Artistic clouds or real clouds for KSP?

[Halsfury]

I was thinking about the mod which gives you clouds in KSP and I came up with a solution for stock clouds,

Now I know that this is a what not to suggest but I have a spin on Cloud effects, now most people would like to see clouds of all shapes and sizes mimicking their RL counterparts, what I was thinking instead would be a 2 part system which would make clouds appear real yet avoid the difficulties of rendering them.

This would involve something like the clouds mod where you have a 2D texture, coupled with "unreachable" cloud sprites which would appear at low altitudes but would never get close enough to the player to require complex high definition, this would allow for a range of clouds which are easy to render without becoming taxing on your video processor.

For example, at the KSC players would see a randomly generated ring of clouds in the distance (50 km away and 10km in altitude) which constantly shift, fading in and out slowly so as to give the impression that they are moving, but, if you move towards them they would recede so that they never need to be rendered close up,

Above this, and over the ground level player, should be a flat cloud texture simulating high altitude clouds at 25km, this would fade briefly as you approach it in a rocket so that a smooth transition is achieved.

Once you cross the high altitude cloud texture then the texture would fade back in and be revealed at even higher altitude to be part of a larger, constantly shifting 2D texture governed by a random generation system imitating the planet's cloud layers.

By doing something like this, clouds would become easy to render, and yes, the sacrifice inherent in this is that there are no "real" clouds but to me "real" clouds are not all that helpful to spaceflight since depending on weather conditions they can hit rockets with lightning or rain and high winds, personally, missing launch windows due to weather anomalies seems a bit harsh even to me and I like maximum realism in video games.

So what do you think? real clouds or artistic clouds?

Thanks

Halsfury

[DaRocketCat]

Well, planes are a significant part of this game, so real clouds which you could slice through (working concepts were shown back in .18) would be nice.

This wouldn't be a big deal should the physics thread of Unity become multithreaded.

[Ruinsage]

If this is implemented, i would like an option to turn it off. It seems to me that it would put a lot of pressure on my pc, for an entirely aesthetic purpose that i would only notice from orbit.

[Ruinsage]

If this is implemented, i would like an option to turn it off. It seems to me that it would put a lot of pressure on my pc, for an entirely aesthetic purpose that i would only notice from orbit.