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

[rbray89]

Can't you just add them in yourself?

If you wan't, you can manually add them in, yes. But they should be there in the defaults.

[Mucha]

Hello i've got a problem.i installed this mod and everything, but when i start the game and when i press this ALT+N and when i adding a clouds theres something going wrong. ;_; kerbin is all covered by clouds he is all white! and when im looking up i see a white squeres flying above. ;_; what is going on??

[rbray89]

Hello i've got a problem.i installed this mod and everything, but when i start the game and when i press this ALT+N and when i adding a clouds theres something going wrong. ;_; kerbin is all covered by clouds he is all white! and when im looking up i see a white squeres flying above. ;_; what is going on??

You need to specify a texture in the texture box. look at some of the other layers for examples.

[Mucha]

hmm... how to do it? ;_; these textures?

[jrandom]

Is there any way to adjust a cloud layer's distance from the ground? I'm using Real Solar System and my clouds are sitting at 40km, when they should be significantly lower. I tried altering the Radius setting in the UI, but that only seems to change the cloud layer's rotation, not it's height/radius.

[KyleofKerbin]

OK, so I have the mod, and it works fine, EXCEPT the Volumetric Clouds aren't... Volumetric. How do I turn this on? they're flat and ugly right now, and I want some CUMULUS CLOUDS TO PRETTY UP MY PLANET!

[Thesonicgalaxy]

OK, so I have the mod, and it works fine, EXCEPT the Volumetric Clouds aren't... Volumetric. How do I turn this on? they're flat and ugly right now, and I want some CUMULUS CLOUDS TO PRETTY UP MY PLANET!

They aren't added yet.

[Thesonicgalaxy]

Is there any way to adjust a cloud layer's distance from the ground? I'm using Real Solar System and my clouds are sitting at 40km, when they should be significantly lower. I tried altering the Radius setting in the UI, but that only seems to change the cloud layer's rotation, not it's height/radius.

You can change the radius factor, though getting it to actually work is a huge pain. Sometimes it doesn't save, and when you reset to save, it never even saved the layer.

[Superfluous J]

OK, so I have the mod, and it works fine, EXCEPT the Volumetric Clouds aren't... Volumetric. How do I turn this on? they're flat and ugly right now, and I want some CUMULUS CLOUDS TO PRETTY UP MY PLANET!

The clouds aren't volumetric. There is a way (I think it's alt-n) to bring up a debug window and generate a single volumetric cloud to see what it'll eventually look like but that's it so far.

And I think the current clouds are quite pretty.

[SergeantBlueforce]

I've found a bug, when I was on the Mun I could see the clouds on Kerbin through a hill; I'm sure this has been reported already, and may have already been fixed, (I'm still using 0.22 until all my mods get updated) but here it is anyway.

[Mucha]

You need to specify a texture in the texture box. look at some of the other layers for examples.

How to do that? because I dont know...

[tajampi]

Hi there:

I've found an usefull asset that could help you with procedural 3D clouds:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/3594

Good:

Nearly no perfomance impact.

They look fantastic.

They are made out of particles.

They are free.

Bad:

Who knows if they will work well in KSP

The free version has a limited amount of renderers...

The paid version is: 80$

Cheers!

[rbray89]

Hi there:

I've found an usefull asset that could help you with procedural 3D clouds:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/3594

Good:

Nearly no perfomance impact.

They look fantastic.

They are made out of particles.

They are free.

Bad:

Who knows if they will work well in KSP

The free version has a limited amount of renderers...

The paid version is: 80$

Cheers!

I'll have to take a look. Thanks!

[rbray89]

Well, there's two things I can think of. One, a higher resolution bump map if possible to combat the tiling, and two, less density in the clouds at the poles. Obviously somewhere between all and none there is probably a pretty good balance. Though, to me, the bump map never looks all that good.

New Release is out! May look minor, but the poles are now really fixed! Very Slight startup delay due to cubic texture conversion.

[bac9]

I don't recommend using non-square textures, to be honest. They are pretty badly managed by the GPU and in worst cases can be automatically converted to a square of a nearest size, thus adding dead weight without actually using it for anything useful. It would be especially a problem with enormous 8k textures many like to use with this mod. I'd recommend either to find a way to use your triplanar with a 1:1 textures, or store multiple texture types in one file.

On other subject, I think the enormous size of planetary bodies and desire of everyone to, for some reason, have completely unique clouds on every latitude and longitude (creating planet-wide texture atlas instead of a noise-based unrecognizably repeating pattern) makes the current implemementation a bit of a dead end in terms of looks. Clouds will never look good from low orbit with the current approach if raw texture will continue to be used. The problem can be solved, though, if there will be a per-pixel shader that generates visual effect (bunch of cloudy noise, for example) using the texture only as the source mask, never showing the size of actual texels. Then, as the next logical step, it's possible to ditch the source texture altogether (saving enormous amount of memory), generating the mask from few noise filters like PQS system does. Many games use a similar approach.

P.S.: I can't recommend using particle systems for volumetric clouds at all, that approach gives insane overdraw, lighting problems, and clipping problems.

Edited December 22, 2013 by bac9

[NathanKell]

bac9: the stock planet textures are all 2:1 aren't they?

That said, rbray89, you could define your shaders to also accept a "page" shader variable, using either the top half or the bottom half of a texture as the page, thus allowing two 2:1 textures per page. Then in the cfg, for each cloudlayer, specify filename and page.

[Frederf]

404 on the download link

[jrandom]

Also getting a 404 on the download link.

[drtedastro]

yup, same.

[The Destroyer]

404 here too. Confirmed.

[Commander Zoom]

On other subject, I think the enormous size of planetary bodies and desire of everyone to, for some reason, have completely unique clouds on every latitude and longitude (creating planet-wide texture atlas instead of a noise-based unrecognizably repeating pattern) makes the current implemementation a bit of a dead end in terms of looks.

Speaking for myself, it's because I want my clouds to look like weather systems - storms, fronts, trade winds, etc - rather than random noise (which is fine for clouds from the ground, but not so much for orbit and beyond). Tell me there are ways to, essentially, simulate weather at a planetary scale (but low resolution) on the fly that don't completely kill performance, and I might be interested.

[bac9]

Speaking for myself, it's because I want my clouds to look like weather systems - storms, fronts, trade winds, etc - rather than random noise (which is fine for clouds from the ground, but not so much for orbit and beyond). Tell me there are ways to, essentially, simulate weather at a planetary scale (but low resolution) on the fly that don't completely kill performance, and I might be interested.

There are ways to draw volumetric clouds without billboards, which would be the best way if you want to get planetary-scale coverage while still getting decent detail and as little overdraw as possible. One example of that approach: http://www.simul.co.uk/truesky (used in ARMA3 and few other products), which probably relies on some low-resolution coverage mask and then draws very neat volumetric clumps using random noise filters. I recall plugin for clouds with a similar approach being available for Unity too.

P.S.: I think that's the one I was thinking about: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/115825-RELEASE-Nuaj-the-3D-clouds-simulator

The documentation offers more indepth look into how it works and how it's configured, I believe. http://www.nuaj.net/Download/Nuaj'%20-%20User%20Documentation.pdf

Webplayer demo: http://www.nuaj.net/WebPlayer/

Notice how it's completely procedural and therefore allows you to seamlessly make transitions from clear to overcast weather without any heavy source textures involved.

Edited December 22, 2013 by bac9

[NathanKell]

bac9: I heartily support the approach. Basically going the way of the citylights side, but better. Also, Commander Zoom, there *are* IIRC approaches for weather system modeling using noise; and even if not, it's still a better approach to use a mask texture and generate the actual clouds from noise (you still get swirly hurricanes, for instance) than the present system that uses detail textures on a white cloud.

[bac9]

I think there is a misunderstanding as to what noise means too. It's not this:

Noise algorithms are used everywhere to generate extremely complex patterns like those:

So it's a great way to render clouds, there is nothing about them requiring a predefined source texture that much.

[Duke-49th]

Download Link in Post #1 is broken It says page not found...