WIP - Environmental Visual Enhancements Development

[CalculusWarrior]

A question for you, rbray: Are there plans to get rid of the 'white horizon' stock Kerbin has? I'm loving the atmospheric haze, it's utterly fantastic. However, the lovely fade-off to blue and then BAM, white horizon is a bit jarring. My favourite part of the Better Atmospheres and Renaissance compilations were their abilities to accomplish this, but only through a RSS hack. Is it possible to modify the horizon colour in the new Overhaul?

[rbray89]

A question for you, rbray: Are there plans to get rid of the 'white horizon' stock Kerbin has? I'm loving the atmospheric haze, it's utterly fantastic. However, the lovely fade-off to blue and then BAM, white horizon is a bit jarring. My favourite part of the Better Atmospheres and Renaissance compilations were their abilities to accomplish this, but only through a RSS hack. Is it possible to modify the horizon colour in the new Overhaul?

That is on my todo list

[_Augustus_]

I don't like how glitchy the atmosphere is and how it disappears at certain angles. When will you fix that?

[wasml]

Love the atmospheric haze! Looking forward to your next release.

One thing I noticed that I haven't seen mentioned - when looking east from the launch pad the ocean on the horizon disappears - in other words I can see the (hazy) ocean bottom on the horizon as if there was no water.

Thanks for the amazing mod.

[CalculusWarrior]

That is on my todo list

Hooray! You're awesome, rbray!

[ashenfang]

What is the most current version of this? Has there been a new one issued since the original?

[Proot]

Right now I'm starting to tame the GUI (several layers running without problems), but I don't understand yet very well how works the fades in the particle system...

By defect the particles appears following the camera as in the first (left) picture, that is perfect for the clouds, but I'm working in a new effect and I wish to know how to get the visual pattern of the second pic. I mean: using the system as works right now, I need visible particles as close to the camera as can be possible, and then a quick fade to invisibility (maybe in within a hundred meters, maybe some more). Is that possible?

I've tried a lot of configs, but I can't get exactly that.

The fact is I'm working intuitively with EVE from the beginning, because I don't even know what means the "xE-XX" values... lol

Please Shader Wizard, help me!

[rbray89]

Right now I'm starting to tame the GUI (several layers running without problems), but I don't understand yet very well how works the fades in the particle system...

By defect the particles appears following the camera as in the first (left) picture, that is perfect for the clouds, but I'm working in a new effect and I wish to know how to get the visual pattern of the second pic. I mean: using the system as works right now, I need visible particles as close to the camera as can be possible, and then a quick fade to invisibility (maybe in within a hundred meters, maybe some more). Is that possible?

http://i.imgur.com/1YWZQwr.png

I've tried a lot of configs, but I can't get exactly that.

The fact is I'm working intuitively with EVE from the beginning, because I don't even know what means the "xE-XX" values... lol

Please Shader Wizard, help me!

Well, the fade uses the particle distance, so unfortunately, the closest you can get is on the left.

[Proot]

Well, the fade uses the particle distance, so unfortunately, the closest you can get is on the left.

Good to know that limit!. And what means "4E-05" in the vertical fade of the particles? (Sorry, I change the values all the time, but I don't fully understand the values "xE-xx")

And by the way, difference between fadedist and inverse fade? (all speaking about the particle system)

[rbray89]

Good to know that limit!. And what means "4E-05" in the vertical fade of the particles? (Sorry, I change the values all the time, but I don't fully understand the values "xE-xx")

And by the way, difference between fadedist and inverse fade? (all speaking about the particle system)

it is scientific notation. 4E-05 = .00004

[Fyzzi]

Good to know that limit!. And what means "4E-05" in the vertical fade of the particles? (Sorry, I change the values all the time, but I don't fully understand the values "xE-xx")

And by the way, difference between fadedist and inverse fade? (all speaking about the particle system)

It's basicaly just another way to write real numbers with floating point... the E means *10 and the number behind E is it's exponent... so for example 4E-05 = 4*(10^(-5)) = 0,00004

[xXIndestructibleEVAXx]

Any news on the update? I don't want to sound like I'm being impatient, but I really want the new update to come out before 0.90. I know it takes a lot of work, but there hasn't been any news in 4 (almost 5) days, and it seems like Rbray is focusing on ATM a lot more now, and it's such an awesome mod that I REALLY don't want it to go away. (sure, maybe I'm looking too much into the silence, but I am kinda getting worried. When .90 comes out, it'll be 2 updates behind!)

[rbray89]

Any news on the update? I don't want to sound like I'm being impatient, but I really want the new update to come out before 0.90. I know it takes a lot of work, but there hasn't been any news in 4 (almost 5) days, and it seems like Rbray is focusing on ATM a lot more now, and it's such an awesome mod that I REALLY don't want it to go away. (sure, maybe I'm looking too much into the silence, but I am kinda getting worried. When .90 comes out, it'll be 2 updates behind!)

Still working. HAD to get the ATM thing taken care of though. Back working on EVE.

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

I mentioned this briefly in the ATM thread, but two things I'd like to see fixed:

1. The water looks funky towards the horizon.

2. Kerbin is unadorned on the KSP startup screen.

I think the second one is especially important, because seeing Kerbin with clouds and city lights indicates immediately that this isn't going to be the usual KSP experience (especially so with Astronomer's Visual Pack, which I will see if it's compatible with the Overhaul's configuration file structure, and maybe modify if it isn't).

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

I've run into an issue that has me scratching my head. Switching to ATM 4-0 (since upgraded to 4-2) and EVE Overhaul seems to have caused KSP to not render chunks of atmospheric layers (i.e. clouds and Map Resource Overlay) in flight view -- "rectangular" segments or parts that are over the ocean at low orbits, and a circular segment when at high orbit (more than a few hundred km -- the size seems to mostly depend on altitude, and the position seems to mostly depend on view angle). Another symptom is that, when opening the tracking station, KSP takes a little while to load one half of the atmosphere (which might be the half of the texture that doesn't render in flight mode at high altitude, but I can't be sure). A couple of representative screenshots:

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The frustrating thing is that this only is happening on some of my saves (it seems to be those which predate the upgrade -- I don't seem to have the issue on saves which are created new, even on the same KSP install). I'm okay with losing those saves and starting over, but I'd like to figure out what's going on, and this is complicated by my apparent inability to toggle the EVE GUI in the overhaul version. It's Mod-N, right? That works on 7-4 but not Overhaul.

Rolling back to EVE 7-4 (and deleting ATM's caches of EVE textures -- and thanks for the multithreading fix, that saves me a lot of pain when testing my mods like this!) fixed this. I can see all atmosphere layers over the entire planet in all orbits.

Thanks.

[LaydeeDem]

I've run into an issue that has me scratching my head. Switching to ATM 4-0 (since upgraded to 4-2) and EVE Overhaul seems to have caused KSP to not render chunks of atmospheric layers (i.e. clouds and Map Resource Overlay) in flight view -- "rectangular" segments or parts that are over the ocean at low orbits, and a circular segment when at high orbit (more than a few hundred km -- the size seems to mostly depend on altitude, and the position seems to mostly depend on view angle). Another symptom is that, when opening the tracking station, KSP takes a little while to load one half of the atmosphere (which might be the half of the texture that doesn't render in flight mode at high altitude, but I can't be sure). A couple of representative screenshots:

http://imgur.com/a/cifAT

The frustrating thing is that this only is happening on some of my saves (it seems to be those which predate the upgrade -- I don't seem to have the issue on saves which are created new, even on the same KSP install). I'm okay with losing those saves and starting over, but I'd like to figure out what's going on, and this is complicated by my apparent inability to toggle the EVE GUI in the overhaul version. It's Mod-N, right? That works on 7-4 but not Overhaul.

Rolling back to EVE 7-4 (and deleting ATM's caches of EVE textures -- and thanks for the multithreading fix, that saves me a lot of pain when testing my mods like this!) fixed this. I can see all atmosphere layers over the entire planet in all orbits.

Thanks.

GUI key is ALT + E now.

Speaking of the GUI, it's really overly big.

[Proot]

Little (but important) issues:

- Set the shadows to "False" (via cfg or GUI) breaks all the thing. The mod still working as can (if it can), but all goes crazy. I think this bug it's causing most of my problems from the beginning with the configs.

- The shadows casted on ground by the clouds disappear if I give any priority to the particles over the main texture. That shouldn't happen or should be optional (imho)

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

Thanks for the tip, Nutt.

Now that I can access the EVE Overhaul settings menu, I'm able to induce the missing-circle effect on any save by fiddling with the "_RimDist" parameter -- changing it to 0.001 or 0.01 (and "apply"ing) while in flight mode causes the system to not render a big circle of the atmospheric layer (and anything else in that layer, like MapResourceOverlay). Unfortunately, putting _RimDist back doesn't fix it. I have confirmed this on an install that is only stock and EVE Overhaul. I duplicated my save just before doing this fiddling, didn't click "save" on the EVE settings, and yet the hole-in-the-clouds persists on the save where I did the fiddling, even after restarts, while the other save is unaffected, and the only differences between the two saves are things like the time and ship state. I don't know what could be happening here.

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

Some more testing: changing the _RimDist at altitudes of ~300 km or more will trip the hole-in-the-clouds bug. Changing it back doesn't fix things. I quicksaved right before changing RimDist, changed it, and paused. The only difference between the quicksave and persistent save files is that "scene=7" in persistent and "scene=5" in quicksave. And yet, somehow, reloading the quicksave doesn't put the clouds back. Where else could EVE Overhaul (or KSP) possibly be saving information on a per-save basis?

I'll be switching back to EVE 7-4 (and AVP) on my main install, but if there's anything else I can do on my EVE-Overhaul-Only install to help you chase out this bug, please let me know.

[TMS]

Ryan... Chad Jenkins posted a video that may be of technical interest: http://youtu.be/6gfFPfgovoY

[pingopete]

TMS, that stuff looks awesome! Especially that it's running in unity

Thought I'd just leave some of the better screens of some testing I've been doing with the overhaul in RSS for RVE

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[Proot]

TMS, that stuff looks awesome! Especially that it's running in unity

Thought I'd just leave some of the better screens of some testing I've been doing with the overhaul in RSS for RVE

http://imgur.com/a/Ux4qU

That is a really good work, pingopete. Congratulations! I've achieved something truly similiar (under my own style, of course) in the vanilla KSP and, precisely by that, I have a question (lol):

With this new system, how can you get that type of atmospheric scatterings in orbit, without convert the atmosphere (in the ground scale) in a too dense and unrealistic fog? It's that effect caused by the escales in RSS or the screenshots avoid that detail?

Btw, I don't truly get what's the difference between the alpha channel and the visibility in the atmo, could you explain me that?

[pingopete]

With this new system, how can you get that type of atmospheric scatterings in orbit, without convert the atmosphere (in the ground scale) in a too dense and unrealistic fog? It's that effect caused by the escales in RSS or the screenshots avoid that detail?

Sorry I'm struggling to fully understand, if by what you say you're referring to the atmosphere's visability in PQS and in ScaledSpace; Yeah I've found this to be an issue, I made a request to release more controls for the atmosphere, and one being independant optional controls for both PQS and SS. However most needed (IMO and for RSS) is some control for the fall off 'range' of the atmosphere haze; on RSS with the right overall-visibility, it's completely opaque then suddenly starts fading in an obvious band in the sky. Ideally a value for fallOffScale so this fade can be made to stretch the whole way from horizon to directly above could be implemented (even if that meant just including it as an optional variable with the default value in place for simple use?)

I don't truly get what's the difference between the alpha channel and the visibility in the atmo, could you explain me that?

There is literally no difference between alpha and visibility, I've tried increasing one by 1000-fold and conversely decrease the other by that much only to find absolutely no change in how it looks i.e. they do the same thing currently.

Edited December 15, 2014 by pingopete

[Chezburgar7300]

I'm having some weird issues with this and my cloud layers. It's probably because I don't fully know how to edit the .cfg . Here's my clouds.cfg and an imgur album of the issues and my textures folder. Any help is appreciated!

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Edited December 15, 2014 by Chezburgar7300

[rbray89]

I'm having some weird issues with this and my cloud layers. Here's my clouds.cfg and an imgur album of the issues and my textures folder.

http://imgur.com/a/qtI05

You may have to play around with the rim settings.