Developer Insights #22 - Sky's the Limit

[Brofessional]

Welcome improvements. I hope the clouds themselves get  upgraded in the future, they look like they are rendering at a lower resolution or something and it kinda ruins the whole image.

[Poynting]

Thanks for this!! It was a really interesting read, I look forward to playing the new version!

[sevenkerbal]

Wow. I Hope the Others milestones on the Roadmap come faster. But for science the First step to recover the Game Back to live

 

[Squaremantis]

When will you guys be adding in some better anti aliasing into the game? Currently all we have is FXAA which is really blurry and doesn't really smooth out the image very much. Something like TAA or MSAA would be good and would help make them game look much better

[Alpha_star]

Hi Blackrack! Always a great fan of your Scatterer so pretty nice to see your work in KSP2. Are there plans to include dynamic weather systems into the game, like what you did a few months ago in EVE-Redux?

[Vl3d]

On 12/8/2023 at 7:10 PM, Intercept Games said:

That’s about a 17-31% performance improvement on the whole frame and we save 2 ms to 4 ms on the rendering of the clouds.

Hats off!

[MARL_Mk1]

Good job! Thought I'm expecting that in the future Intercept looks into overhauling current cloud looks to something in a middle ground between actual ones and the work you've done with your KSP1 Volumetric Clouds, in the sense that they don't need to look all that real life looking but also not as underwhelming as they currently do.

[TROPtastic]

9 hours ago, MARL_Mk1 said:

Good job! Thought I'm expecting that in the future Intercept looks into overhauling current cloud looks to something in a middle ground between actual ones and the work you've done with your KSP1 Volumetric Clouds, in the sense that they don't need to look all that real life looking but also not as underwhelming as they currently do.

It's a tricky balance to get right, since the clouds in KSP1 have their own quirks because of their "puffiness" (blackrack presumably couldn't do all he wanted within the limits of a mod). Compare KSP1 EVE clouds to KSP2 clouds:

The clouds in the first picture look like a bunch of  translucent puff balls grouped together, while the clouds in the second look coherent but "smeared out" and somewhat shapeless. Neither is quite what realistic clouds look like.

If IG had an entire team to work on clouds and were confident that clouds wouldn't be seen from orbit, approaches like FS 2020's could be viable. Even then however, its clouds can look too puffy in certain situations, and they come with significant performance impacts.

Real-time clouds are difficult to get right, but I do agree that a bit more definition would be nice in KSP2 clouds.

Edit: I remembered that an update for FS 2020 released an aircraft that can fly to the upper edge of the mesosphere (~83 km / 275k ft), so perhaps FS's techniques could be used for games with very high altitude flight like KSP. Some links of atmosphere rendering for those interested:

https://flightsimulator.azureedge.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/ArcanePython931-Forum-1536x799.jpg

https://flightsimulator.azureedge.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/DaveBGaming-Forum-1536x864.jpg

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/uploads/default/original/4X/f/e/a/fea3952d5043b656a627fe9b5c459a0322c2308b.jpeg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/38RaXQAIcaQ/maxresdefault.jpg

Edited December 10, 2023 by TROPtastic
added links for context

[The Aziz]

1 hour ago, TROPtastic said:

Compare KSP1 EVE clouds to KSP2 clouds:

The clouds in the first picture look like a bunch of  translucent puff balls grouped together, while the clouds in the second look coherent but "smeared out" and somewhat shapeless. Neither is quite what realistic clouds look like

I'm not going to be the one to point out the latest achievements in KSP1 cloud mods, but I will point out the KSP2. Have you actually seen the clouds from 0.1.5?

 

[TROPtastic]

9 hours ago, The Aziz said:

I'm not going to be the one to point out the latest achievements in KSP1 cloud mods, but I will point out the KSP2. Have you actually seen the clouds from 0.1.5?

I'm going off the images in the dev diary we are commenting on, where the cloud picture I posted is labelled as coming from 0.2.0.0. Perhaps the build in the diary is using different cloud generation than what you posted.

On 12/8/2023 at 9:10 AM, Intercept Games said:

For 0.2.0.0 we took a bit more inspiration from temporal techniques to find an alternative solution to re-rendering problem areas [...]

After some implementation and tweaking this ended up working well and we can see the following improvement in rendering performance

 

[Jacob Kerman]

On 12/8/2023 at 1:28 PM, NexusHelium said:

Yeah, he did the cloud work and atmosphere scattering for patch 0.15

thats CRAZYYY

[Flush Foot]

@Dakota... any chance of new 'Developer Insights' / Dev Diaries?