suns, for that matter), and those might want that. A stock example might be Laythe, getting Joolshine and Vall/Tyloshine.

Also, bit more of niche thing, but what the possibility of using the world they're applied to as the secondary light; for example for light pollution from cities on Kerbin or thermal glow from a lava planet (uniform lighting might be a poorer approximation of that but also surely way easier than local individual sources).

[blackrack]

40 minutes ago, WarriorSabe said:

Would multiple secondary lights be a thing, like with Scatterer? I imagine that would get expensive quite fast, but I was thinking about worlds with multiple large moons (or multiple suns, for that matter), and those might want that. A stock example might be Laythe, getting Joolshine and Vall/Tyloshine.

Also, bit more of niche thing, but what the possibility of using the world they're applied to as the secondary light; for example for light pollution from cities on Kerbin or thermal glow from a lava planet (uniform lighting might be a poorer approximation of that but also surely way easier than local individual sources).

Yeah I was thinking about scatterer's secondary lights but it can't do planetshine yet, so just additional suns. Additional lights will nearly double the performance hit as at every point raymarched a secondary raymarch needs to be done towards the light source. I was thinking of dropping the quality of secondary lights or trying to find some other approximation. Maybe even only sample the light currently shining the brightest, that way it cycles between different lights as needed, and still sample the sky and scattering contributions for all lights to help blend it.

For using the world itself as light source it'd probably "just work" if there is support for multiple lights just like in scatterer where people put an atmo on the sun and make it shine on itself.

Also, point lights with no secondary raymarch seem to work and look ok from what I've seen in other games (typically used with lightning on the clouds). I might try that and see how they look (I plan to try lightning at some point), if they work ok maybe I'll consider using it for custom placeable lights or have other light approximations like a global gradient instead of a totally uniform light.

Edited October 18, 2022 by blackrack

[N9 Gaming]

On 10/16/2022 at 7:07 AM, blackrack said:

Multiple layers + Inter-cloud shadows (note that the layer shapes are for testing and not final)

 

Prototype rain

Rain and other thin clouds/fog naturally get godrays on them when using inter-layer shadows

KSC during a bad day:

 

Oh my Kraken this is the best thing I ever seen in this game - words don't describe the immersion something like this adds to the experience. I am beyond excited to see progress like this, well done thank you for working on this (:

[KSACheese]

Loving these recent updates, blackrack. Keep up the fantastic work! I'm planning a whole save with a more dramatic focus on atmospheric flight in anticipation for this mod. Extremely excited for release!

[pingopete]

On 10/18/2022 at 3:09 AM, blackrack said:

Thanks. Right now the view from orbit is still the weakest part, and while it has improved from the last time I showed screenshots I still don't have enough variety in noise/shapes/shading yet to make it look good. In addition the temporal upscaling starts to deteriorate in quality from orbit showing increased artifacts and blurring.

So it can do 3d in scaledSpace and the transition altitudes to 2d are going to be configurable but for now I'm going to go with a relatively early transition due to the above issues.

At the moment clouds at night are still pitch black. They don't look good with a uniform "ambient" light and need a directional light. My goal is to have them be lit by the mun or a second body at some point for a convincing night look.

Understood, yeah from my experience the switch to SS always seemed messed up visuals on most mods in one way or another. Was just imagining how incredible 3d anvil heads might look on the horizon from orbit, especially with shadows and sun light extinction. I'd be curious to see how the distance to render scales the quality of the cloudlets, I know you mentioned temporal upscaling and blurring. I'm assuming it just approximates from a larger sample of the cloud map, which I guess means the transition from 3d voluetrics to the 2d cloud layer could more or less be done by just fading our the voluemtrics into the 2d layer, I'd imagine this could probably look good especially at a distance.

[infinite_monkey]

On 10/17/2022 at 10:48 PM, blackrack said:

Not hard at all, maybe after the first release though. Could also have the particles being "lightable" by sun and/or craft lights for added immersion.

And rainbows? 

[blackrack]

6 hours ago, pingopete said:

Understood, yeah from my experience the switch to SS always seemed messed up visuals on most mods in one way or another. Was just imagining how incredible 3d anvil heads might look on the horizon from orbit, especially with shadows and sun light extinction. I'd be curious to see how the distance to render scales the quality of the cloudlets, I know you mentioned temporal upscaling and blurring. I'm assuming it just approximates from a larger sample of the cloud map, which I guess means the transition from 3d voluetrics to the 2d cloud layer could more or less be done by just fading our the voluemtrics into the 2d layer, I'd imagine this could probably look good especially at a distance.

Yeah things really don't look good at all from orbit right now unless scaled to humongous proportions, it's hard to explain but it's a combination of the temporal upscaling not handling high-frequency detail well, the raymarching noise/flickering at those distances and the noise/cloudtypes distributions looking uniform-ish and repetitive at that scale. If scaled up to look good from orbit they look very big and out of place from the ground and when flying through at low altitudes, while still looking unrealistic from orbit.

I'm not sure what you mean about the transition but the 3d volumetrics are derived from the 2d layer so fading in to the 2d should be ok.

In the previous images I posted both the godrays and the cloud-on-cloud shadows are just read directly from the 2d layer texture for performance and you can't tell most of the time.

5 hours ago, infinite_monkey said:

And rainbows? 

Ehh they don't add much in my opinion. Besides, IRL I see them very rarely.

Edited October 19, 2022 by blackrack

[rbray89]

On 10/18/2022 at 1:09 AM, blackrack said:

Thanks. Right now the view from orbit is still the weakest part, and while it has improved from the last time I showed screenshots I still don't have enough variety in noise/shapes/shading yet to make it look good. In addition the temporal upscaling starts to deteriorate in quality from orbit showing increased artifacts and blurring.

So it can do 3d in scaledSpace and the transition altitudes to 2d are going to be configurable but for now I'm going to go with a relatively early transition due to the above issues.

This was always the most difficult part to solve. Other games still haven't really solved it either from what I've seen.

[blackrack]

25 minutes ago, rbray89 said:

This was always the most difficult part to solve. Other games still haven't really solved it either from what I've seen.

Star citizen seems to be the closest, but they also seem to scale the clouds waay up to avoid those issues.