"Fog" to make the atmospheres look better

[Whirligig Girl]

I had an idea, I was thinking about how fake the atmospheres in KSP look. you see a film on the outside, but it doesn't look right. I think, that they should make a fog renderer (surely unity supports this) that takes atmospheric thickness into account, and renders fog in in the distance, and near the horizon when you are in space. I don't mean actual fog, I mean how when you are in the mountains, the distant ones look light blue and blurry.

[Apature rocket science]

I think that is in the planed updates in the weather section, when you have a massive rocket the fog will make it lag it Mutch more, think about that.

[Vostok]

Generally, in video games, fog is in fact added to ease the rendering of the world. So maybe, fog would ease off the load on the rendering.

Obviously this would only look appropriate on planets like Jool, and Eve.

[boomerdog2000]

Generally, in video games, fog is in fact added to ease the rendering of the world. So maybe, fog would ease off the load on the rendering.

Obviously this would only look appropriate on planets like Jool, and Eve.

Or at random times on Kerbin. No reason Kerbin shouldn't have weather.

[Kegereneku]

Fog to ease rendering sound interesting. It also look like a good way to mask pixelation from orbit.

At launch your rocket is huge with all its parts and you usually don't have the time to watch around anyway (unless Mechjeb), so reducing the stress on the processor sound good.

As you gain altitude the rocket become lighter, there's less stress on the processor, and the fog would become less important.

But I suppose all this can be considered "Weather", so it's in the "Do not suggest" list

[Pugspaceprogram]

Technically, fog is in the 'Not to suggest' list, as it falls under weather.

Cheers.

[SolarLiner]

Nope, I don't think he speaks of the "weather" fog, but the atmospheric haze, who similarly to atmosphere scattering, adds a "fog" to blend more naturally the ground and the sky on the distance.

[Whirligig Girl]

What I mean is atmospheric haze, not the weather.

[allmappedout]

Whilst Fog is, technically, weather, I can understand the suggestion is actually quite a good one in terms of looking at optimising computer performance. As pointed out, games often use fog to hide a multitude of sins (Silent Hill, anyone?), and if it could be used to provide a performance boost, as well as look good, then it does have merit outside of the 'weather' suggestion.

[SilverWarior]

Generally, in video games, fog is in fact added to ease the rendering of the world.

As pointed out, games often use fog to hide a multitude of sins (Silent Hill, anyone?), ...

The fog itself is never used for gaining performance but to hide LOS range.

LOS (line of sight) range defines how far away are object being rendered. So the fog is ususally used to hide the sudden apearing or disapering of object when they get into or out of LOS range.

The fog itself does lower the performance a bit, but this is almost neglible.

[lajoswinkler]

Fog can be local, made of something that is actually rendered. That's the laggy fog.

For you people that have played Minecraft, remember the "fog" that's generated when you lower the settings? That would be useful as it really eases the lag and is quite pleasing unless it's happening 100 m away. Then it makes you disoriented. I remember being lost in one peninsula where I've built my base. It wasn't large at all, yet I would get lost all the time.

[chaos_forge]

While this seems like it would reduce lag, I'm not so sure about the "looks good" aspect of the idea. I usually hate it when games have rendering "fog"

[allmappedout]

While this seems like it would reduce lag, I'm not so sure about the "looks good" aspect of the idea. I usually hate it when games have rendering "fog"

I get where you're coming from, but I suppose as someone points out, if it does reduce graphical load on the GPU, it might be a useful thing to build in for the unlucky ones of us who don't have a powerful computer

[chaos_forge]

it might be a useful thing to build in for the unlucky ones of us who don't have a powerful computer

Makes sense. As long as it's disable-able, I'm all for it.

[SilverWarior]

For you people that have played Minecraft, remember the "fog" that's generated when you lower the settings?

Even Minecraft uses combination of LOS + fog and not just fog alone.

The way how fog is done is that you either shade the objects with fog color or alpha blend them into fog color. The further away theese objects are the more they are shaded or blended into fog color.

So this does consume some GPU power. Of course using shaders for this is usually much faster as you can combine fog shader with other shaders and the whole shading can be done in single pass while alpha blending needs another pass and thus becomes slower.

I get where you're coming from, but I suppose as someone points out, if it does reduce graphical load on the GPU, it might be a useful thing to build in for the unlucky ones of us who don't have a powerful computer

The biggest reason why pepole are expiriencing poor performance of KSP is not due to graphics but due the fact that ingame physics engine is single threaded which means it can use only one of your computers cores. That is why some pepole with older single core computers where these processors have high CPU frequency might even be getting better perofrmance than some pepole with newer computers with cheaper multicore processors becouse these have lower CPU frequency.

So until Squad manages to make ingame physical engine to be fully compatible with muthithreading we will all be expiriencing this kind of poor performance. Also do note that making mutithreading compatible physical engine is far from easy and converting single threaded physical engine into multithreading could be even harder as you need to use a bit different logic due to need of synchronizing states between different threads.

[Harguinxx]

The biggest reason why pepole are expiriencing poor performance of KSP is not due to graphics but due the fact that ingame physics engine is single threaded which means it can use only one of your computers cores. That is why some pepole with older single core computers where these processors have high CPU frequency might even be getting better perofrmance than some pepole with newer computers with cheaper multicore processors becouse these have lower CPU frequency.

So until Squad manages to make ingame physical engine to be fully compatible with muthithreading we will all be expiriencing this kind of poor performance. Also do note that making mutithreading compatible physical engine is far from easy and converting single threaded physical engine into multithreading could be even harder as you need to use a bit different logic due to need of synchronizing states between different threads.

I can not be more agree with that, but even high end processors struggle to have a high FPS's performance in large vessels, and that is unacceptable. Also the technology in processors is progressing in the proper synchronization of the cores and the energy efficiency of them, the frequency of processors haven't improved for years, and even if right now a new type of applicable semiconductor material is discovered the frequencies won't improve in the next years, so the problem that we have is the problem that we will have tomorrow, these game desperately needs multithreading technology no mater how hard it is, right now we are in alpha, but that will be unacceptable in an ended game.

[SolarLiner]

Guys, STHAP ! This is a great discussion about the fog and the LOS, but is not the point.

What he meant was the Horizon haze, like that:

Left: Nothing; Right: Atmosphere + Horizon Haze

[Harguinxx]

Guys, STHAP ! This is a great discussion about the fog and the LOS, but is not the point.

What he meant was the Horizon haze, like that:

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=58444

Left: Nothing; Right: Atmosphere + Horizon Haze

Sorry for get out of the point, and yes, I love it, some ones will criticize a possible lack of performance, but it can stay as a graphical option, for me: +1.