[PLUGIN][ALPHA-10] City Lights and Clouds on Kerbin/Others

[rbray89]

Alpha-7 looks much better than Alpha-6 - clouds are visible during flight through the mid/upper atmosphere, and the detail effects on the city lights helps them out a lot (instead of big, pixelated blocks). The only visual glitch I'm seeing right now looks like its probably related to texturing the cloud layer, and it's relatively minor. I can see some of the triangle edges showing up as brighter, straight lines between vertices. Are the cloud textures sampled per vertex or per pixel? It looks like interpolation of a couple of whiter / higher alpha vertex samples along the edge between them.

One config question: Right now, the clouds appear to move at a drastically different speed than the planet below (this is obvious when warping in a higher orbit). I see a "speed" setting in the cloud config. What's that value mean? I'd like to change the speed to something closer to the length of a day, so the clouds aren't moving so rapidly relative to the surface.

The textures should be sampled per pixel, but a few things I could think of might cause this:

1) The texture is just too small and the filtering isn't good enough to produce good results

2) The "mixer" texture isn't tiling properly

3) The lighting is being handled more poorly than I'd like. This could probably be fixed by adding more detail to the sphere.

[rbray89]

Alpha-7 looks much better than Alpha-6 - clouds are visible during flight through the mid/upper atmosphere, and the detail effects on the city lights helps them out a lot (instead of big, pixelated blocks). The only visual glitch I'm seeing right now looks like its probably related to texturing the cloud layer, and it's relatively minor. I can see some of the triangle edges showing up as brighter, straight lines between vertices. Are the cloud textures sampled per vertex or per pixel? It looks like interpolation of a couple of whiter / higher alpha vertex samples along the edge between them.

One config question: Right now, the clouds appear to move at a drastically different speed than the planet below (this is obvious when warping in a higher orbit). I see a "speed" setting in the cloud config. What's that value mean? I'd like to change the speed to something closer to the length of a day, so the clouds aren't moving so rapidly relative to the surface.

Ah, and as for the config question, the "speed" determines the rate and direction of texture movement. Move it up or down to speed it up or slow it down.

[rbray89]

I've had to play around with my .cfg edits and textures for these planets a bit, but it really does look great. Lower altitudes especially.

Unfortunately I crash landed when I went to make a cup of tea. Attempt two did much better and actually landed (mostly thanks to landing gear)

And Jool just looks plain scary.

Wow... These are absolutely stunning! This is exactly what I was hoping people would do when I started working on this.

[briansun1]

the mod seems to take away the pathing(ie the blue line of travel of your craft except for all of the stuff in orbit )

pic

Edited October 25, 2013 by briansun1

[rbray89]

the mod seems to take away the pathing(ie the blue line of travel of your craft except for all of the stuff in orbit )

I just discovered that from an earlier comment. Good thing it's an Alpha I'm trying to find another couple of layers I can stuff the planet overlays on, but I'm having difficulty finding info on it. Some I tried were REALLY interesting. Everything from navbal, Space center, or GUI overlays would magically appear on screen in weird places.

[MOARdV]

I just discovered that from an earlier comment. Good thing it's an Alpha

I saw this with one ship I launched from Kerbin -> Mun. Once in orbit over the Mun, I saw the orbit line missing. However, switching to another ship restored it. I also did not see that problem with a second ship that I launched into a high orbit while I was tweaking cloud speeds.

[rbray89]

How would everyone feel adding rings/asteroid belts?

[briansun1]

[15nelsoc]

How would everyone feel adding rings/asteroid belts?

I can see how you would do the rings around planets such as Jool, but how would you make asteroid belts? If you flew into the asteroids would they disappear due to only be a rotating texture around the planet or have you come up with some way of actually rendering them as physical objects? Either way, that would be stellar.

[Superfluous J]

How would everyone feel adding rings/asteroid belts?

As physical objects? If you could make a ring that would kill you by flying through it, and would cast a shadow on the host planet, that would be awesome! Anything else I'm not quite so sure.

If you could make actual physical asteroids that you could interact with, you need to be talking to Squad not us, and asking them for a job.

[adge]

Just a little pointer for the folks cursed by disappearing conics (trajectory paths) on the Map mode.

I find if you zoom out they will re-appear, and you can zoom back in as normal then.

You have to do this every time you enter map mode..... but given that (most) burns have a big window of waiting, a few seconds to zoom out/in shouldn't harm Yup, gets a bit annoying, but better than no conics!

[rbray89]

This should be fixed pretty quickly in the next build. I know the issue, just have to find some suitable layers that won't interfere/be interfered with

[Superfluous J]

Just a little pointer for the folks cursed by disappearing conics (trajectory paths) on the Map mode.

I find if you zoom out they will re-appear, and you can zoom back in as normal then.

You have to do this every time you enter map mode..... but given that (most) burns have a big window of waiting, a few seconds to zoom out/in shouldn't harm Yup, gets a bit annoying, but better than no conics!

Or no clouds!

This should be fixed pretty quickly in the next build. I know the issue, just have to find some suitable layers that won't interfere/be interfered with

Sweet.

I ask this question as someone who is vaguely aware that modding this game is possible: Can you make your own layers? Could Squad enable more layers, like they enabled a few empty tech tree nodes for modders? Could they enable the possibility of people creating any number of layers they want?

In short, should we be suggesting this somewhere?

[rbray89]

Or no clouds!

Sweet.

I ask this question as someone who is vaguely aware that modding this game is possible: Can you make your own layers? Could Squad enable more layers, like they enabled a few empty tech tree nodes for modders? Could they enable the possibility of people creating any number of layers they want?

In short, should we be suggesting this somewhere?

No, The Unity game engine uses a bitmask to determine layer rendering... 32 layers at most (0-31), so the most we can do is find some that aren't used in the places we want to use them (GUI, VAB, etc), or find some that currently aren't assigned. (or rendered by the main camera).

[adge]

Hi again!

Before I point out more glitches, I just want to first state that I love this mod. It looks stunning, so when I post these, I post only to highlight and improve

However, a few things I've noticed on my first run:

The lights of Kerbin are visible through the Mun (slight above the NavBall)

When near Kerbol's corona, it appears that Kerbin becomes translucent?

Not sure if either of these have been noted, but wanted to just highlight them for the developers of the mod

KUTGW!

[rbray89]

Hi again!

Before I point out more glitches, I just want to first state that I love this mod. It looks stunning, so when I post these, I post only to highlight and improve

However, a few things I've noticed on my first run:

The lights of Kerbin are visible through the Mun (slight above the NavBall)

When near Kerbol's corona, it appears that Kerbin becomes translucent?

Not sure if either of these have been noted, but wanted to just highlight them for the developers of the mod

KUTGW!

Yeah... I think I have an easy solution for at least one of these as well...

The first is due to the render order (camera ontop of bodies == overlays on other bodies) and it should be fixable by dropping the alpha with distance (won't be able to see the clouds anyways right?).

The second is due to the coronal layer rendering below the cloud layer, making it seem as though Kerbin is transparent. This one is trickier and haven't been able to solve it in anything other than the map view, where I push the layers into the scaled cam. Might have to try and detect the flare change and do the same.

[deadshot462]

I suggested this before but haven't seen an answer yet, is there a chance Auroras / northern lights could be implemented?

Would be awesome.

[BLUAV8R]

hey let me first say that this is a great mod and i love it

but i been having these weird circles appear on Kerrin in map view

notice the curved blank line going up and down

if anyone has a solution that'd be great otherwise just a note for a fix in the next version

I'd also like to say that i think the lights at night have become a little to.. "dumbed down" in that there's not as many as before and they don't seem as bright, it'd be great if there could be more and if they could be brighter

[The Destroyer]

I-snip-

Oh my god, that is amazing, me want!

[NathanKell]

A question. I don't know if it behaves this way in stock KSP or only with the rescale, but:

1. Clouds, looking from below, are quite dark. Is there any way to make them nice and bright white?

2. There seems to be fresnell falloff of the shader from below--it's visible only at the edges of the sky, not right above.

Other than that, me likes! This keeps getting better and better!

[Lucchese]

Hi guys,

I loaded this mod and and when I entered VAB I noticed the kerbals were all moving very stuttery, almost laggy.

When I tried to launch a rocket, the game crashed to the windows crash detection screen rather then the Oops KSP has crashed screen.

I also had no error log folder.

Are there compatibility issues with other mods?

[Superfluous J]

I use this mod with a lot of other mods and some Modulemanager configs with no issues.

Well, no issues that I can attribute to this mod

BoulderCo <- This mod

Engineer

EnhancedNavBall <- With the Navball docking indicator dll in the same directory.

KAS

KerbalAlarmClock_2.6.2.0

Kethane

Squad

UniverseReplacer <- just to replace the stars and Kerbal faces.

[Lucchese]

Hmm right, I guess it was memory overload after all, I unloaded a bunch and it all runs fine now.

I cant choose which mods I want >.<

I had a cloud texture in place with UniverseReplacer, the static texture combined with the moving one from here makes it look like clouds are expanding and contracting pretty realisticly (from great height ofc )

Edit: some screens (without UR cloud texture)

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Edited October 26, 2013 by Lucchese

[ludsoe]

I took a HD picture of it for ya, the picture above is scaled down....

(Along with Universe replacer.... But you don't notice it really.)

Heres the link to the full sized unedited version. I couldn't upload it to photobucket.... Im sure they allow pictures that big.

http://www./view/1o2ks3ymchh6dlj/Screenshot902.8572.png

[NathanKell]

Needs much thicker cloud cover IMO.