[1.1.2][1-1-2] May 13-2016 EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements

[vanlock]

One way of improving the detail textures is by placing two or more layers of clouds on top of each other with different velocities for the detail textures but the same velocity for the main texture.

Anyways I been playing around with sandstorms on Duna, here what I got so far:

http://www.filedropper.com/rollingduststormsonduna

Just copy the zipped cloud folder on top of the one in BoulderCo folder. All I did was create a texture for the sand/dust storms, I made 4 layers with this texture having the same velocity, layers are at 125, 1325, 2525, 3725 meters and go from 0-75% transparency. So the higher you are the more transparent the sandstorm.

Next up more complex clouds on Eve.

http://imgur.com/a/J53iZ

Here you go.

Oh My ! That's really really cool !

the layer issue from orbital view is maybe caused by the Unity engine.

Otherwise it looks really great, i'm installing it thanks alot !

[sidfu]

gaiiden he uploaded a alpha version for the new clouds thats whre my ss come from follow the link at my ss and u can get his clouds. if u want it to look like my ss just use the defualt .cfg not astros. the op hasint updated because its a alpha relase

[Wren]

Here is a vid of the awesome clouds in action!

[BLSmith2112]

I can imagine sandstorms obscuring the sun and preventing easy solar panel = infinite power capabilities. You could have like a sand trap science component that eats power but catches fine materials in the air from sandstorms. You'd have to design large battery powered ships to pull off a successful mission. Man the potential for these things is huge!

[TMS]

Weirdness / glitch

[MarcusQ]

Okay so I gave this another shot, and it seems much more stable now. Also, I love the volumetric clouds. Brilliant mod!

[Minarkhaios]

astros http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/hdcloudtextures/ with default settings

The cloud textures are nice, a lot darker than the original ones and that give a serious bad weather looking.

I love that.

But (sorry, always a but somewhere) the borders are quite too sharp, and it give a 'pastel painting' look which I personally dislike (at least it is too cartoonish for my taste in kerbal).

[Crozius]

Any chance we can get some kind of tutorial on the new config structure? I'm trying to get the RSS (w Krag's Planet Factory) working with the new system to no avail.

To clarify, this is the problem I'm having:

http://imgur.com/ZJ7gRrK

Edited April 6, 2014 by Crozius

[SCurry13]

Ok, so I've had this mod for a while, it's fantastic! Only recently, since the new update, I've encountered a problem with the city lights rendering fully at ground level (looks a bit strange), the volumetric clouds work perfectly, but there's a big problem with the map screen. A certain segment of the planet has the cloud texture overlay, and the rest doesn't. Is this a common issue that is in the process of being rectified, or is it a problem with my setup?

Great mod, keep up the good work!

[rbray89]

Ok, so I've had this mod for a while, it's fantastic! Only recently, since the new update, I've encountered a problem with the city lights rendering fully at ground level (looks a bit strange), the volumetric clouds work perfectly, but there's a big problem with the map screen. A certain segment of the planet has the cloud texture overlay, and the rest doesn't. Is this a common issue that is in the process of being rectified, or is it a problem with my setup?

Great mod, keep up the good work!

Running with a Mac? If so, you may have to go with the "low Res" version.

- - - Updated - - -

Weirdness / glitch

http://i57.tinypic.com/2s6q24l.png

http://i61.tinypic.com/2ir3fqp.png

http://i59.tinypic.com/21j6r7b.png

Running with RemoteTech? Apparently that can cause this.

[AndreyATGB]

His last screen doesn't have RT2, only time I saw it cause this it was only for the Space Center. I never saw anything like that in flight.

[Astronomer]

The cloud textures are nice, a lot darker than the original ones and that give a serious bad weather looking.

I love that.

But (sorry, always a but somewhere) the borders are quite too sharp, and it give a 'pastel painting' look which I personally dislike (at least it is too cartoonish for my taste in kerbal).

This was not intentional. I am currently working this problem, but due to the way the clouds are rendered, still to no avail.

If I figure this out, I'll release 2 versions of clouds: pastel and photorealistic.

[TMS]

Running with RemoteTech? Apparently that can cause this.

Nah, never got into remotetech.

No biggie. Only happened once. Just thought I should log it.

[Cydonian Monk]

Nah, never got into remotetech.

No biggie. Only happened once. Just thought I should log it.

I've seen this issue as well with the new asteroids.... Doesn't seem to be an E/VE issue, but more one with the core game or another plugin causing a a null-reference exception that in turn causes the planet to not load. Oddly the clouds & lights are the only things that work right.

[TheWampa]

rbray89, your volumetric clouds are beautiful. Thank you so much for all your work (ActiveTextureManagement is the only thing that keeps my monstrous heap of plugins up and running mostly crash-free )!

[rbray89]

What do people think about "thick Atmospheres?" Jool doesn't work well with volumes because it has so few layers, and is so deep, so I was thinking about adding a new class for volumes that handles thick atmospheres. Basically three clouds layers that follow the ship down, get darker and less transparent the deeper you go. It may also be used for eve as well.

Thoughts?

[Ralathon]

What do people think about "thick Atmospheres?" Jool doesn't work well with volumes because it has so few layers, and is so deep, so I was thinking about adding a new class for volumes that handles thick atmospheres. Basically three clouds layers that follow the ship down, get darker and less transparent the deeper you go. It may also be used for eve as well.

Thoughts?

Should work, but I'm worried that you can see the clouds follow you down. If you could implement the same system as in the horizontal direction, where the system just spawns new clouds as you go down that should work nicely. But I don't know how easy it is to expand the current 2D system to 3D like that.

[RuBisCO]

Ok I'm having a heck of a time with Eve, if I make a purple cloud layer below a one or many white cloud layer it does not matter if the white layer has an alpha of 1, if the purple layer has an alpha at or near 1 the white layer is completely transparent and all I get is a featureless purple orb. What I want is white streaking clouds over featureless purple clouds.

[EdisonMaxwell]

Pimp My Clouds (And city lights!) Texture Pack v0.5 - (23/01/14 UPDATE)

---

http://imgur.com/a/nk6XH

[B]DISCLAIMER:[/B]
I'm not responsible if you accidentally overwrite any of your previous personalized textures or settings!![B][I]

CAUTION:[/I][/B]
[B]This pack overwrites cityLights.cfg and cloudLayers.cfg to use new default settings. IT'S EXPERIMENTAL and still in progress, so all this should be used aware of it.[/B]
For the best and most secure installation, put this pack on a clean installation of "Visual Enhancements: Clouds & City Lights" mod. If you can't or you don't want to do it, please, do a backup of all your personalized textures 
and configs (if you have it) before use this.

DOWNLOAD

https://mega.co.nz/#!skFEyaaa!EeS9FGAItEyWWyF68gkRqy9kWZYEhCrEmOzQuLdoHhE

HOW TO INSTALL:

1- To install this pack, merge the folder "BoulderCo" from the rar with your mod installed folder "BoulderCo" (Substituting the necessary files in the process).

2- Then, just delete (or rename completely different as backup) all remaining TGA textures in your "CityLights" and "Clouds" installed folders (yet inside "BoulderCo").

This pack uses his own files, all in PNG, so this last step is important: having duplicate texture names may cause undesirable results.

(Texture Replacer Mod + Pimp my Kerbals Texture Pack is recommended for best results of this pack)

[B][Changelog][/B]

Version 0.5

- Several changes in cloudLayers.cfg.
- Added clouds (and corresponding shadows) to Duna and Laythe.
- Eve improved and recolored.
- New improved clouds for Kerbin.
- first approaches to better under-clouds settings in Kerbin. Trying to avoid excessive traces and reach a good fake-visual "volume" for clouds from ground.
- New city lights and map for city lights. Visible from space now, but yet not too much if you don't zoom the camera to Kerbin. Trying to find the best settings in glow, size and distribution.
- Jool clouds improved and recolored. Please, use "Pimp My Kerbals Texture pack" (containing his first low-res texture) for the best results. If not, remind that layer not going to be there and Jool may seem strange or different to captures in KSP Forum.
- Please, use Texture replacer and "Pimp My Kerbals Texture pack" for the best results with this pack: contains revamps for Kerbin, Minimus, Mun, Duna and Jool -last one necessary for the best results with Jool-.
- This pack is optimized now and is near to half the stock mod size but, if you are concerned yet about performance issues, TextureCompressor mod (A.K.A. Active Texture Management) is highly recommended. 
[URL]http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/59005-0-22-Release-1-Active-Memory-Reduction-Mod[/URL]

-------------------------------------------

Regards and gratefulness:

Thanks to rbray89 (author of the mod which shows this textures) by make this possible.

Strange. This doesn't work. I the other pack mentioned on the first page works but this doesn't when installed on a fresh install.

[Jethro Bodine]

What do people think about "thick Atmospheres?" Jool doesn't work well with volumes because it has so few layers, and is so deep, so I was thinking about adding a new class for volumes that handles thick atmospheres. Basically three clouds layers that follow the ship down, get darker and less transparent the deeper you go. It may also be used for eve as well.

Thoughts?

Sounds pretty sexy. Set pitch black to Kraken altitude and we're good to go!

Strange. This doesn't work. I the other pack mentioned on the first page works but this doesn't when installed on a fresh install.

That's Proot's pack for the older VisualEnhancements versions (prior to volumetric clouds). Astronomer recently updated his pack, so that's why the other one works.

[RuBisCO]

Here what I got so far on Eve, see my cloud problem?

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[BudgetHedgehog]

rbray - if you can make it work, that sounds pretty groovy. Finally we might have an atmosphere resembling Venus! EDIT: after having read a few posts about 50 pages back where you polled for what people wanted and they chose volumetrics, I'd like for the lightning/rain additions to be considered next plz

RuBisCO - loving the Duna sandstorms (and so are the people on reddit). One guy suggested a reason and fix for the visual distortion on the layers

I think you're talking about alpha composition which is a special case of additive blending. I've got a small snippet here (I've been working on an image editor):

PixelRGBAF PixelRGBAF::blendAlpha(PixelRGBAF other) {
        PixelRGBAF temp{0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f};
        temp.alpha = alpha + (other.alpha * (1 - alpha));
        temp.alpha = std::min(1.0f, std::max(temp.alpha, 0.0f));  //just in case, I had weird glitches before

        if(temp.alpha > 0.0f) {
            temp.red = ( (red * alpha) + (other.red * other.alpha * (1 - alpha)) ) / temp.alpha;
            temp.green = ( (green * alpha) + (other.green * other.alpha * (1 - alpha)) ) / temp.alpha;
            temp.blue = ( (blue * alpha) + (other.blue * other.alpha * (1 - alpha)) ) / temp.alpha;
        }

        return temp;
    }

So the actual opacity is (opacity + (background opacity normalized (scaled/squeezed) so it won't go over 100%)), then each color component of the foreground is multiplied by the foreground opacity, then the background is multiplied by the background opacity and again normalized so it doesn't go past 100%, then everything is normalized to the actual opacity.

The reason it looks really weird in this is because there are four distinct layers instead of a gradient. This blending is done four times at rough edges so it doesn't really get thicker as you get lower, it gets thicker wherever that boundary is met.

If the developer of the mod wanted to make it look smoother, they would have to make the thickness of the sandstorms an actual gradient instead of 4 areas, or maybe only do that on the edges of the layers to keep everyone's GPU and/or CPU from not catching on fire.

(linky) Edited April 6, 2014 by ObsessedWithKSP

[RuBisCO]

Yeah honestly I don't know crap about coding outside of Matlab and R, all I did was play with the scripts, script kiddy stuff, someone needs to actually change how the shader works to fixes some of these problems. As for multiple layers that was the only way I could get the clouds to change transparency per altitude, as is now the clouds have uniform fading about their layer, so to make the clouds become opaque very quickly at low altitudes and then fade off slowly for several thousand meters vertically will require someone to enhance the code in the plugin its self (and please provide the parameter in the config file for above and below layer cloud fading distance when you do make the enhancement ). Even with only one layer for the sand/dust storm it will still have the odd edge where it interfaces with the ground. The only way to prevent that now is to have the layer always above the terrain, and then there would be no dust storms. The problem is only visible in map view so it is not that big of an issue for immersion purposes. The fix I can imagine would be the have the layer fade as it approaches the ground, so then we would not see those hard edges.

Oh thanks EdisonMaxwell for indirectly showing me how to make shadows, now I might be able to make things get much darker inside the dust storm... It would be really cool if dust storms cut down solar power, but again someone else whom is better then I will need to do that.

[Lack]

What do people think about "thick Atmospheres?" Jool doesn't work well with volumes because it has so few layers, and is so deep, so I was thinking about adding a new class for volumes that handles thick atmospheres. Basically three clouds layers that follow the ship down, get darker and less transparent the deeper you go. It may also be used for eve as well.

Thoughts?

That would be fantastic. I was trying to mess around with that by seeing if I could have a transparent cloud layer that still generated clouds (I couldn't). Actually, if I was able to do that as well, might be useful for things like those Duna dust storms.

The capability to set depth parameters for them via config would be nice as well and perhaps some control over RGB-A values for the clouds.

I.e.

volumetricfogLayer1
{
        Max height = x
        Min height = y
}

But that's mainly just because I'd like to play around with it.

The volumetrics really are great, going through Eve's atmosphere especially. Essentially how I'd always imagined it should be.

[rbray89]

Here what I got so far on Eve, see my cloud problem?

http://imgur.com/a/g0odn

The layers are in the right order, but due to z-fighting, the lowest is showing issues. You may have to raise it. I'll be adding support for "Layerless" clouds for things like mist/fog/dust storms.

White in itself is not an issue. You have to make sure the alpha is set to 1, and the texture you are using has full alpha (no transparency) for it to work.